Movie review: ᑐᑌᑎᑕ, Part II

[dorchadas]

On Saturday, sashagee and I went with thosesocks to see ᑐᑌᑎᑕ, Part II. Thoughts below:


ᑐᑌᑎᑕ, Part II felt way more packed than ᑐᑌᑎᑕ did. The first movie had a lot of sweeping establishing shots of the desert, or of Arrakeen, and linger shots of buildings that were 10x bigger than they need to be. ᑐᑌᑎᑕ, Part II was three hours long and felt like it could have been an hour longer to give it more time to breathe (bring back intermission IMO). Everything happened at a breakneck pace.

Okay, my first thought is about the message. One of the points of the Dune series is that messiahs are bad, and that turning your entire culture over to someone who is like "Trust me bro, I'll lead you to paradise" rarely ends well. That's true for the Fremen, who participate in the slaughter of billions and live to see a green Arrakis but lose everything about their culture that matters in the process. ᑐᑌᑎᑕ, Part II really hammers this home so that I think it'd be very difficult to come away from it talking about how it's a white savior narrative. I mean, there's literally multiple scenes that go like this:

Stilgar: "Lisan al-Gaib!"
Music: extremely sinister chords

They changed Chani's character to make her suspicious of Paul's role in liberating the Fremen, to provide a counterpoint to everyone else's fanaticism. No one who paid attention is going to go into ᑐᑌᑎᑕ: Messiah expecting things to have a happy ending.

The best spectacle wasn't Arrakis this time, though, or even the arrival of the Padishah Emperor, it was Giedi Prime. The Harkonnen homeworld was monochrome, with a black sun in a white sky and fireworks like splashes of paint on a canvas (and then white fireworks in a black sky at night). There's no way you could think that the Harkonnens were the good guys, even before their constant murdering of their subordinates (and the fact that they killed off the Atreides without provocation in the first movie, of course), but like sashagee mentioned to me multiple times, the portrayal of Giedi Prime really got rid of all doubt. Not only are these not good people they have basically zero redeeming qualities.

Their society reminded me of what D&D dark elves would be like, honestly.

One thing thosesocks pointed out is that Paul spends a big chunk of the movie resisting the Jihad and seems to swap over in a scene into going all-in on it, and it's true that it was a bit jarring, but it's partially the fault of the movie leaving out one of the important characterization bits--that Chani and Paul have a infant son who dies in a Harkonnen raid. That wouldn't make any sense with Chani's new, more skeptical character, though, because audiences would think she was heartless if she was still against uniting the Fremen to fight the Harkonnens after her infant son was murdered, and also the time period of the movie was compressed--it definitely wasn't four years (or however long it was in the books), so the timing wouldn't have worked out either. But I do think one of the movie's failings is that there doesn't ever seem to be a reason that Paul changes his mind, one day he's just like "You know what? Maybe 60 billion people dying in a jihad isn't so bad if I get to become emperor of the known universe."

Kind of weird that there's all that stuff about the jihad and then God-Emperor of Dune is like, "You know what Paul's real problem was? He didn't kill enough people and he wasn't oppressive enough!"

It had an excellent sense of place. In the same way that ᑐᑌᑎᑕ had enormous buildings in Arrakeen, and Caladan it rained 99% of the time as a contrast to the utter lack of water on Arrakis, the film-negative Giedi Prime, the mirror-sphere of the Padishah Emperor's ship, the sandworms cresting the rubble after Paul detonates the family atomics to breach the Shield Wall (one of sashagee's favorite parts), the still pool of water in Sietch Tabr, the scenes of lasguns slicing a crawler to ribbons, and at last, Gurney Halleck playing the balliset. A movie that it's good to see in the theatre.

And Alia Atreides's cameo makes me hope we'll get a ᑐᑌᑎᑕ: Messiah movie. They need to keep going through to God-Emperor of ᑐᑌᑎᑕ so people can see how incredibly weird this series gets!

Comments

[earthspirits]

I enjoyed Dune Part I, and definitely plan on seeing Part II. with the books, I loved the first book the best, but yeah, the series got really strange as it progressed, and that's putting it mildly!