The voice is pure guttural bass delivered from the void, thousands of years in the future. Every one of your 37 trillion cells shudders from the vibration. Sonic dread violently travels from the soles of your feet to the extremities of every hair on your body. The electricity of anticipation crackles through your soul, the darkness compels you to listen, thrust into your seat by invisible pressure that could crush the hull of a nuclear submarine like a tin can.
“Power over spice is power over all.”
Villeneuve is in such control over his deep space Leviathan that he is the abomination the Bene Gesserit witches fear. It is his voice from the abyss we hear coercing us to watch in terrified awe. Harkonnen warriors descend to the ground of Arrakis like harbingers of doom, only to then glide to higher ground with the deadly grace of killer Baryshnikovs.
Have you seen the like before, puny mortals? This is the future of cinema. Watch or die.
Dune: Part 2 is Denis Villeneuve’s statement of intent. Nothing short of the total subjugation of the audience will suffice. A crushing victory that shifts the paradigm of cinema firmly back to the French-Canadian. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer may have swept the Oscars in 2024 but with Dune: Part 2, Villeneuve has achieved cinematic transcendence; naysayers may consider this sacrilege or heresy, but the first two Dune movies are the closest any filmmaker has come to the Godfather films.
Just as Rabban and Feyd-Rautha feud for the attention of Baron Harkonnen, Nolan and Villeneuve duel for the supremacy of bombast. Cinematic superpowers that clash on the grandest stage. With Oppenheimer Nolan went for interiors on an Imaxian scale and Cillian Murphy thoroughly deserved his Oscar as father of the Manhattan Project but Villeneuve has assembled a blockbuster of dazzling density, a complex saga that catches a quartet of young Hollywood stars; Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Austin Butler, and Florence Pugh as they, like Paul Atreides, ascend to accept their destiny.
Like The Godfather films, Villeneuve’s Dune films are based upon a pulpy best-seller that features family strife, betrayal, internecine conflict, and an heir whose harrowing rise to power will lay waste to everyone and everything, until everything they have ever loved withers and dies at the edge of their thrones. Michael Corleone and Paul Atredies are reluctant figureheads of their respective families and far deadlier than the fallen patriarchs that raised them.
Both films have instantly recognisable scores, one is melancholic, a tragedy waiting to unfold, the other is a thunderous assault on the senses heralding the galactic genocide to come. Both films look like nothing else. Gordon Willis shot The Godfather films with sophisticated compositions as black as the themes of corruption that envelop every frame as men order the deaths of other men from living room and offices. For the Dune films Grieg Fraser has fashioned titanic desert vistas that bombard us with sunlight as vast armies and insectoid machines of destruction pummel one another to oblivion.
For all the insane grandeur of Dune: Part 2 Villeneuve never forgets Irvin Kershner’s famous quote about cinema: “There is nothing more interesting than the landscape of the human face.”
And what faces they are.
Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica peers out of a headdress with a face full of ink, conversing with her unborn daughter, “You’re right, if we want to protect your brother, we need all the Fremen to believe in the prophecy. We must convert the non-believers one by one. We need to start with the weaker ones, the vulnerable ones, the ones who fear us.”
Zendaya as Chani talks truth to power throughout the film but her looks of horror and despair on her azure blue eyes as Paul moves further away from his humanity and her love, is the true star of a film full of them. “This prophecy is how they enslave us.” She loves Paul but not at the expense of replacing one tyrant with another to lead her people to annihilation.
Dune and The Godfather both have sequels that are arguably superior to the first films, building upon those solid foundations to forge epic cinematic visions. The question remains whether the proposed Dune: Messiah will surpass the deeply flawed last instalment of The Godfather trilogy, Godfather III.
Perhaps Alia Atreides has the answer, “You are not prepared for what is to come.”