So I’m Just Back From Seeing “Dune II” & IMO, It Was Phenomenal Piece of Hollywood Magic..

The film captures perfectly the sense of magisterial history imbuing Frank Herbert’s mythos and is a sprawling Hollywood epic in every sense of the word.

The film masterfully encapsulates all the major motifs found in Herbert’s source material without diluting the socio-philosophical import of these grand themes: drug addiction as a means of societal control; the psychic toll of psychotropic induced mysticism; the inherent desire of humans to seek messiahs; how rulers manipulate the faithful for political control; the antagonism between faith & reason in daily life; the clash between secularist and fundamentalist world views; the authoritarian nature of mass political movements; ancient feudal disputes between opposing elite political houses; wars of a strained colonial empire; and the tension between matriarchal intuition/calculation vs. patriarchal decisiveness/action.

Is the movie fully faithful to Herbert’s narrative? No.

The female character Chani — a tribal native — is given a more prominent role and acts as the film’s moral critic of the story’s protagonist (and noble born) Paul Atreides’ ambiguous quest to fulfill his chosen role as a political/spiritual messiah.

Yet noteworthy in this era of “woke” Disneyfied Mary Sues: though the actress playing Chani was a strong and powerful female lead, not once did I feel I was being preached to by a moral superior but instead was witnessing a conflicted and wholly believable female character confronting the complex sexual politics that rules the universe of Dune.

Why a mention here on the PB?

Because I think it is important that a film which is not consumed with being woke but instead tries to transcend the partisan disputes of the current day in exploration of larger philosophical themes should reach a wide audience and be rewarded at the box office for that goal.