Dune 2: The Worm Movie
The plot: Christopher Walken looks bored.
Like many movies and the best fireworks displays, Dune 2 is a good spectacle but it’s not a good movie. It’s all about the worms. The worms justify the means.
It all starts when Luke Skywalker’s parents get killed on Tatooine. After Luke leaves to meet Yoda in a swamp, the Dune production team rushes in and uses the same location to save money because the spice market is way down, just like our version of inflation.
The set pieces, costumes, plot threads, are all repurposed and camouflaged to look Dune-ish, rather than Star-Wars-ish and wa-la! No one knows the difference, because no one knows what’s going on anyways.
After awhile, all these epic sci-fi movies begin to look like love and motocross colliding in a distant future with Tesla-driven drop ships that still require humans to pilot them.
In the year 10,000 and something, pilots sit in the cockpit of hi-tech drop ships because it gives them something to do. They’re trained to hide their Soduko puzzle books and look like they’re steering the aircraft when the camera pans towards them. Can’t Wait for Dune 3: The Dream Sequences All Mashed Together.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Madonna appeared in the next Dune. In fact, it would surprise me if she didn’t.
I know people who love the Dune novels. I haven’t read the novels or the CliffsNotes (yes, they do exist), but many people haven’t read Albert Camus’ The Stranger and wouldn’t care what it meant if I explained the plot, or intentional lack of it.
I wouldn’t want to rob anyone of an enjoyable reading experience. However, I shouldn’t have to read a novel in order to understand the movie version. That onus lies with the director who chose to adapt the origin material to tell a coherent story.
Besides, hot chicks don’t lie around swimming pools reading Dune. A lot of guys who lie around swimming pools don’t even know how to spell Dune. If Dune were renamed Dude, things may turn out to be too simple for the bros by the pool, and we don’t want that…
I saw Star Wars as a kid when it first came out in 1977. I’ve seen the bulk of recycled trope evolution over the years. I remember when you had to go to the movie theater to see Star Wars again, and again, and again, in the theater, because there was no other again-and-again technology. That was your only option.
I miss places like Tower Records, where you could just spend an hour or two browsing record albums, hanging out, flipping through black light posters, checking out the glass blown bongs in the head shop section, and accomplish nothing, other than spending unstructured time your way. That’s kind of how Dune movies spend their time on screen: their way, not yours…
The Dune 2 cast is decent but they look like they’re filling out a position, all designed to have a “certain quality” where the flash is the substance, like the chick who dyes her hair Sharpie Hi-liter anime blue. You can’t forget the hair but you can’t remember the chick.
I also get annoyed with klutzy direction. For instance, David Batista as Rabban literally looks like he was told by the director to just yell at everyone. It just doesn’t come across as a personal acting choice. Just my intuitive reaction.
Whereas Darth Vader instilled fear in officers by suffocating poor performers with telekinetic asphyxiation, the trope is so shopworn and stepped-on from overuse in 2024, there’s no recoiling in terror. It’s just another lazy choice.
If Rabban were wearing a Star Wars t-shirt that might have added some real “metamodern” (yet another bullshitty zero-calorie pop meme) depth to the character.
The Sci-Fi Amnesia Effect: In the distant future, people are smart enough to build devices that defy the laws of physics, but too dumb to fix them when the laws of physics break the device.
In Albert Camus’ The Stranger, Meursault lacks a first name, age, and physical features. He is the incarnation of a hollow vessel who doesn’t care about his fate until he is about to be executed for killing an Arab on the beach. In the the novel, these features are by design. Albert Camus wrote it that way on purpose.
In Dune 2, and many movies adapted from novels you will live to see, these features are not by design. They are accidental, or else, year, after year, just La-Z-Boy storytelling.
Get the chair. It’s more fun to fall asleep in.
Years ago, I saw Lawrence of Arabia in L.A. at the Cinerama dome (now closed). In psychological time, Lawrence of Arabia is a three and a half hour movie squashed into two hours. Dune 2 is a two and a half hour movie squashed into three hours.
Dune 1 is the same: lots of Discovery Channel steadicam flyover sequences of desert duneage, set to Hans Zimmer’s repetitive AI-sounding space opera score, cranked at full blast through George Lucas’ eardrum piercing THX sound system.
To some degree this strategy works: you’re so worried that your ears will start bleeding into your popcorn, you actually don’t notice how boring the movie is.
The whole sword fighting logic is just lame. I get that it was adapted in part from the novels but no one goes to sci-fi movies to watch sword fights. No one goes to a picnic to eat paper plates.
Sometimes a good cinematic idea is just a good cinematic idea in the same way a good cigar is just a good cigar. The mistake is in trying to fix a good cigar by switching out laser blasters for swords.
Light sabers back in 1977 were a different story. No one had ever seen Alec Guinness get into a light saber duel with Darth Vader. No one even knew what a light saber was. Now, it’s just a lazy trope even for the Star Wars saga.
Movies like Dune 2 would be more interesting if it were a movie about two people eating a midnight breakfast at Norms, where one tells the other all the Dune plots over ham and eggs, and the stories never close…
