There’s many things you can hope for as someone who spends over two hundred hours in the cinema every year. Dune two delivers on all of it for me. I’ll never forget it. Yes, I’ll never forget driving two hours through an ice storm to see a festival screening of Portrait of a lady On Fire, or my older brother sneaking 14 year old me into No Country For Old Men, or going with my older brothers and dad to the midnight screenings of LOTR, Dune Two now ranks in that rarified air.

Thematically, this is a tragedy from start to finish. Paul is a character bound for destruction, constantly playing at the edges, using his affability to manipulate, and emotionally dragging people along to serve his best interest. This movie flipped for me when I realized that Paul states to Jessica almost at the very beginning of the movie that “we must sway the nonbelievers”. We then see a temporal shift in Paul, who sees that projecting himself as the Lisan Al Gaib among the North will not sway them but that he must gain trust and control as one of their own. Whilst drinking the worm juice is the obvious moment of conversion it’s clear that Paul is probably crippled by the idea of absolute power at an even earlier point in the journey than is realized.

I could ramble but I’ll just say that some films believe in themselves so hard and operate within that belief so specifically that it doesn’t really matter what anyone has to say. Congratulations to Denis who had a vision and delivered far beyond what i even expected as a fan.