Sometime in autumn 1992, I walked out of Michael Mann’s “The Last of the Mohicans” exhilarated and ready to sit through at least another hour of that movie. Almost exactly 25 years later, I walked out of Villeneuve’s “Blade Runner 2049” convinced I had just watched a masterpiece that I would need to watch again several more times before unpeeling it to its essential core.
Nearly seven years after that, Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two” has me feeling like the first times I walked out of both those other movies. It is an unusually long film — you’ll easily spend over three hours total in the theater — that moves with deliberation and layers its narratives deep. It is also a film that, with its pieces carefully assembled across its first two hours, accelerates upward asymptotically in speed, scope, and stakes. It begins as a small tale of refugees in exile, and its penultimate scene is the inception of a galactic jihad. When you get there, it makes sense to have gotten there because there was nowhere else to go.
A few notes on the production are in order. The visual design of “Dune: Part Two” is simply extraordinary and better than you’ve heard. Its aesthetic is a weird admixture of art deco, Moebius and the bande dessinée, Arabesque, and in the scenes on Giedi Prime, the black pits of hell. The visuals are alternately stark and gorgeous, or so detailed and vivid — almost a photographic ligne claire style — that the eye cannot take it all in. In the inspired decision
