Aaron Gwyn

At a moment when words like “jihad” and “genocide” fall perpetually from the lips of pundits, professional activists, and policy makers, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two seems a rather subversive spice to sprinkle into our combustible culture. While both parts of Dune comprise a complex film that defies simplistic one-to-one allegory, at times Villeneuve’s richly imagined epic places a finger on the familiar, the historical, just as it points its others toward a fiction set amongst the stars.  In the second half of this adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, Paul and his mother, Jessica, have escaped the initial assault on House Atreides to shelter with Fremen insurgents, but Harkonnen death squads pursue them.

In the summers my grandmother would drive us south of town to where the black oaks thinned out and the world opened into pasture land and sky: prairie grass as far as you could see. Here, on their tribal land, the Seminole People would hold an annual powwow. Folks congregated to visit and eat frybread tacos, and I would skateboard with my Muskogee friends, Mike and Bobby Harjo on the cement basketball court, or along sections of sidewalk outside the aluminum-sided lodge. Around sundown, when the whippoorwills began to call from the sparse stands of blackjack and the fireflies winked on and off, the sound of drums started to pound the earth. You could feel them coming up through the soles of your shoes.

Ripples appear in courtyard puddle outside the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge; a tornadic funnel erupts from the black atmosphere toward Earth. Between these images — the small one of intimate life and the colossal one of planetary death — a haunted young man looks on in curiosity and horror.  The man is Robert Oppenheimer, played to perfection by Cillian Murphy, a theoretical physicist “troubled by visions of a hidden universe.” This visionary, capable of conjuring apocalypse from the particles stowed inside atoms, spends the first fifteen minutes of the film looking bewildered — a gaunt, gray sliver of a man wandering through his life like a ghost.