The other day I watched an interview with Denis Villeneuve, where he picked a favourite shot from each of his movies dating back to Prisoners. His movies are all so epic in scale, full of such grand, larger than life visuals and vistas, and yet in pretty much every case his proudest shot was something much more reigned in and intimate, the shot of the tree in Prisoners, the shot of K asleep in his car in Blade Runner 2049, the shot of Paul’s first step into the desert in the first Dune. That’s the essence of why I love this man as a filmmaker, no matter how big or small a scale he’s working at, everything is ultimately leads back to the characters and the story first and formost.

So on that note, my favourite thing about Dune, both this movie and the first one, is how detailed every single one of these characters is, big or small. Stilgar who goes from the stoic figure they teased in the first one to an almost deranged zealot in this, Lady Jessica who becomes a far more sinister devil on Paul’s shoulder, something reminiscent of her former Reverend Mother, Chani, who loves Paul but sees right through the Fremen prophecy, she’s a big part of fleshing out the Fremen as actual people and not just a homogenous hive mind, Baron Harkonnen, ruthless, greedy, cunning, always conceals his lies by telling versions of the truth, Feyd Rutha Harkonnen, one of the coldest, most intimidating villains in a movie in a long while, yet still having his honour code, Princess Irulan, how she cleverly manipulates the Reverend Mother into itting things, painting the picture of someone clever, mousy. One of the characters who really stuck out to me was Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV. Dune Part 1 built him up as this paranoid, machiavellian mastermind, but in Part 2 he’s so understated, so detached from everything else going on, this poor, pathetic old man, desperately trying to hold onto what power he thinks he has, not realizing he’s ultimately nothing more than a pawn to all these other players, you get the sense that he never stood a chance. And finally of course, the protagonist, Paul Atreides. I feel like I say this somewhat liberally, but I mean it definitively this time: This is EXACTLY what Anakin Skywalker in the prequel trilogy should have been. This noble hearted youth who comes to the Fremen, ascends as a hero among them, lets that personality cult build around him, lets the power, the hero complex, and that lust for revenge get to his head, erode away his father’s ideals, until he starts to lean into that fanaticism and stops looking like a hero, starts looking like just another one of these corrupt, power hungry monsters fighting for control of Arrakis. It really is impressive how many characters and dynamics are going on in this film, and how it condenses all that exposition down by communicating most of it through visuals and inference.

Behind all that character work is some of the grandest spectacle in a blockbuster in I don’t even know how long. And I mean true spectacle, true, breathtaking, invented images and set pieces you’ve never seen before at an epic scale. From the small skirmishes and Fremen ambushes, to any of the scenes involving the sandworms, or the arena scene on Geidi Prime, with that infrared sun casting everything in stark black and white, and those rorschach fireworks that explode black in the day and white at night. My favourite scene is probably the scene where Paul rides the sandworm, Paul pacing back and forth while the dust cloud gets closer, the rumbling gets louder, then when he’s on it’s back, the viscerality of sand blowing in his face, in the theatre, you felt it every time the worm smashed into a dune trying to shake him off, then Paul finally finds his footing, both literally and metaphorically, that music swells up, it’s absolutely epic. The costume and set design is above and beyond, I love how everything has a distinct futuristic yet old world feel. And the world. I love how every choice seems to feed into the next, the factions are all fleshed out, the ecosystem on Arrakis is fleshed out, the Fremen culture is fleshed out. And I like how like in real life, technological progress isn’t always a straight forward line, sometimes a piece of technology sends other technology back, like how shields obsolete projectile weapons in a man to man context, forcing them back to swords and spears.

I deny it the perfect score for two reasons. One because I still don’t think it’s quite self sufficient from the first, there’s quite a bit of information from the first film that this doesn’t do that great a job catching you up on. And two, because, while I’m not denying the fantastic performances, I think the cast is a bit too much of a celebrity dump. Big A-list celebrities in the right roles can obviously instill a huge sense of presence and legitimacy, but oversaturate your cast with them and you start to see them less as characters, more as just themselves. A few more lesser known actors in the big roles I think would’ve really pushed the immersion factor and the authenticity of this world that extra step to where it would be perfect. Having said that, Dune is absolutely justified in its position as a landmark saga alongside Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. It’s a dense, exciting, audacious, mythic, intelligent, emotionally resonant film with a lot to say about authoritarian regimes, personality cults, religion and how it can be politically weaponized, and how even the most well meaning of us can be corrupted by being given too much power. BR2049 is still my personal favourite, but make no mistake, the Dune saga is Villeneuve’s magnum opus.

2024
Denis Villeneuve Ranked