Khoi Vinh’s review published on Letterboxd:
This sequel is really just the second half of the first book, so it benefits from comprising the climactic last act of the original narrative, where all of the biggest action occurs. So it’s scaled up and louder, more sweeping in its action than the first movie. If you came for giant futuristic space craft, towering explosions and brutal fighting, you get all of this. But the movie that Villeneuve has fashioned from these already ornate building blocks is also much deeper and more complex than both the movie’s predecessor and even the source material, surprisingly.
Villeneuve does not bind himself to Frank Herbert’s text. Instead he spends the time to flesh out the many ideas that Herbert packed into his prose, following the plot threads more extensively, reasoning them out with more detail, giving us a fuller, more nuanced picture of the Fremen natives and their struggle. As he does this, the director also confronts even more boldly than Herbert did the inherent tensions in the tragic hero story at the heart of the entire franchise. And as if that weren’t enough, there’s also a very gritty, unsentimental dissection of the white savior complex that underscores the entire mythos. Villeneuve does more than just play lip service to the subtextual quandary of whether we should really be rooting for Chalamet’s Paul Atreides, a western-coded white male who ostensibly rescues a third world-coded population. Villeneuve dives into this question fully, tweaking the book’s twists and turns to reflect a more honest truth about the devil’s bargain that the central character strikes in order to achieve resolution. The result is less rousing, but more pragmatic, and much, much more rewarding.
I’m not even sure “less rousing” is the right way to describe it because the experience of watching this thing is really extraordinarily emotional. There’s the deeply moving arc of the family narrative, which the previous movie rightly identified as the core of this story; what happens to the Atreides family is unspeakably sad. There’s also the overwhelming scope and awe of the visual world that the director has built; it’s truly magnificent, even in its smaller, quiet moments. In fact the parts that had me at my most emotionally vulnerable were the quiet, startlingly naturalistic conversations among Paul’s cohort and his Fremen hosts. The director, the script, the actors all bring these characters and moments to life in such a lucidly real way that I felt overcome with joy. This felt like the culmination of a long-held dream of science fiction—to make it not just fantastical and awe-inspiring, but also to make it feel real, plausible, believable, and within reach. Even if to see it so close at hand means that it’s revealed to be full of horror.
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