Beautiful, big, bold and boring.

I have rarely seen a film so suffused in white guilt as this. I suppose that this is because most films that swerve this far out of the writer / director's lane hire some kind of consultant to lend the piece some authenticity. But Dune is a fantasy, so such considerations are ill-considered and slapdash. Consider the principle cast, so utterly bereft of MENA actors that Souheila Yacoub had to be added to Part 2 with a role so pointlessly small in a film already so bloated that it was apparently necessary to jettison her out post haste with an implied breach of the Geneva Convention.

Not that anyone here cares about the Geneva Convention. This is the spice future. I get it, it's a fantasy, and Frank Herbert's fantasy is a racist one. Shouldn't we be trying to make it better? Shouldn't I stop moralizing over a blockbuster?

I am not politically offended by this film. It's too inoffensive for that. The film is infused with a deep sense of beauty and appreciation for its landscape. Too bad that the actual compositions and cinematography is tepid and slow. The fight scenes are simplistic, the shot-countershot rhythms frequently forgetting to make use of the landscape with closeups so close that I am forced to contemplate each one of Timothee Chalamet's pores individually. The film never tires of contrasting the singular small black figure (always with fluttery rags wrapped around them) moving over the orange sand, to the point where any homage to Lawrence of Arabia becomes parodic.

This film wants to be an epic in the style of old Hollywood, with Charles Heston at Sinai and occasionally being pulled by horses. Those horses died, though, and the sets were real. When we pan lovingly over a CGI-seeped battle scene with all the cinematographic gravitas of a Ken Burns documentary, I want to fall back on something. The writing? But the writing just isn't there. Dune Part 2 isn't saying anything new about its source, about its central conflict, about the themes it portrays.

Did you know that colonialism is bad? Did you know that charismatic leaders will twist religion to their own ends? Did you know beautiful women have interior lives? Gosh, I'm so glad those guys from Little Women could take time out of their busy schedules to deliver this message. Maybe there will be more Tuvan throat singing this time.

Dune: Part 2 is a mess. It's a beautiful mess, but it's still a mess. On every level, it's more spectacle than style, and more style than substance. It is mostly focused around being more thoughtful than a Marvel movie, prettier than a Star Wars movie, and less racist than a book that came out in 1965. If someone only watches films and reads books produced by the Disney company, these are irable goals.