Totally stellar sci-fi (but why’s the ending so flat?)
Dune: Part Two Cert: 12A, 2hrs 46mins ★★★★★ Lisa Frankenstein Cert: 15A, 1hr 41mins ★★★★★
A‘Thrilling score only adds to the pleasure. This is a film you feel, not just watch’
t the end of the premiere of Dune: Part Two, the screen faded to black, the end credits started to roll and a polite smattering of applause – somewhere between token and desultory – rolled around the auditorium. Certainly not the sort of ovation that director Denis Villeneuve and Warner Bros can have been hoping for.
But having seen the film twice now, that muted response is totally understandable. Not only is Part Two even longer than 2021’s first instalment, but it bravely ends, yes, with umpteen bangs and a couple of important whimpers, but also with all sorts of untidy loose ends. A Hollywood ending this is not.
Villeneuve has since revealed that he hopes to make a third Dune film in the unspecified future, but this picture surely has to stand and be judged in its own right. And until that subdued ending it is quite magnificent. Visually, it provides a stunning spectacle with an immaculate sound design, and Hans Zimmer’s thrilling score only adds to the pleasure. This is a film you feel, not just watch.
It resumes more or less where the first ended, after the bloody battle for Arrakis, which saw the cruel, shaven-headed Baron Harkonnen back in charge of the only planet to have ‘spice’ – a powerful hallucinogen to some, the hugely valuable key to interstellar travel to others. Arrakis’s endless deserts and dunes are full of the stuff, which is why they’ve been fought over for centuries. As the ominous opening caption puts it: ‘To have power over spice is to have power over all’.
The climactic battle saw the departure of several key characters, but here their place is capably taken by notable new arrivals – Christopher Walken as the Emperor, Florence Pugh as his diary-keeping daughter and Elvis star Austin Butler as the terrifying Feyd-Rautha, deranged nephew of Harkonnen. Listen out for Butler doing a rather good impression of Stellan Skarsgard, himself still channelling Marlon Brando as the murderously hottempered Baron.
But driving our story of power and prophecy are the central trio of Timothée Cha lam et as Paul At reid es (he ends up with so many alternative monikers I lost count), Rebecca Ferguson as his pregnant and increasingly mystical mother, and Zendaya as Chani, the Fremen freedom fighter who sensibly doubts that Paul is any sort of Messiah at all.
Yes, this is a film full of amusing potential for Monty Python And The Holy Grail jokes, just as it is for deadly serious comparisons with the current situation in the Middle East.
The attacks on the vast spiceexcavating machines are stunning set-pieces, as is the mastering of the sand worms. However, two black and-white sequences, with obviously poorer visual effects, just seem odd.
There’s not a single duff performance, but two linger particularly fondly: Javier Bardem as the evangelical Stilgar, and Dave Bautista, giving surely a careerbest as Beast Rabban, another nephew of the Baron and perhaps the only Harkonnen ever to experience self-doubt.
Dune: Part Two is a complex and surprisingly subtle triumph. I doubt we’ll see a better sciencefiction film this year. It’s just a shame about that ending.
Cross Juno with Edward Scissorhands, throw in a touch of Beetlejuice and you might end up with something very like Lisa Frankenstein, a coming-of-age black comedy set in 1989 about a high-school misfit who only starts to find her rather dark, gothy self when she is befriended and wooed by, er… a recently revived corpse.
The only problem is that he’s missing a hand, an ear and another body part.
What is a girl to do?