Dune: Part Two, revisited: the rare blockbuster that trusts its audience

Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two arrived as an event film and has aged into something more interesting: a very expensive piece of studio filmmaking that is fundamentally suspicious of the story it is telling.

A hero film that does not want a hero

The film's central manoeuvre is to give the audience everything a messianic narrative promises while making the promise itself feel dangerous. Paul's ascent is shot with total conviction, which is precisely what makes it uncomfortable. The film does not undercut its own grandeur with irony; it lets the grandeur land, then shows you the cost.

Chani functions as the film's conscience, and the decision to give her a sharper, more sceptical position than the source material provides is what holds the whole structure together. Without her resistance, the film would simply be the thing it is critiquing.

Craft in service of scale

The technical achievement is not in the size of the images but in their legibility. Large-scale action is frequently incoherent; here it is not. You always know where people are, what they want, and what it will cost them. Greig Fraser's photography commits to real light and real texture, and the sandworm sequence works because it is built on geography rather than chaos.

Hans Zimmer's score does something unusual for a blockbuster: it withholds. There are long stretches carried by sound design and silence, which makes the eventual swells mean something.

Where it strains

The compression of the back half is real. Several political turns land faster than they earn, and at least one significant relationship is resolved with a speed that suggests scenes were lost. Viewers without knowledge of the source material will feel the gear change.

The verdict

It remains one of the few genuinely ambitious studio films of its scale, and it holds up better on rewatch than it did on release, which is not usually true of spectacle. It is a film about the seduction of narrative that is itself extremely seductive, and it knows it.

Four and a half out of five.