The boy's DUNE GOOD!
Heartthrob Timothee Chalamet leads an all-star cast in this marathon sci-fi sequel - just don't forget your sandwiches
Dune: Part Two (12A, 166 mins) Verdict: A sandy spectacular ★★★★☆
DUNE was bursting out all over London;s Leicester Square at the world premiere a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been to lots of grand openings there down the years, but never to one quite as flamboyant, with quite as much fanfare, causing so much frenzy.
Probably not for 60 years, since the heyday of The Beatles, has that patch of central London resounded with the kind of noisy adoration directed (this time) at the star of the Dune films, 28-year-old Timothee Chalamet. And at least there were four Beatles to share the attention. The young American star gets ‘Chalamania’, as it’s known, all to himself.
The bigger issue, though, was this: would Denis Villeneuve’s epic sequel justify the razzamatazz, not to mention the investment of an entire evening? Dune: Part Two lasts almost three hours. It is even longer than the first film, and that seemed to go on forever.
HAPPILY, it does. The 2021 movie tackled many of the plot complexities that for years fuelled the belief that Frank Herbert’s mighty 1965 science-fiction novel was ‘unfilmable’ (claims not exactly punctured by David Lynch’s 1984 stinker). It was terrific, but exhausting, laboriously introducing us to the inter-planetary empire Herbert imagined, and the various dynasties grappling for power or simply survival.
The sequel has a mercifully more straightforward narrative. On the barren planet Arrakis, with most of his own kinsfolk wiped out, Paul Atreides (Chalamet) prepares to lead the beleaguered, disenfranchised Fremen tribe against his and their mortal enemies, the formidably evil House Harkonnen.
Ruled by the grotesque Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard in a wobbly fat suit), to whom they swear allegiance at chilling Nuremberg-style rallies, the Harkonnen owe their political and military supremacy to their control of ‘spice’ — the most valuable commodity in this universe, generally assumed by Dune devotees to be a metaphor for oil.
Paul’s aim is to disrupt spice production, but unlike our own Just Stop Oil brigade, he needs to do more than lie down on a motorway. Anyway, Arrakis doesn’t have motorways. It’s a vast desert, in which he must prove himself to the Fremen by undergoing various challenges, such as sand-surfing behind a worm roughly the size of a superyacht.
Paul has a useful ally in the Fremen chief, Stilgar (Javier Bardem), not to mention a Fremen lover, the smouldering and beautiful Chani (Zendaya).
But there are others who mistrust him. Is he a false prophet or their true ‘mahdi’, their messiah? His modesty clinches it. ‘The Mahdi is too humble to say he is the Mahdi,’ someone says, approvingly, which reminded me strongly of the scene in The Life Of Brian, when Brian’s efforts to convince his followers that he is entirely ordinary backfire, on the basis that only the true messiah would deny his divinity.
I hope Villeneuve had Monty Python in mind, too, because there isn’t otherwise much obvious wit or fun in this film.
But it is supremely stylish, with a piercing Hans Zimmer score and marvellous work by cinematographer Greig Fraser. Mostly, the action unfolds in subtle shades of brown and beige, as if the set designers were told to restrict themselves to the edges of the Farrow & Ball colour chart. This makes Paul’s eyes look even bluer, a bit like Peter O’Toole’s in Lawrence of Arabia. As Noel Coward famously said at that pre miere, if he’d been any prettier it could have been called Florence of Arabia. The same is true of Chalamet Any more ravishing and they’d have had to call it June.
But Paul is a fierce warrior first and foremost, who has a truly gripping set-piece duel with the emerging champion of the Harkonnen (a shaven-headed Austin Butler), and whose muscular beauty pleases
Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), scheming daughter of the Emperor (Christopher Walken).
Butler, Pugh and Walken are all new additions to the cast, incidentally, along with Lea Seydoux and, in a cameo, Anya Taylor-Joy. From the first film, Rebecca Ferguson and Charlotte Rampling also return. There are stars everywhere you look, in a movie that is lavish in every way, and demands to be seen on a big screen.
It’s genuinely spectacular. But take sandwiches.