I am physically shaking. This is a spiritual experience, this is what cinema is made for, this is the event of a generation, this might just be Denis Villeneuve’s best film.

I made a point of seeing this again straight away, and in the exact same screen at my local cinema that I first saw Part One in, because I knew, much like my experience with Oppenheimer in its opening weekend, the first go around for films I anticipate as heavily as these is often slightly disorienting for me in adjusting to what the film actually is. The first viewing for films that mean this much to me is always somewhat clouded by a feeling of disbelief that I’m actually seeing this, that I’m actually seeing more of Dune. Hence, the second viewing, especially when done straight away when the film still dominates my mind, allows me to fully sit with it and process better how I feel about it.

As suspected, that’s exactly what I got by going to see this again the next day, at a showing just under 24 hours after the one the day before, in my local’s biggest screen, almost completely full (a rarity there). I’ll never forget the first time I saw Part One in this screen. It was the first time I ever felt myself truly outside my body, my soul one with the screen, my mind untainted by thoughts of the outside world. It’s a feeling I’ve had many times since with Villeneuve’s films and whilst I loved seeing this in IMAX last night, I didn’t quite feel that ascendent feeling yet. Well tonight I did. It took me a minute to calm myself down but once my mind was at ease, I never looked back.

It’s just remarkable that we have a film this grand and huge doing so well and being a key cultural moment that the whole world is in on, at least the whole film world. To have a film like this, with serious studio money behind it, be not only the expected spectacle-driven blockbuster but also an ideologically thorny, dark, human, heartbreaking tragedy of biblical proportions is so special.

Timothée Chalamet is an utter force of nature, a man you’d never expect to hold much power suddenly transforming into another being entirely that commands the screen. He’s so in control of everything he does, he pulls you in and refuses to let you breathe. Watching his progression of Paul in this film is akin to a religious experience. The way Villeneuve interrogates the messiah figure is what I love the most about this, how he navigates the white saviour complex through the eyes of the women surrounding him and the native people he’s taken command of. Whether Paul really is the messiah is up to you to decide but it doesn’t really matter if he is or not, because his ascendency lives on the fanaticism of the religious Fremen turning legend into reality, through the Bene Gesserit’s laying of a path that allows him to be seen as the Lisan Al Ghaib.

Villeneuve and Jon Spaiths’ script makes the incredibly smart decision of fully involving Chani in Paul’s journey, not as a female instrument to his rise, but as a different perspective that gives life and human pain to the journey Paul goes on. The choice of final shot is remarkably powerful, holding for the perfect number of frames to allow the emotion of everything to sink in through the face of the person on screen, bringing all the hope and hurt and love and brutality of the preceding 2hrs and 45 minutes to the fore. I think I do prefer this over Part One now as I love that film’s meditative nature in how it builds it’s mythology, but this expands on that in every direction it can whilst going far deeper, bringing out the humanity of the first part that so many people missed and enmeshing it with the larger thematics and spectacle in a flawless, completely overwhelming manner.

I can’t believe I said Hans Zimmer’s work was slightly weaker in this when I wrote my first review at 2am this morning. It’s 11pm now as I write this yet within that short space of essentially 24 hours I’ve been on a huge journey with this film. Zimmer delivers his trademark hefty epic soundscape, building on the sonic themes of his original work and intertwining it with an operatic love theme for the ages. He also significantly darkens his material in line with the film, with certain themes reflecting the brutalist architecture of the Harkonnens and the brutality of the forced prophecy on Paul. Every step of the way, you can tell it’s a score produced in tandem with the director’s vision and input. 

Somehow in a regular, non-IMAX screen, I appreciated the stellar sound design much much more as well as the overwhelming production design. As I said this same morning, Greig Frasier’s consistently daring colour palette is a thing to behold, with harsh oranges, unforgiving infrareds, eye-blinding bright whites and earthy browns. It shares some key visual DNA with Part One through its desert imagery and colours but beyond this, the more I realise that the two parts don’t look much like each other at all.

An unprecedented piece of work, one of the greatest sci-fi masterworks of our time and a privilege to behold. This is filmmaking on a different level, a blockbuster of a wholly new and more challenging kind. Villeneuve had already proven himself plenty but this is quite beyond anything he’s ever done before. I will never forget this opening weekend double viewing I’ve had with this film, and I will hold this dear to me forever. Everyone has said it already but I couldn’t agree with them more; the Dune films are the new Lord of the Rings of our generation, films so huge and all encoming that they leave a mark on film history and culture forever. This film is what I live for and what makes my heart feel complete and Denis Villeneuve has completed his task as was commanded to him by Frank Herbert. ‘Lead them to paradise’.