Dune: Part 2, dir. Denis Villeneuve
Dune 2 was originally going to be No #12 on this list. I'm bumping it down in light of today's news, which gave this entry a lot more urgency.
Honestly, I do not even want to talk about Dune 2 right now. I'm cancelling this review, we're going in a whole different direction. I know most people do not think immediately of Dune when they think of David Lynch. I, however, let too many random movies I saw on Showtime Beyond in middle school decide the course of my life.
David Lynch passed away today. He was seventy-eight. The director was no longer a young man or even a man too young to suddenly pass. Last year Lynch reported that he was home bound due to health complications born from a lifetime of smoking. Worse, he had not filmed much since the conclusion of Twin Peaks Season 3 back in 2018. We'll never get to see that TV show he was shopping around with Netflix starring Naomi Watts, because Netflix felt their money was better spent on projects such as Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon. (Spoilers: that did not make my Top 15. I will have words about that project, however.) There will be a lot of piecing written in mourning because Lynch was a singular visionary director, one of the greatest of all time. In his filmography are several films that are more more unique and more fascinating most filmmaker's entire careers: Inland Empire, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Mulholland Drive, Eraserhead, and Wild at Heart. We spoiled by a splendor of greatness from this man, and yet one cannot help but wish he could have made more. You should really make a point to go see The Straight Story right now. It is not a surreal or experimental like many of Lynch's great works, but it is a beautiful story of an old man's final journey across the country to visit his elderly brother. They get to sit on a porch together, holding back tears, unsure of what to say. Maybe that is a perfect movie to mourn Lynch with.
I instead turned on 1984's Dune. That movie is a notorious disaster, one which Lynch himself never quite disowned but clearly failed in realizing his complete vision for. It was a flop. Alejandro Jodorowsky laughed at it in his documentary bragging out the Dune movie he never made at all. As history progresses, the '84 Dune may merely become a curious footnote beneath the 2020s retelling: the funky half-finished mess with terrible-looking shield special effects, an opening that is twenty straight minutes of info dumps, and a montage that "yadda yadda yadda"s over most of what Denis Villeneuve shows in Dune: Part 2.
It is also one of my favorite movies of all time. I cannot argue it is Lynch's masterwork. It is still my favorite thing he's ever done.
I needed some comfort, I worry enough about the death of elderly loved ones too much right now, so on a day like today I needed a floating fat man pulling the heart-plug out of a whimpering boy slave and then smearing himself in the spilled blood. I've only watched that scene a thousand times. I can quote the skin doctor's lines word for word, even down to cadence. "You are sooo beautiful my baron... You skiiin, loove to me..." I needed the Emperor of Space having a conversation with a floating ameba monster in a fish tank, words coming out of an awful twitching genitalia mouth, ultimately just to clunkily exposit to the audience what the plot is - which will be repeated a few more times. The money behind this operation, famed genre producer, Dino De Laurentis, clearly did not trust his audience to follow his director's strange vision. You can feel the arguments behind the scenes that David Lynch lost, forcing more and more explanation for a film that is on its greatest level, inexplicable. In some ways, this movie forced Lynch forward artistically, the more he became handcuffed to an explanation, the more his later works succeed due to the lack of one. This is the final time any studio would Lynch blockbuster money. It was also the last time we got a blockbuster this unique, this broken. I love all the more for the flaws.
You can "solve" a David Lynch movie, some feel that's exactly what they've done with Mulholland Drive or Twin Peaks. There's Youtube lore theory videos that will tell you all about who or what Judy is if you really want to know. Blue Velvet is not all that inexplicable, that first scene tells you all you need to know: the bugs crawling under the bright green lawn are a metaphor for the darkness hiding within the peaceful veneer of white suburban America. Dune is about space barons fighting for control of a sand planet and magic drugs. It is high concept space opera schlock, as explicable as it gets.
My guess is that Lynch was given this job because he had famously turned down the off to direct Return of the Jedi, and De Laurentis wanted his own Star Wars. Thus he funds Dune, the Frank Herbert book that heavily inspired Tatooine, Jabba the Hutt, and that boy's fantasy Hero's Journey that is so core to Star Wars. David Lynch could have turned in a very typical big budget space opera of the era. Instead he made a movie whose every detail, every particularity, is unique. Dune tells you why Paul (Lynch regular Kyle MacLachlan) goes to the world that the script calls "Dune... Arrakis... Desert Planet..." and why he rides a giant Sandworm. What fascinates is every point on the line besides that big picture explanation. These are choices Villeneuve did not make. They are choices no other filmmaker would have made.
There's a reason that Lynch chose to jump into the world of Frank Herbert and not George Lucas. For one, Lucas has already built a universe and Lynch would have no opportunity to populate his sets with pet dogs, men with giant bushy eyebrows, or bald witches. Dune is a triumphantly singular vision full of character actors delivering their lines in wonderful ways, such as whatever form of kooky sign language that Brad Dourif is playing with. Or Patrick Stewart running into battle with a pug cradled in his arms.
