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I think Dune - particularly Dune filtered through Denis Villeneuve's sensibilities - will always be a little too clinical for me to love in the way a lot of my friends do. But there's no doubting the wow factor. The last film's best VFX scene was the one where a vehicle was swallowed whole by a sandworm, a scene whose potency lay in how slow and weighty everything felt. There's a good four or five comparable moments in Dune: Part Two, starting with the sight of the Harkonnens' enormous, tick-like harvesting machines. The twist this time is that the protagonists aren't trying to save a machine, they're trying to sabotage it. There is a little of the court intrigue that powered Dune: Part One, seen from the interesting perspective of the nun-like Bene Gessereit. Mostly, though, this is a war movie.

Shortly before the war in Afghanistan began, the Pentagon reportedly recommended its strategists read Frank Herbert's novel as a way of explaining how a technologically superior invasion force can still be defeated by underestimating an insurgency. I'm not sure what strategic insights you can get from Dune: Part Two other than "don't fuck with the side who have sandworms", but this is a much more explicitly anti-imperialist film than its predecessor, and the depiction of the Fremen's loosely Islamic culture goes deeper than their vaguely Bedouin outfits in the first film. It has to be said that Stilgar's determination that Paul must be the Messiah despite his denials often recalls Monty Python's Life of Brian, and I suppose some people would use those echoes as proof that Villeneuve is terminally humourless. But I've seen his early comedies: given the choice between him making this and making another Maelstrom, I'll happily take this.

It doesn't hurt that Stilgar is played by Javier Bardem, one of the returning actors who I knew would get much more of a showcase in the second film. Dave Bautista's Beast Rabban is fleshed out into a more dimensional character, and there is, of course, a lot more of Zendaya. I've seen David Lynch's version of Dune a number of times now, and I still go back and forth over whether it's any good or not. But it has some wonderful performances, many of which live non-competitively in my head alongside the ones in Villeneuve's films. The grand exception is Chani, whose part is certainly expanded even from the book, but who more importantly feels like a role that was just waiting for Zendaya. She's played a number of parts who, in anyone else's hands, would be simple hero's girlfriend parts; her brilliance is that she plays them without seeming like she's hung up on winning anybody's affection. She's a very cool, very acerbic performer, and as Paul descends more and more into messianistic madness that makes her this film's moral centre.

The decision to stick with that character arc for Paul - an arc even Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky blanched at - means Timothee Chalamet has to deliver things no other director has ever asked him for, and he does strikingly well with it. It also makes a little sense out of some of Villeneuve, Jon Spaits and Eric Roth's adaptational decisions. Waiting until this film to bring Shaddam IV into the narrative gives Paul's actions an uncontrolled feel; he's exceeded the boundaries of the Atreidis vs. Harkonnen grudge match that was set up in the earlier film, and ends this one raining vengeance on levels of power we didn't even know existed. It's easy to feel that Paul has overstepped the mark, particularly when Chalamet's raging is contrasted with Christopher Walken's delicate, elderly Emperor.

Maybe if Villeneuve really was the miserablist he's sometimes painted as, this would be the end with each revolution containing the seeds of some future tyranny. But past and future are never that simple in this series, and this film makes it clear that Villeneuve is very comfortable with the most eccentric, un-Hollywood parts of Frank Herbert's vision. I think he'll continue to follow this story out to areas other big-budget films wouldn't touch.