Dune: Part Two

When considering a sequel, or simply how this adaptation of Frank Herbert's intergalactic tragedy might continue, the key moments in the first part of Denis Villeneuve's Dune seemed to be those immediately following Jessica and Paul's escape from the invading Harkonnen armada. Made fugitives and buried under waves of sand, the mother and son wept and argued about their predicament. His previous standing in the feudal solar system smashed, Timothée Chalamet's Paul Atreides, now strung out on grief as well as an allergic reaction to twinkling narcotics, dreamt of golden violence. An army, under his command, crashing into then over his ivory enemies. Paul saw himself in a trance; dispassionately exterminating the greatest warriors in the galaxy with, seemingly, little effort. The visions travelled deeper into the future, focusing on pyres of burning bodies - either those of his recently ambushed clan or some enemy yet to falter - and himself, beatific and buoyed by the zealotry of berserkers. 

Paul screamed at his mother for making him into the kind of freak who inspires such deranged dedication. For failing to consider the personal toll of the Godhood she had stolen from future generations to give to her son. Jessica consoled her child, reassuring him that he was also the product of his father: a good and decent man, beloved despite his position in a choking, intergalactic royalty. The fallout from this huddle reverberated throughout the remainder of Part One. Rebecca Ferguson's concubine viewing her son with an increasing sense of disassociation and horror as his prophesised reign (slowly) began to take shape. Upon meeting the indigenous Fremen, it's crucial that Jessica's immediate plan is one of escape, using them to contact the smugglers and pirates that she assumes they know, to take them away from the desert planet of Arrakis. Placed in a position of danger and weakness, Jessica refutes the Bene Gesserit whispers that should herald her son's coming, preferring to play it safe and use her considerable martial and political power to go off into hiding. 

It's Paul who hesitates, embracing his visions of victory and, therefore, the slaughter to come. Following a delightful sequence in which Harkonnen scouts, dressed in black blast furnace suits, weightlessly traverse a rock face before meeting their doom, Dune: Part Two quickly settles in with the Fremen; describing the ways in which Paul and Jessica attempt to appeal to their new bedfellows.  Given the choice between euthanasia and drinking a third-eye opening poison, Lady Jessica chooses the latter, transforming herself and her unborn child into a bicephalic creature, one constantly in conversation with itself. In Villeneuve's film, drinking this sanctified Water of Life is very much a real kind of death and, during the ceremony in which her character sips this liquid, Ferguson's surging, shaking Jessica treats it as such. Although the physical body and a trace of its wider, familial connections remain, the original identity is either obscured or outright overwritten by the composite desires of countless, conspiring ancestors and a descendent yet to come. 

In the seconds before the water touches Jessica's lips, the dying Reverend Mother, that the concubine has been recruited to replace, is practically levitating with excitement. Some tiny fragment of herself will outlive this wrinkled physical form, trapped forever in the gorgeous monarch that now crouches captive beneath her. Post-sup, Jessica twists in terror-struck supplication until the cautious woman we met in the previous film is extinguished. The person (or persona) who remains is quick to assume the appropriated robes of her new office, to travel South and stir up war. Her body is adorned with runic spells written in Fremen script; her mouth dripping with manipulation and the threat of impending jihad. In David Lynch's Dune the inner monologues present in Herbert's text became hushed murmurs, whispered over the unfolding action. Villeneuve uses Jessica's pregnancy to relitigate some aspect of this device: questions and their answers carry over uteri landscapes in which an unborn, female messiah stirs. 

Surprisingly, Lynch's film, and the director's wider work, is referenced several times in Villeneuve's sequel. As well as Javier Bardem's Fremen warlord Stilgar inheriting lines specifically drawn from the 1984 movie, we also see a vanquished foe's body crawling with the Arrakian equivalent of hungry, Lumberton ants. The two adaptations even share a similar sort of storytelling apparatus when signposting the disconnect between the Paul who exists happily within the society that has adopted him and the Paul who is willing to use seeded superstition to his advantage, positioning himself as a leader of leaders. Following an attack on a Fremen holy site by Austin Butler's monstrous, albinoid Feyd-Rautha, Duke Leto's son steels himself and follows his mother by drinking the poisonous waters that promise a feminine, extrasensory insight. As Paul lies alone, decoding the toxins he has inflicted on his own body, the strange, structural frequencies of Lynch's film re-emerge: that feeling that a sequence of events has broken down and fresh information with only vague, visual purchase has survived the disruption. 

And so Zendaya's Chani appears from nowhere in a weathered, Arrakian helicopter (of no clear origin) to kneel beside her comatose partner and fulfil a previously unmentioned prophecy that she otherwise wants no part in. Following his reawakening, Paul portrays a kind of religious revelation when dealing with the Fremen. Like his mother before him, caution is abandoned to such a degree that it is clear that the Paul that remains is either, to some extent, reliving an experience he has already dissected then consigned to memory or the young Atreides has transformed into someone so convinced of their impending ascendancy that their every action reads as dangerously impatient. Paul then is a child inhabited by things that are already dead and, therefore, cannot know fear. Regardless, the remaining Atreides are no longer alone and shivering beneath a shifting landscape, they tower above it. Eyes fixed and boring through an atomic fire that they themselves have unleashed. 

Mother and son are now glowering, all-knowing fulcrums; pressing every socio-political and metaphysical advantage available to them to trample an indigenous faith beneath their bloodthirsty decrees. Viewers with a more comprehensive knowledge of Frank Herbert's cosmology might, in Paul's visions of endless, elderly faces, find trace of the path this new emperor will walk over the years (and films) to come; the terrible foresight that demands he make some attempt to take control of the inevitable carnage. Villeneuve though accounts for another, more human perspective to creep in: revulsion. Cursed with a total understanding of his own appalling genealogy, Paul connects with a barbaric, animalistic aspect as a way to reframe his own nature and satisfy his personal need for revenge. When the all-powerful mother and son meet again, their first order of business is this rotten lineage and what it means for their shared future. The Atreides name, the human greatness of a Duke Leto that inspired loyalty and devotion in all of his subjects, has been polluted forever and will, in the fullness of time, sink beneath a flag of boiling, merciless violence. Amen.