The other reason though is that Lynch actually saw something in this material. His art has always been dream-like. This is a tale of a hero driven by fate into a realm of dreams made real. Lynch believes heavily in the power of transcendental meditation. So his Paul is not like the Paul of the novels, or the 2024 version, a tragic conqueror who is forced against his will to become the Great Man of History, covering himself and the universe in blood. The Lynchian Paul is the sleeper who must awaken. Leto (Jürgen Prochnow), his doomed father, has no access to the greater magics or destinies of the Spice. Yet he is the one who recognizes the value of 'becoming'. This is a full Messianic fantasy, following the power of inward transformation to achieving wisdom and peace. The Reagan-era Paul is a righteous champion of the unjust who brings rain to the desert world, yet wins his final battle by "bending like a reed in the wind".
One interesting thing that Dune '84 does is heavily use voice over. Star Wars will let a few Jedis talk to each other from across space. However, Dune makes it a part of the entire cinematic language. Almost every scene we get interior monologues in this spaced-out whispered delivery. I usually hate voice over exposition like this. Cinema as an artform does not need it, the footage and edit can better tell the story of a a character's thoughts and feelings than blunt "I feel like X". In Dune, however, it works. Because there's this entire higher universe of psychic energies and destinies that our protagonist taps into. There is a network of wills and powers at play, in every scene, whether Paul is there or not to read the character's mind. Sometimes it is just the gross Baron (Kenneth McMillan) luxuriating in his own sadism, a whole galaxy aware from our hero.
Speaking of that Baron, he is the most fun character in the movie. McMillan makes every evil act so delicious in its nastiness. But he's also the first of many terrifying sexual predators that will populate Lynch's work. Behind him is Frank Booth, Killer Bob, Bobby Peru, and whatever is happening with the Phantom in Inland Empire. (My guess is as good as your's.) Lynch never shied away from the most awful and terrible aspects of humanity, the parts society needs to ignore in order for it to continue functioning. The real horror of Twin Peaks is not demons from another dimension, it the regular American home, where so much abuse can hide behind closed doors and ignored under the rotating sound of a ceiling fan. The final shot of Lynch's career effectively is the ending of Twin Peaks: The Return with Laura Palmer screaming at her own childhood home. In some ways, it is a perfect ending to wrap up his life's works. This is what hiding the truth, sealing yourself off brings you: cruelty hidden away.
Back to Dune, there is no real plot reason why we spend so much time watching the formally-human creature called a Guild Navigator fold space. It is a wonderful sequence of miniatures and Eraserhead-like imagery of the cosmos. But all we're seeing is some faster than light speed. Villeneuve cut the Navigators out entirely of his Dune because they did not serve his ends, and maybe one more faction simply confused the plot too much. I see the Navigator folding space in 1984 as one of the most important parts of this movie. Dune is not merely a battle for a patch of sand, with an army of extras in Stillsuits fighting while a very cheesy but awesome guitar riff plays over the soundtrack. There is a mystical level of reality that we are seeing that the Harkonnans cannot imagine, that the scheming Bene Gesserit sisterhood hope to monopolize for themselves, that the Emperor is afraid of, which Paul can unlock and unleash to his followers. Sometimes this power is a miracle, the rain in the desert. Sometimes it is Paul's terrifying half-demon of a sister, Alia (Alicia Witt) spiritually overwhelming the wicked Baron and pushing him into the maw of a Sandworm.
Technically too, Dune is a great looking movie. You got Sandworms on screen, and they still awesome. There's full lavish sets, wild costuming, many many extras with blue eyes rotoscoped onto them in post-production. Though practically any movie shot on film with real objects in frame will look impressive in 2025, when the latest space opera blockbuster is Rebel Moon, tons of CG with an art design that goes out of its way to look generic. No character is unlocking deeper wisdom in that thing.
And yet, Dune (1984) as a movie, is arguably the least of what David Lynch achieved as a director. I would need many more words, more hours of study, and probably some advanced meditation techniques of my own to decipher Inland Empire. That's a masterpiece of dissociation that depicts through an impossible-to-follow narrative the horror of Hollywood's consumption of its actresses. Dune, in comparison, is just is a lot of fun. A guy has to milk a cat to get the vaccine to the poison that's killing him every day. Villeneuve would never dare shoot that. I'm not sure any filmmaker would dare shoot that in a major blockbuster in 2025.
That and more is what we lost today.
...
Anyway, I really liked Dune: Part Two. I'm looking forward to Dune 3 when Villeneuve completes his vision and adapts Herbert's second novel, Dune Messiah. I had a whole review here originally, turns out it was not all that important in comparison. I actually did not have that much to say about Dune 2 that I had not said about Dune 1 a few years ago, so... this emergency piece kinda worked out.
I really liked Austin Butler in Dune 2, btw.
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