Recently, there’s been a quote from Denis Villeneuve that’s been making the rounds — he spoke about how he believes TV has driven audiences to expect more from dialogue in films, but he believes the power of cinema is image and sound, not caring about dialogue. This is exactly what Dune: Part Two proves. A spectacle by all means, an audiovisual experience. A world so unique, captured in such an immersive manner, that dialogue is its worst enemy — when someone opens their mouth and they speak English like one of us, it’s almost immersion-breaking. Quite frankly, there isn’t all that much noteworthy about the dialogue in either of these movies, and it doesn’t matter because it serves as a means for the story to keep going and the audio and visuals tie everything together. 

I can’t even imagine what it must feel like, as anyone who contributed anything to the creation of this film, to see your work, your vision, flourish to this degree. What Villeneuve has achieved, and trust me, it is an achievement, here is few and far between. A vision executed on a scale so incomprehensibly large and vast, with every single person involved bringing their best, for an end product that still feels shockingly intimate and concise. 

When this franchise was started with Dune in 2021, I was certainly impressed from the day I’d seen it, but I was never as interested in it as any of Villeneuve’s other work. I didn’t watch it again until it was re-released in theaters just this past month and that’s when I realized how much I’d been underselling the film and Villeneuve’s vision, but that’s what it was, a vision, and a means to get there. I couldn’t possibly bring myself to start praising it as a masterpiece or anything more than an amazing movie until I’d seen more of his vision and how the franchise would be handled. Well, after seeing Part Two, I’m completely on board. Even if this isn’t the finale, this is what the first part was all leading up to, and it paid off. So fucking much is going on, constantly happening, and there’s just so many moments where you’re on the edge of your seat. It’s an epic in the truest sense of the word. I legitimately had tears of joy at multiple moments coming down because of how beautiful this movie is. 

I can’t stress enough how important it is to catch this one in IMAX, with the entire runtime being in the IMAX expanded aspect ratio (1.90:1) and over 40 minutes in 1.43:1. Seats vibrating during all the action as if the sandworm was right underneath me, and Zimmer’s fantastic score blasting in my ears, phenomenal experience.

Also, I did not watch a single teaser or trailer before seeing the film, entering movie theaters late on purpose to avoid trailers for months and running out of the dune re-release at the end to avoid the preview footage, and it was so worth it. There’s obviously enough to still shock you if you’ve seen all the footage, but not watching anything made it so much better.