Why Dune II Fails

From 'ancient future' to 'eternal present'

At the heart of Dune is the tragic interplay between man and the grand forces of history. As I described in my introduction to the philosophy of Dune:

Man is not moved by the crude, surface-level events which we perceive day-to-day, but by tremendous forces which we dimly perceive: vast interwoven ecologies of time, history, environment, politics, religion, technology. These complex forces are in flux, alive, each bleeding into the next….

Through this storm, man drifts, buffeted by the forces which move around him. But rare men arise who have the vision and will to orient themselves, to cut through the storm, to command the winds to change. Sometimes, man can master the storm.

The genius of Frank Herbert was his ability to survey these forces of history from outside of time; to provide a God’s-eye view of man, environment, and destiny as they evolve across lifetimes.

The book was published half a century ago, and yet the traces of that cultural moment are barely perceptible. No: Herbert grappled with timeless questions and bought them to life with sophistication and historic perspective.

The same cannot be said of Dune: Part Two. In the film, each of the forces upon which the events and philosophy of the book revolve are twisted and stunted by the paranoias of our present moment.

The filmmakers did not have the vision or the conviction to transcend our time in any aspect except the visual and superficial. They succumbed to the pressure to make a work that was crudely relatable, compressing the narrative into our particular sociological arc.

In so doing, they inverted the central value of Dune: rather than allowing us to step outside of our time into eternity, they projected our time onto eternity, announcing that our current political reality and beliefs are now and forever. They were bold enough to show alien visuals but not alien people.

Their limits as storytellers are demonstrated by their naive understanding of the central Dune themes of race, sex, faith, and authority.