Came for the popcorn bucket, stayed for Austin Butler as Lord Voldemort. 

No but in all seriousness, Villeneuve delivers the best in theater movie experience since Oppenheimer. As soon as we are introduced to Feyd-Rautha, this thing moves as smooth and operatic a big-budget tent pole movie like this is capable of. Nolan may have more competent movie-brain dialogue but no other working mainstream director can world-build and execute effects and action sequencing, shot-selection and pacing on this scale better than Denis, all of which serve to highlight a litany of career-best performances from a well-timed and in-sync ensemble, most notably here voice-change specialist Austin Butler, Rebecca Ferguson and Chalamet (finally showing some real edge—-Zendaya does what she can with what she’s been given, which amounts to mostly reaction shots, and Javier Bardem as the best hype-man since Lil Jon). This probably should have been another 15-20 min than it was, as character motivations and the third act’s logistics were not exactly clear/fleshed out, but the spectacle is enough to gloss over the psychological and practical gaps. While the strength of the metaphor built into the lore —the water of life, spice, hierarchy/society as a cyclical game of power that breeds moral sacrifice and internal struggle, colonization, the white-savior complex—lie in Herbert’s original writing, Villeneuve expresses it better than any other director probably could. The highs are among the best in movies in the last 10 years, so that counts for something. 

Whether Dune 2 is a masterpiece or not, time will tell, but there’s no doubt this will be a shoo-in classic for a lot of the younger audiences who didn’t grow up on Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Regardless this is fantastic visual storytelling and I’ll have to see it again.