Let's see, what mega-adjectives haven't been used already to describe Villeneuve's "Dune" sequel - staggeringly grand? Breathtaking? No those are extremely common but I'll settle for them anyway because they're accurate. I was often astonished by the epic filmmaking. Almost all "big" movies these days are inherently schlock-prone blockbusters; few on this scale dare to be so serious (even Nolan's work has more levity than this), so concentrated in mood.

The key, I think, is Villeneuve's refined tastes. There are a couple iffy choices he shouldn't have made perhaps, but mostly for an entire 165 minutes of what could've been a derivative Chosen One messiah narrative couched in an already-too-familiar-to-most-audiences "Game of Thrones" fantasy-universe power struggle (even if Herbert's novel obviously pre-dates George R.R. Martin's, the pop culture zeitgeist made "GoT" matter before as many people had experienced "Dune" IP), every single scene bears intrigue, awe and iconography. It doesn't misstep, even in the smaller moments. It's always involving, always making shrewd movements. The presentation is so well-curated that we don't mind having really seen all of these tropes a million times before. They feel urgent again, thoroughly satisfying, and creatively inspiring. It's been said elsewhere, but "Dune: Part Two" (even more so than the first) is why cinema needs to exist. It gives imagery and sound to literature, sophisticated geography and expanded motion to theater. Ideologies and classic stories and states of emotion whisked into audio/visual vibes. However you feel about the plot or characters, it's easy to be mesmerized by the humming cohesive magnitude of it all, ergo why everyone from casual viewers to cinephiles are raving about it on opening weekend.

Plus war, destiny, heritage, the cost of power, these are micro and macro preoccupations universal to our history as a species. They echo across all the major works of fiction throughout the ages. It was only a matter of time before someone smart and talented (and tasteful) like Villeneuve made Frank Herbert's "Dune" both commercially viable, artistically pure and thematically resonant.

Also these movies merit their own hue classification - not quite color, not quite black-and-white (except in those Harkkonen sequences), more like gold, brown, orange and yellow. Desert palette. Arrakis acrylic. Spice-world tint. It's almost suffocating in an otherworldly immersive sort of way. There were times I felt claustrophobic and even hot while watching it, even though I was sitting in a spacious theater with no one around me (except my wife) and in the chill of early March.

And what a collection of all the young It stars - Chalamet + Zendaya + Florence Pugh + Austin Butler + Anya Taylor Joy. Just seems necessary to point out what a cool-kids convention this is. The movie was acutely engineered for a certain rung of hipsters, but those kids are pretty good at what they do, so no complaints here. Walken, Bardem, Ferguson, Skarsgard, Bautista and Brolin deftly supply the outer gravitas.

1 serious complaint, 1 jokey one:
- serious: just couldn't resist the siren call of infinite franchising, could you Villeneuve? This could've been a secure, closed-off, completed second-half of a story, but instead you had to insert multiple teases for future films (the Anya Taylor-Joy cameo reminded me of Thor's last scene in that cave in "Avengers: Age of Ultron" where he just disappears on his own adventure with no explanation or follow-through for the rest of the movie) and even end on a cliffhanger, again. Understandable in "Dune: Part One", but greedy in "Dune: Part Two". A lot of people seem excited about this, but to me it just makes the movie seem needlessly unfinished. Just let it be its own movie and worry about making more "Dune"s later.

- jokey: how in the hell do people get off those sandworms?? We see how challenging it is to mount them, and we see how all the desert people use them for travel on a regular basis like it's no big deal, so I kept waiting for even just a brief shot later of someone, anyone when they've reached their destination having to hop off and get back to walking, but it always cuts to the travelers suddenly off again. Do they just jump and tuck 'n' roll into the sand? Does stabbing their grappling hooks into the worms' flesh force the worms to travel above ground the whole time? Why don't they submerge again while the people are riding them? Do they stop and let the people off eventually? Getting off looks harder than getting on.

Trailers I Saw
1. Longlegs: nice work hiding the Nicolas Cage factor. You wouldn't even know he was in the movie which helps not break the trailer's genuinely creepy spell.
2. The Bikeriders: if nothing else looks like a grade-A vibes movie.
3. Kingdom of the Apes: am I imagining this or is there a depressing formula to all these ape movies? You see the crazy monologuing power-hungry ape character in this trailer and it becomes clear that this is the villain who will cause damage, probably kill some likable cast , provoke a major conflict and get killed in the end while the remaining apes (and probably a human or two) march soberly toward a slightly safer future. Hope it's not so basic as that, but..
4. Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: if the whole movie could be synchronized to bitchin' disco dance struts like "Another One Bites the Dust", we'd really have a stew going here.
5. Twisters: looks like a fun thing to watch come summertime, even though it won't compare to the original.
6. The Watchers: remixing that Shyamalan showmanship, let's see if his daughter can do it even better! Looks promising.
7. Godzilla+Kong: I like this line in the trailer: "Kaiju are the guardians of nature; the great apes are protectors of humanity."