What You Need to Know Before Watching ‘Dune: Part Two’

In Part Two, Paul strikes back.

First, he must prove his giant sandworm-riding skills, so the Fremen will accept him as the Harkonnen-stomping messiah foretold by ancient prophecies. Then he has to beat the baron’s bald, psycho nephew Feyd-Rautha (Elvis’ Austin Butler) in a traditional knife duel, so Paul can gain his dad’s rightful title of duke and rule. And he’s got another enemy: Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken, 80), who wants to keep Arrakis in Harkonnen hands.

All of the multiple battle and action scenes look awesome, yet not derivative of Star Wars or Marvel movies, and in Imax theaters, the sound design is marvelously quake-like.

Timothée Chalamet

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The story is a lot like Star Wars.

The novel Dune was published in 1965, but author Frank Herbert struggled and moved constantly to avoid creditors until success arrived when he was 55 — a couple of years before Star Wars debuted in 1977. Herbert counted 16 points of “absolute identity” between Dune and Star Wars, including an evil galactic empire, a desert planet, hooded natives, religious themes, a messianic hero with an aged mentor, mines of spice (inspired by Herbert’s psychedelic experiences — he sometimes wrote while on psilocybin), and Alia (The Queen’s Gambit’s Anya Taylor-Joy), a powerful, Princess Leia-like sister to the hero Paul.

Herbert thought Lucas also stole ideas from books by fellow sci-fi stars Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon, and he joked that they should all start the We’re Too Big to Sue George Lucas Society.​

Florence Pugh stars as Princess Irulan.

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The Dune world is inspired by myths and cultures from all over the real world.

Like Lucas, Herbert was a thieving magpie who wove everything that inspired him into a distinctive, highly original fantasy. Paul Atreides is named after Christian evangelist St. Paul, and the House of Atreides comes from the Greek legend of the House of Atreus (Greek for “no tremble” or “fearless”). Harkonnen is a scary-sounding Finnish name he plucked from a phone book. Paul is like Lawrence of Arabia, an outsider leading a native revolt. Paul’s increasing power threatens to make him a corrupt leader causing immense destruction, which worries Chani. Herbert worked in D.C. politics (his cousin was the commie-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy) and found power sinister. He thought President Richard Nixon did us a perverse favor by making us distrust the powerful.

Herbert got the idea for Dune’s desert planet from a government program to plant sea grass to stop sand dunes engulfing a highway in Florence, Oregon. The lovely scenes of Paul and Chani cautiously “sandwalking” in the dunes to avoid alerting sandworms to attack came from Herbert’s Northwest youth, when he trod carefully while hunting and fishing, so as not to scare off the wildlife.

The last scene of Star Wars is a visual quote from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Dune: Part Two tops that with a dark, Nazi-like gladiatorial scene in a colosseum that dwarfs the one in Rome.

The Force is child’s play compared with the religious ideas of Dune.

Herbert’s supernatural themes are far more complex. He nicked ideas from the Middle East’s dueling Jewish, Christian and Muslim people; the second-century gnostic gospels discovered in Egyptian desert caves in 1945; and his pal Alan Watts, who popularized Buddhism in America. Some of Herbert’s mystics are “Zensunni,” a combination of Zen and Islam’s Sunni sect. Charlotte Rampling, 78, plays a scary, veiled psychic who tests and tries to manipulate Paul. She’s one of the Bene Gesserit — powerful female seers and sorceresses based on the Irish maternal aunts who tried to convert young Herbert to Catholicism. Their name is a play on Jesuits.

Javier Bardem stars as Stilgar.

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Herbert identified less with Paul Atreides than with Paul’s grownup mentor.

The character the author most identified with was Stilgar, an outdoorsman steeped in Native American-like folkways and ecology consciousness (Herbert was influenced by Rachel Carson’s 1962 environmental book Silent Spring). Stilgar’s revolutionary fervor reflects Herbert’s activism — he joined a huge Vietnam War protest crowd that marched down I-5 to attack Seattle’s courthouse. Stilgar’s sorrow over the Harkonnens’ oppression of his people is rooted in Herbert’s despair when he invented Stilgar, and his literary career was at its penniless nadir. But Stilgar helped make Herbert rich for the last decade of his life.

Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides in "Dune" (1984).

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Part Two is the best Dune film yet, after multiple failed attempts

In 1973, a Dune movie to be helmed by Lawrence of Arabia director David Lean was scuttled when its producer died. A 1974 Dune film would have starred Orson Welles as rotund Baron Harkonnen, Salvador Dali as Emperor Shaddam IV, Charlotte Rampling as Paul’s mom, Mick Jagger as Feyd-Rautha, and Gloria Swanson in Rampling’s 2024 role, but it fell apart when right-wing Dali clashed with the film’s left-wing director, Alejandro Jodorowsky, who went way over budget.

A Dune movie finally did get made in 1984 by David Lynch. It starred Sting as Feyd-Rautha and Kyle MacLachlan — who thought the phone message offering him the job was a friend’s prank and almost didn’t reply — as Paul. But the studio slashed the film’s running time from over four hours to an incomprehensible two, and it flopped, crushing Lynch, who’d turned down directing the Star Wars sequel Return of the Jedi to do it.

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There will be more Dune.

Virginia Madsen, 62 (Sideways), a star of the 1984 Dune, thought “they were going to make Star Wars for grownups,” with lots of potential spin-offs. It took a while to get the epic right, but there are more adventures in the Dune universe in the works. The prequel series Dune: Prophecy, set 10,000 years before Paul Atreides’ birth, will premiere on Max, possibly in late 2024. Dune: Part Two uses the first Dune book’s story, and there are 22 more Dune books begging to be movies. Clearly, you haven’t seen your last ride on a giant sandworm.