It's blue-and-orange vs. monochrome in the ultimate battle as Atreides/Fremen and Harkonnen/Sardaukar clash for the fate of the universe! It's a fracas on Arrakis as Willy Wonka and Elvis shiv each other for the Imperial Throne! It turns out that starting a violent cult with your mum and taking some serious drugs can cause relationship problems with your girlfriend, especially if you try to relegate her to your side piece! Is he the Messiah...or is he a very naughty boy?

Dune 2: Electric Boogaloo largely sticks the landing after the first film, successfully bringing out the book's intended morally ambiguous themes and relatively successfully wrangling the large cast of characters. As with the first film, I think this is about as good an adaptation as you could get of what I think is rather a flawed book. I think one area where it falls down, an inevitable difficulty in adapting introspective scenes in books, is developing the concept of Other Memory and other "inner world" elements from the book.

One area where I thought the film excelled was de-glamorizing the violence, preserving the emotion and spectacle but not making it "ooh cool!" For example, the final knife fight between Paul and Feyd-Rautha is not some kewl balletic martial arts spectacle set to pumping music, it's a nasty, drag-down, dirty fight which reduces the spectacle to what it is: two gang bosses shiving each other to see who gets to be top dog. This is something I was hopeful Denis Villeneuve would execute well in Dune, based on his earlier films like Blade Runner 2049, Sicario and Incendies.

Also, the numerous people in my screening who kept obviously checking their phones (and in some cases leaving them screen-on in front of them) shall have their water taken for the tribe. ;-)