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Dune: Part Two review – second half of hallucinatory sci-fi epic is staggering spectacle
news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 21 February - 17:00 · 1 minute
Denis Villeneuve’s monumental adaptation expands its extraordinary world of shimmering strangeness. It’s impossible to imagine anyone doing it better
The second part of Denis Villeneuve’s monumental Dune adaptation lands with a sternum-juddering crash; it’s another shroom of a film, an epic sci-fi hallucination whose images speak of fascism and imperialism, of guerrilla resistance and romance. Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel – working with co-writer Jon Spaihts – draws on David Lean, George Lucas and Ridley Scott’s Gladiator in the (perhaps inevitable) mega-stadium combat scene with the tiny billions of CGI crowds in the bleachers. But he really has made it all his own: secular political cruelty meets Indigenous people’s struggle in those vast mysterious planetscapes. The sound design throbs and drones in this film’s bloodstream, lending a queasy frisson to its extraordinary visual spectacle and the recurrent horror-fetish BDSM chic which appears to govern so much intergalactic-wrongdoer style.
My only reservation is that some of the momentum that the first part had built up has been lost since that movie was released more than two years ago. Those outside the existing Dune fanbase could feel that the ending does not deliver the resounding closure to which we all might, maybe naively, consider ourselves entitled to at the end of 330 minutes total screen time. And the final eventful moments of the film feel a bit rushed, as if Shakespeare had decided to shrink Henry VI Part III into a zappy coda to go at the end of Part II.
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