Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune’ is a spiritually empty, imaginatively bereft upscale spectacle, engineered for fans of Kamala Harris and subscribers to The New Yorker //

Who, after all, in 2024, can imagine a world in which anyone believes in any cause higher than girl power? Who can conceive of a moral order predicated on anything other than the dictates of intersectionality? Not Villeneuve, which means that his Dune: Part Two, as splendid as some of its details are to contemplate, is as completely and utterly sterile as any new luxury hotel in Dubai.

Without instilling in his characters the realness of belief—that is to say, without allowing his Fremen to be Fremen, not modern, solipsistic creatures that yowl about the future being female—what the director of our latest Dune has given us is the digital equivalent of a sandstorm: awesome while it lasts, then wiped away without a trace. Even nature has been sliced into metaphor: Those sandworms, so menacing in Herbert’s novel, have, in Villeneuve’s telling, been so thoroughly tamed as to be nothing more than toothy Ubers, summoned for a ride with the click of a button, more convenient than terrifying.

What do you get when you rob faith of its magic and meaning and reduce it to metaphor? First, a very boring film. And second, license to make the film mean just about anything you want. The consistently craven New Yorker even managed to review the film as a metaphor for Israeli aggression post-Oct. 7. “The movie,” cackled the world’s once-greatest magazine, now the upscale prose equivalent of Kamala Harris, “pitting Fremen fundamentalists against a genocidal oppressor, can scarcely hope to escape the horror of recent headlines.” Actually, as The New Yorker knew back when it was run by much smarter and more soulful men and women, great works of art can escape the headlines with ease, because they are committed to big ideas, not slick and comforting conventions. They make us uncomfortable, as Frank Herbert’s book did when it ended with the Muadib realizing that his followers were about to shed much blood and plunge the universe into decades of violence. Villeneuve ends his with Chalamet triumphant. The goodies have defeated the baddies. The damsel rescued herself, of course. Nothing more to see here, folks. Not a stick of furniture is out of place.

One day, inshallah, we’ll get the Dune film adaptation we deserve, a Dune that takes faith seriously and isn’t afraid to go a little gross and a little crazy trying to understand how and why we humans believe the things we believe. But as long as our pop cultural industries remain in the hands of men and women drained of all serious religious and moral imagination and intention, we’re better off with books.