As I watched the gigantic, awesome, triumphant, overwhelming, punishingly large and loud Dune: Part Two in IMAX earlier this week, I couldn't help but think of an old meme.
Sometime before the 2021 release of Dune: Part One, a clever anonymous poster mocked up a "know your candidates" page featuring Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Only the "issue" they were discussing wasn't health care or foreign policy. It was, "What is Dune about?"
In the meme, Sanders' answer was typically long-winded and discursive: "Well, it's hard to say Dune is about any one thing, because Dune is rich with themes. The first book, for example, is about ecology, and the hero's journey, and as a criticism of the Foundation series' take on declining empires, among other things. The second book subverts the hero's journey told in the first book, and the later books follow in…" and then the fake Sanders answer trails off the page.
The meme version of Biden simply responds: "Dune is about worms."
The magic of director Denis Villeneuve's two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert's 1965 sci-fi novel is that it captures both of the fake candidate answers from the meme. It's an intricate desert epic about ecological balance, the harshness of nature, the economics of resource extraction, imperialism, tribal politics, corporate intrigue, groovy psychedelic drugs, culture clash, and Golden Age science fiction missing the point, among other things.
But it's also about, you know, worms.
Specifically: very, very big worms.
Even more than the first film, which covered a little more than half of Herbert's novel, Dune: Part Two is a showcase for cinematic grandiosity, for movies as conveyors of sheer, terrifying enormity. The movie is the tale of young Paul Atreides, a young duke whose family was killed by their rivals the Harkonnens after a distant emperor granted the Atreides charge of the planet Arrakis.
Arrakis isn't just any planet: It's the home to spice, a psychedelic drug that also happens to power interstellar travel, which is made by the planet's native giant sandworms. Imagine if oil was also LSD, and it was produced by roving, murderous whales who lived deep in the desert sands.
The first installment was the story of Atreides' journey to Dune and the defeat of his family. The second is the story of his triumphant revenge, as he unites the local people, the Fremen, in defiance of the Harkonnen overlords.
Herbert's novel is replete with descriptions of corporate structures and what amount to company strategy discussions about economic fundamentals and resource extraction metrics, all mixed with complex political machinations and semi-inscrutable hallucinogenic dream logic featuring religious prophecies and drug-addled visions, plus a lot of asides about the elegant sustainable eco-technology of life on a barren sand planet. At times, reading Dune resembles reading minutes from a corporate board meeting while tripping balls with green-tech climate activists in the desert.
Anyway, you can probably see what meme-Bernie was talking about.
The movie, however, captures all of this clunky complexity quite well, capturing desert life among the Fremen and gesturing at their political structures and religious beliefs without subjecting viewers to drawn-out exposition. Villeneuve and co-screenwriter Jon Spaihts understand that a thoughtfully imagined fictional world doesn't need to constantly stop to explain itself; it can just go about its business.
But then, in the midst of all this, there are the worms. In contrast to Dune: Part One, which closed with a hint of the possibility, this time Paul Atreides gets to ride them. And it is awesome.
In Dune: Part Two, Villeneuve delivers a handful of truly gargantuan set pieces featuring Arrakis' skyscraper-sized sandworms as they plow through the desert of the film's alien planet. Along with his work on the first-contact film Arrival, they mark Villeneuve as Hollywood's most successful purveyor of colossal mystery.
As with that movie's obelisk and its tentacled alien inhabitants, there's something truly alien about the sandworms of Arrakis, and also a sense of scale and vastness that few other filmmakers convey. Watching a sandworm plunge through desert valleys, blasting tidal waves of sand in its wake, on an oversized IMAX screen in kneecap-rattling surround sound is the sort of audiovisual experience that big-budget, big-screen movies were made for. Dune: Part Two is a glorious, overwhelming sensory smorgasbord.
In recent years, far too many blockbusters have served up weightless, ugly, computer-generated, mediocre-at-best set pieces. Villeneuve's Dune films are reminders of what real cinematic spectacle looks like. They are movies about worms—really big worms. Hell yeah, they are.
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