Dune: Part Two exceeds expectations in every way — except humanity

The inevitable analogy of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two as The Empire Strikes Back to Dune: Part One’s Star Wars was recently highlighted by Christopher Nolan. The Empire Strikes Back has become the paradigmatic genre sequel that surpasses the original, and the standard by which every ambitious second film in a series is measured. And the debt of George Lucas’s Star Wars mythos to Frank Herbert’s Dune novels (a corrupt galactic empire, a quasi-religious order with mind-control powers, etc.) is substantial enough to make comparisons unavoidable. When the sequel depicts the young protagonist going into hiding, undergoing intense training and visionary trials, and eventually confronting a terrible revelation about his ancestry — all visualized on an overwhelming scale, with images of staggering power and utterly persuasive visual effects — the comparison becomes almost redundant.

Yet it would be equally true, if not truer, to call Villeneuve’s Dune movies a kind of anti–Star Wars. I’m tempted to call them the definitive anti–Star Wars movies, and Dune: Part Two the anti–Empire Strikes Back. Indeed, to speak as I did above of the “Star Wars mythos” suggests the characterization of the Dune saga as an anti-myth. For all that Lucas drew from Dune in crafting his galaxy far, far away, the whole outlook and tone of Star Wars owes more to inspirations celebrating the triumph of good over evil, from conventional Westerns and serialized sci-fi swashbucklers to J.R.R. Tolkien’s implicitly Catholic The Lord of the Rings. By the end of Dune: Part Two, it’s clear that while the idea of “the triumph of good over evil” is popular in some regions of the Dune universe, that idea is a cruel lie in a harsh cosmos with no lack of overwhelmingly evil forces and Machiavellian power players, but a dearth of powers worth rooting for.