Dune: Part Two

There is a moment, somewhere in the back half of Dune: Part Two, when Paul Atreides walks out before a sea of believers and the film stops being an adventure and becomes an accusation. The crowd roars. The drums hit like tectonic plates. And Denis Villeneuve, that cold-blooded romantic, holds the shot just long enough for you to notice you were cheering too.

That is the trick of this thing, and it is a magnificent one. Part Two is a blockbuster built to indict the pleasures of blockbusters — the chosen one, the prophecy, the righteous slaughter. Villeneuve gives you every drop of spectacle the form can hold, IMAX cameras drinking the desert dry, and then quietly asks what it costs to want a savior this badly.

Timothée Chalamet finally gets to play the corruption rather than the boy, and he is genuinely frightening by the end, a messiah with the dead eyes of a man who has done the math. Zendaya’s Chani is the film’s conscience and its open wound; she is the only one watching the messiah and seeing the body count. Rebecca Ferguson, all whispered menace, weaponizes faith like a woman loading a rifle.

It is not flawless. The middle act sags under the weight of its own world-building, and Christopher Walken’s Emperor arrives like a guest who wandered in from a lesser movie. But these are quibbles against an achievement of pure cinematic muscle.

Hans Zimmer’s score does not accompany the images so much as colonize them. The sandworm-riding sequence is the best action filmmaking of the decade, full stop — not because it is loud, but because it is legible, a clean line of geography and terror and exhilaration.

Dune: Part Two is event cinema that refuses to let you off the hook. You leave it stunned, thrilled, and faintly ashamed of how good the war looked. That is the point. The spice flows, and so does the blood, and Villeneuve makes sure you can’t tell anymore which one you came for.