Dune 2’s two silliest performances bring this very serious movie to life
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies can seem like a rebuke to Hollywood’s quip era. They are as far as you can get from the Marvel rule that no situation is so grave, no stakes so high that they can’t be punctuated by a smart, self-aware gag. These are solemn, earnest movies, modeled on classical cinematic epics like Lawrence of Arabia and intent on delivering the bizarre visions of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi books in as straight-faced a manner as possible.
Except, for Dune: Part Two, Villeneuve and his collaborators seem to have realized that a little bit of levity goes a long way. One of the reasons this movie is quite a lot more enjoyable than the first — alongside its more even and purposeful dramatic structure, and the fact it wasn’t released in the middle of a pandemic — is that Villeneuve has figured out how to loosen it up a little without puncturing the mood. With much of the visionary world-building work already done, he could afford (or, perhaps, was told by studio bosses) to sprinkle on a little bit more crowd-pleasing bits of business.
That’s evident in the film’s two most memorable turns: Javier Bardem’s Stilgar, and Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. It would be unfair to call them camp, but these two actors do bring a vivid, outsized performance style that can hold its own amid the grandiosity of Villeneuve’s images or the boom and clatter of Hans Zimmer’s score. They do more than hold their own, in fact — they accentuate a windswept, monolithic movie with a much-needed note of fun and wickedness.
Bardem is the biggest surprise of Part Two, if only because little about his stoic performance in Part One would have led you to suspect that he would play the sequel for out-and-out lols. Stilgar is still the cool and courageous leader of the Fremen, but Bardem lightens the character with a recurring bit about his fanatical belief that Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) is the Lisan al Gaib, a messianic figure prophesied to deliver freedom to the Fremen.
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