INT. LIVING ROOM - LIGHTS OFF, SUBTITLES ON - SATURDAY NIGHT
I saw Dune: Part Two twice in theaters in 2024. On a TV it loses some of its size. It gains something I missed both times on the big screen: how much of the movie is about other people watching Paul and deciding what he is.
The worm ride
The first sandworm ride is the scene everyone remembers, and it still works at home. Villeneuve keeps the score almost silent until Paul is up. You hear sand, then the hooks going in, then the roar of the worm breaking the surface. When Hans Zimmer’s music finally arrives, it feels earned.
Giedi Prime in black and white
The Harkonnen home world was shot with infrared cameras, which turns skin chalk-white and makes the sun look black. In a theater it is a jolt. On a TV it reads as a style choice, and the choice pays off. It gives Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha twenty minutes that feel like his own movie. He is scarier than the Baron, and he barely raises his voice.
The crowd chanting Paul’s name is the scariest sound in the movie.
The crowd is the point
On a rewatch you notice how often the camera turns away from Paul to the people listening to him. Stilgar believes from his first scene. Chani never fully does. When Paul finally speaks to the southern Fremen and claims the prophecy, the scene is shot from the crowd’s side. You watch faces change instead of watching him.
SPOILERS The ending, and what it sets up
Paul kills Feyd-Rautha, demands Princess Irulan’s hand, and the Great Houses refuse to accept him. He sends the Fremen to war. Chani will not kneel. She walks out alone and calls a worm, and the film ends on her face instead of his.
Frank Herbert wrote Dune Messiah partly because readers treated Paul as a hero. Villeneuve makes sure nobody leaves Part Two thinking that, which gives Part Three a head start.
Before December
If you are rewatching before Part Three, turn the subtitles on. A lot of the Fremen dialogue is in Chakobsa, and the translations carry Chani’s doubt more clearly than the English scenes do. Then read Dune Messiah. It is short, and it is the book Part Three adapts.