This review was published on February 29, 2024. On May 21 Dune: Part Two became available to stream on Max.

The first Dune belonged to Timothée Chalamet. Chalamet plays Paul Atreides, the son of one of the aristocratic houses controlling the known universe, as well as an unenthusiastic contender for the position of genetically engineered, holy-war-waging messiah. It was, and still is, inspired casting, and not just because Chalamet has the patrician bone structure of an imperial hemophiliac. Chalamet, Hollywood’s chosen prince, has been navigating the crumbling path toward movie stardom like someone who’s aware there are more mistakes to be made than rewards to be had, which gives an extratextual charge to his performance as someone trying to avoid being corralled into the parts others would like him to play. He’s good in that first film, a boy-man dwarfed by galaxy-size power games, and even better in its follow-up, which finds his character fighting alongside the indigenous Fremen, giddy with revolution and new love. But Dune: Part Two isn’t his movie — it belongs firmly to Zendaya, who gives the second half of Denis Villeneuve’s Frank Herbert adaptation an emotional tangibility that the first, in all its exotic majesty, eschewed.

Science fiction is Villeneuve’s genre, and has been even before he started making movies about extraterrestrial communication or desert planets being mined for an interstellar travel-enabling drug. He can’t help but render the world as otherworldly onscreen, turning the Toronto of Enemy into a jaundiced alternative reality in which hostile doppelgängers made perfect sense, and the Arizona suburbs of Sicario into a pre-apocalyptic wasteland. This remove has been his most consistent quality as a filmmaker, even when it has undermined the actual stuff of his films, and one reason the Dunes are so terrific is that they provide the ideal material for his unshakable aesthetic. The macrocosm of his Dune movies is supposed to feel forbiddingly distant, populated by a mankind that’s iterated itself into sisterhoods of space witches, societies of goth fascists, and orders of human computers (though, alas, there is no Stephen McKinley Henderson in the sequel) amid a hierarchical structure of suspicious clans.

Villeneuve’s facility with this stuff doesn’t just come from his talent for spectacle, though there are set pieces in Dune: Part Two that aim to blow the top of your skull off. The sequence where Paul tries to prove himself to the Fremen by riding a sandworm for the first time is staged like someone attempting to hook themselves to a high-speed train. The camera keeps by the character’s side as he tumbles disorientingly through an upended ocean of sand, only to find himself clinging to the armored hide of the giant creature as rushing air whips him around. But the filmmaker’s real gift is his ability to treat this strange futurescape as fully inhabited. The script (which he wrote with Jon Spaihts) skips awkward paragraphs of expository dialogue, expecting that viewers can keep up with what they might not fully understand. We see a lot more of Giedi Prime, home planet of the vicious Harkonnen family, in order to meet Baron Harkonnen’s (Stellan Skarsgård) sadistic nephew Feyd-Rautha (a scene-stealing Austin Butler, smiling around blackened teeth). Why bother going over the niceties of local succession traditions when we can just watch the young noble celebrate his birthday by slaughtering slaves in front of a crowded arena chanting his name, with the light of the black sun draining whatever color might be left on a planet that’s already near-monochromatic?

Dune: Part Two isn’t any more compromising than the first film when it comes to the conflicts and stratospheric intrigues that result in piles of corpses to be incinerated on the ground. The secretive Bene Gesserit, a matriarchal society whose superhuman company includes Paul’s mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and emperor’s daughter Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), are still carrying out a horse race between the respective results of their eugenic labors. Reverend Mother Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling), a senior member among the Bene Gesserit, prefers the sociopathic but controllable Feyd-Rautha over the rebellious Paul. The emperor (Christopher Walken, the only actor unable to get into the film’s vibe) is revealed to have engineered the Atreides’ downfall, to Irulan’s frustration. And Jessica, having sampled a poisonous, prescience-enabling sandworm by-product in order to become a Reverend Mother herself for the Fremen, seems to have become a true believer in all the prophecies her order strategically seeded, and walks around having conversations with the newly awakened fetus she’s carrying. We haven’t even gotten into the real freak shit of the later Herbert books, and this is already thrillingly strong stuff.

Rather than soften the strangeness of its source material, Dune: Part Two shifts its perspective to one on the ground — to Zendaya’s character, the Fremen warrior Chani. She was more promise than actual presence in 2021’s Dune, a figure from Paul’s visions who’s only encountered in the flesh after the Harkonnen family ambushes and wipes out most of the Atreides forces. But she’s the soul of the new film, skeptical of all the messiah talk she rightfully believes was planted to control her people, and skeptical of this off-world upper-cruster who comes seeking refuge, swearing he’s not like the others and that he only wants to learn the ways of her people and help them. (Chani’s fundamentalist cohort Stilgar, played by Javier Bardem, meanwhile, is certain that Paul is the prophesied leader meant to free them.) The beats of Paul’s time with the Fremen echo ones from Avatar and Dances With Wolves, only here they’re a calculation. Paul may be sincere in falling in love with Chani and wanting to take up the Fremen cause, but he’s also trying to decide if he wants to use them to fulfill the destiny he’s been avoiding.

Zendaya’s fierce, open-hearted performance provides a counterpoint to all the high-level machinations of the plot. As someone who understands that the interests of this charismatic outsider aren’t actually those of her and her community, she can’t help but be swayed by him anyway. “Your blood comes from dukes and great houses,” Chani says to Paul at one point. “Here, everyone is equal.” His response — “I’d very much like to be equal to you” — is the perfect kind of howler, a reminder that shrewdness is no match for when you want to believe. In the maelstrom of wariness, hope, and betrayal she projects in the final act, Zendaya shows us that emotions can be universal, even in a context that’s anything but.