‘Dune: Part Two’ – An Amazing Film with Real World Themes it Still Ignored

Dune: Part Two is a towering achievement in almost every way that is quantifiable, joining the growing list of sci-fi epics where the sequel outpaces an already heralded original. The majority of this review will be the ways it accomplishes this with a few, but noteworthy amounts of criticisms that keep it from being perfect. But I didn’t want to bury the lead in stating how great the film itself is because I couldn’t really write this review without acknowledging the film’s release, thematic framing in our real world, and the behavior of its performers in recent months. I am a big Dune fan and I say that as a fan of the books that once believed them to be impossible to adapt faithfully. I enjoyed Denis Villeneuve’s initial entry (and all of his films, honestly) and really, really looked forward to how he would adapt the second half of the first book in the sequel. But I can’t, won’t pretend to ignore the world of Dune and the climate of the real world the movie’s sequel crystalized in. The largest controversy being Timothee Chalamet’s skit on SNL and which Hamas was used as a punchline in what was essentially the early days of this specific violent eruption that had already killed thousands and thousands of innocent Palestinians. I have my skepticisms about the impact of celebrities role in global narratives in general and often feel that propaganda has more power to entrench people in their already established beliefs more often then it sways someone from one side to anoth…