`Dune: Part Two' a visual masterpiece
When your first movie is a hit, the studio tends to give you more cash to spend on the sequel.
And when your film adapts what essentially is the second half of a book, it tends to be more exciting than the installment that came before it.
Not surprisingly, then, filmmaker Denis Villeneuve's excellent “Dune: Part Two” — in theaters March 1, after being pushed into 2024 as a result of last year's Hollywood strikes — is greater in scale and more frequently riveting than its strong predecessor, 2021's six-time Academy Awardwinning “Dune.”
This second “Dune,” costing a reported $190 million, isn't a giant leap forward, the science-fiction epic matching the first ($165 million) precisely in terms of look and tone. And it picks up where “Dune” left off, with possible future messiah Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother, mystical Bene Gesserit Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson, “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning”), living among the Fremen, the native people of the remote desert planet Arrakis.
In case you need a refresher, “Dune” and “Dune: Part Two” are based on Frank Herbert's influential 1965 novel “Dune,” a work interested in ecological themes, among others.
In Herbert's world — set thousands of years in the future and following humanity winning a war against artificial intelligence — computers are outlawed in the universe. Instead, to traverse space, folks depend on spice, the mind-altering substance that grows in the sands of Arrakis. As a result, control of the otherwise desolate planet is important — so important that it cost Paul his father and saw the great House Atreides fall to the merciless types of House Harkonnen.
Now, the prescient Paul desires to express his distinct displeasure with what has happened to that house's leader, the grotesque Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård, “Andor”), and the man pulling the strings from above him, the Emperor