Massive disappointment. I know the book a little and I knew where the story was going, but the outcome is worse than I expected. I liked the first film, its grandiose settings, its open questions. The way the second responds is quite appalling.
That the Emperor's throne comes down to a knife fight is already hard to swallow, but what's more, it ends with the good old trick of 'it's the hero who is dead, ah no it's the other one', already seen a million times in film, it's disappointing...
Aesthetically, the story immensely reduces the ambitions of this second part by focusing on the Fremens and their rough desert settings. With the exception of a scene on the Harkonnen planet, Giedi Prime, which is rather impressive in martial white and black tones. That said, I still miss David Lynch's crazy and disgusting Harkonnen with their strange greenish/industrial planet and sexual perversions.
Here we are in a demonstration of pure force, strangely contradicted by the ridiculous fear suddenly displayed by Rabban, and by an astonishing vulnerability of the Harkonnen troops like the Sardaukars to the guerrilla techniques of the Fremens without this being convincingly justified by the mise-en-scene.
We can only imagine that what makes the difference is the infinitely superior number of the Fremen, greatly underestimated by the Harkonnen, which allows them to gain the upper hand at the cost of a major human sacrifice. But this quasi-genocidal aspect is only evoked by a film which obviously must be easy on the general public to be profitable. Here we touch on the structural limits of the project.
That the Emperor's throne comes down to a knife fight is already hard to swallow, but what's more, it ends with the good old trick of 'it's the hero who is dead, ah no it's the other one', already seen a million times in film, it's disappointing...
Aesthetically, the story immensely reduces the ambitions of this second part by focusing on the Fremens and their rough desert settings. With the exception of a scene on the Harkonnen planet, Giedi Prime, which is rather impressive in martial white and black tones. That said, I still miss David Lynch's crazy and disgusting Harkonnen with their strange greenish/industrial planet and sexual perversions.
Here we are in a demonstration of pure force, strangely contradicted by the ridiculous fear suddenly displayed by Rabban, and by an astonishing vulnerability of the Harkonnen troops like the Sardaukars to the guerrilla techniques of the Fremens without this being convincingly justified by the mise-en-scene.
We can only imagine that what makes the difference is the infinitely superior number of the Fremen, greatly underestimated by the Harkonnen, which allows them to gain the upper hand at the cost of a major human sacrifice. But this quasi-genocidal aspect is only evoked by a film which obviously must be easy on the general public to be profitable. Here we touch on the structural limits of the project.