I said I would not harm them, and I shall not, but Arrakis is Arrakis… and the desert takes the weak.

I’ve come to reckon with some of the shortcomings I and many others had on first viewing. Some, like the pace and rhythm of the film, have evaporated on rewatch; Being able to see the storm before it comes has allowed me to grasp the beauty of its complexity, to sway with its strange rhythm. Others, like the lack of cultural specificity to the Harkonens and especially the Fremen, have crystallized in my mind as more concrete cracks in the film’s armour (though I think Villeneuve does extend just enough attention towards both to get by). Broadly though, I find myself increasingly enraptured by the tragedy of this second part. Where once I was distant from the pathos of the drama, now it rings in my heart in every hour of the day. The feeling of being virginal to the world, but caught in a trap of fate. Of trying to discover and experience your way out of it, while everything you learn seems to validate the aching, galling dread in your stomach which tells you your part was scripted long before you were cast into it, and that all you do to circumvent that only plays into it. In secular lives this instinct is perhaps easier to dismiss as the trappings of a paranoid mind, but the mind is a treacherous, dangerous thing, and the power of belief, even (or especially) false belief, can prove an indomitable one. The conjurings of a convicted mind can influence; the conjurings of a convicted zeitgeist can manifest. We live, it seems, as a doomed generation, wandering about a necropolis yet to come. I’ve long-since lost my faith in the power of commercial film to usher mass social change, but some naively hopeful part of me still longs to see Villeneuve’s latest at least cause audiences to ponder the dangers of believing that the die has already been cast.

Do you know why I killed him? Because he was a man who believed in the rules of the heart. But the heart is not meant to rule. In other words… your father was a weak man.