‘Dune: Part Two’ Counters the Western Savior Myth

Chalamet’s Paul Atreides comes across as another colonial agent rather than a Chosen One.

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Dune: Part Two opens with a black screen and a gurgling, growling, indecipherable voice, speaking in a language unlike anything heard on Earth. 

That’s a fitting introduction to the world of Dune, based on the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert. Herbert constructed a vast and imaginative world revolving around the planet Arrakis, the sole producer of “spice,” a substance that grants users prescience, or sight into the future, and makes space travel possible. Herbert fills Dune and its five sequels with opaque terminology and dense world-building that made the book series beloved by few and impenetrable to most. 

But when white text accompanies that opening blackness, the world of Dune becomes much more familiar. “Power over spice is power over all,” reads the translation. For all its talk about centuries-old religious sects, intergalactic trading guilds, and foretold messiahs, Dune: Part Two is a movie about power and the material resources used to secure it. 

Dune: Part Two picks up where its 2021 predecessor Dune left off. Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) still run for their lives from Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) and his forces. At the end of the previous film, Harkonnen and his warriors—including his brutal nephew Rabban (Dave Bautista)—slaughtered Paul’s father Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) and took control over the planet Arrakis. 

Paul has found temporary safety with the Fremen, the Indigenous people of Arrakis, who continue to resist their oppressors. However, Paul faces a galaxy-wide conspiracy by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken), who sent House Atreides to Arrakis to fail, hoping to crush their rising popularity and maintain his power. At the same time, the secretive sect of female witches known as the Bene Gesserit, led by the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling), plays their own game. The Bene Gesserit plot to create a messianic figure called the Kwisatz Haderach. Thanks to Lady Jessica, herself a member of the Bene Gesserit, the Kwisatz Haderach may have arrived in the form of Paul. 

For those with no stomach for fictional world-building, the above paragraphs likely doom any interest they might have in director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films, no matter how critically acclaimed they are. Set in a far future in which humanity has spread across the galaxy and its customs have mutated, Dune feels like it takes place in a world as alien as that of The Lord of the Rings or any other epic with a devoted fanbase. 

And yet, as they did with the first installment, Villeneuve and his co-screenwriter Jon Spaihts keep every aspect of Dune: Part Two legible. Not only do characters define their strange terms immediately after using them, and not only do the actors (with few exceptions) ground their characters in recognizable emotions, but Villeneuve trades in familiar genre tropes. 

Even someone who hasn’t seen the first Dune can identify the Harkonnens as villains. Working with supervising art director Brad Riker and production designer Patrice Vermette, Villeneuve imagines members of the enemy house as pale grotesques. Wrapping black leather around their pale bodies, the Harkonnens move through their brutalist headquarters, monologuing about destroying the Fremen and strengthening their familial hold on the planet. The performers lean into the characters’ malevolence, with Bautista bellowing at his underlings as Rabban and Skarsgård deliver menacing speeches. 

The film’s weakest performance comes from newcomer Austin Butler as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. Positioned as the lithe counterpart to Paul, Feyd enters the film as a deadly and remorseless warrior, whom the Baron picks as his successor. And yet, Butler finds nothing interesting to do with the character. When he’s not vamping and sneering like so many other seemingly psychotic characters from pop culture’s past, he’s speaking with Skarsgård’s rough accent, except unintelligible and even less believable. 

Conversely, Paul and the Fremen are presented as underdogs, scrappy warriors using their knowledge of the land and cleverness to take down the Harkonnen superpowers. The movie proper begins with Paul fighting alongside the Fremen, their leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem) and the young warrior Chani (Zendaya). Villeneuve doles out the action with intention, building tension with slow scenes of the enemy warriors descending from their ship and tracking their quarry across the sand. The violence arrives with an explosive start, building to a clear and well-choreographed fight scene that ends with Paul standing over his opponents. 

Every time Paul and the Fremen take down a Harkonnen ship, every time the film cuts to the court of the Emperor to see the worry covering his face and troubling his daughter Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), the audience can’t help but feel a surge of excitement. The good guys, after all, are beating the bad guys. 

Or so it seems. Paul may be the protagonist of Dune: Part Two, but he is not the hero. Herbert wrote the first Dune as a cautionary tale against charismatic leaders and the holy wars they invoke. Although Herbert did not fully develop that idea until later works, especially 1969’s Dune Messiah and 1976’s Children of Dune, Villeneuve and Spaihts know where Paul’s rise to power will lead, and show the danger of that path from the beginning. 

After his first victory in the movie, Paul reconvenes with the Fremen. Some look at him and shout “Lisan al Gaib!” which translates to “Voice from the Outer World.” In these and other moments, Dune: Part Two takes on the shape of a Chosen One narrative, framing Paul as the long-prophesied leader who will overthrow the invaders and bring paradise to the arid Arrakis. 

But Villeneuve and his co-creators challenge these tropes. Rather than a redemptive figure from on high, Paul is a product of the Bene Gesserit’s social engineering among the desperate Fremen. When Paul charges his mother and the members of her order with manipulation and propaganda, Jessica does not disagree. Instead, she declares her plans to convert or eliminate the doubters before moving to excite the fundamentalists. Jessica reveals her plan in a tight close-up of Ferguson’s face, her glowing blue eyes stabbing out from the screen, obliterating any suggestion that the movie supports this point of view. 

As Paul continues his ascendancy throughout the movie, Villeneuve presents him as less heroic and more terrifying. The fight sequences still look exciting, especially when Paul and the Fremen emerge from the sand to fall upon their unsuspecting enemies. But the low tones in Hans Zimmer’s score grow more pronounced as Paul consolidates power, making his victories more ominous than inspiring. 

This treatment of the central character leads to perhaps the most recognizable aspect of Dune: Part Two—its portrayal of global politics. Although the film casts the American Zendaya and the Spaniard Bardem as the two most important members of the group, most of the Fremen are portrayed by darker-skinned actors, and they are all coded as Arabic. The coding underscores the oil metaphor, with spice—necessary for transportation in the larger economy—and the desert locale that produces it, recalling West Asia and North Africa. 

Whether it’s the horrific Harkonnens or the noble Atreides ruling, both are colonial powers using the Indigenous inhabitants for their own ends. Sure, the Harkonnens indulge themselves in wasteful displays, such as when the corpulent Baron bathes in oil or the House celebrates by splattering inky fireworks across the sky. But Duke Leto spoke of harnessing the “desert power” of the Fremen in the first film, something that Paul achieves when he becomes Lisan al Gaib and uses the Fremen to exact revenge against his enemies. 

Critic Roxanne Hadadi has written about the problems Dune adaptations face in representing the actual West Asia, shortcomings that seem to persist in the sequel. That said, Villeneuve does seem aware of the symbolic legacy of Western colonizing narratives, especially on film. One scene finds Paul walking in front of adoring Fremen, their faces barely distinguishable amongst their waving hands and headpieces flapping in the wind. They shout a cacophony of a foreign language, recalling scenes in films like Argo, Rules of Engagement, and countless other American movies about Arab nations. 

And yet, when Paul assures them that he wishes only to help them free their land, to help put them in a position to rule, Dune: Part Two breaks from the Western cinematic tradition. His empty promises echo beyond the outlandish imagery of the films, past the unfamiliar language from Herbert’s novels, through the Orientalist imagination still prevalent in American pop culture. It recalls the pursuit of power in the real world, on display in U.S. actions in Yemen or in support of Israeli attacks on Palestine. 

Through Arrakis we understand the United States in all its self-mythologizing glory, reaching for power and calling it salvation. 

Dune: Part Two opens in theaters on March 1.