A ‘Dune’ for right now — and tomorrow

Denis Villeneuve’s sequel is an instant landmark of the genre

It takes chutzpah to restart your years-in-the-making sci-fi epic in the womb, but after a quick prologue, that’s basically where “Dune: Part Two” begins. The floating fetus, we’re told, communicates with mother and brother not in the typical ooh, the baby’s kicking fashion, but rather in full-blown telepathic sentences about interplanetary strategy and guerrilla warfare. She is the unborn Alia, and her sibling, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), has words for her, too: “Sister, Father is dead,” he says, sounding less like a hero on the rise than a glum teenager in need of a hug.

There’s a spooky grandeur to these scenes with the galaxybrain baby, one in keeping with the overall spirit of Frank Herbert’s revolutionary 1965 novel, which was itself in conversation with a future generation. For all

its Campbellian myth building, the book spoke to a dawning audience of young people who wanted drugs (fine, call it “spice”), expanded consciousness and eco-awareness. Over the years, “Dune” has lured the most audacious filmmakers to crash their dream ships on its craggy shores, visionaries like David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky.

I would never have put the spectacle-minded French Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve in their company — and still wouldn’t. But he understands something about “Dune” that those cult creators never did, an insight that makes the second half of his colossal-feeling, frequently staggering adaptation an instant landmark of its genre. (The sentient unborn Alia is Villeneuve’s own invention, a departure from Herbert’s text.) He widens our eyes with big action hugeness — the products of an army of visual effects experts — but then asks us, as he did with 2016’s “Arrival,” to interpret and connect the dots. Less an act of literary fidelity than generosity, his sequel plunges us into the book’s messianic prophecies, but also into spiritual uncertainty, cultural conflict and doubt, as it must. Somehow, Villeneuve has made a “Dune” for right now — and tomorrow.

If the chair-rattling first mov

Rating: PG-13, for sequences of strong violence, some suggestive material and brief strong language

Running time: 2 hours, 46 minutes

Playing: In wide release Friday

Photographs by Niko Tavernise Warner Bros. Pictures TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET, left, as Paul Atreides, squares off against Austin Butler, playing Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, in an inevitable showdown in “Dune: Part Two.”

AUSTIN BUTLER and Léa Seydoux in “Dune’s” sequel.