I’ve been a fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune ever since I read the novel way back in high school. Over the years I’ve dipped in and out of that universe, both the original books and the many (many) ones subsequently published by Frank’s son Brian and his collaborator Kevin J. Anderson. And, of course, I’ve also eagerly devoured the on-screen adaptations, including both David Lynch’s bizarre 1984 version and the Syfy miniseries. Though I enjoyed them both, Lynch’s was just a bit too far out there for me to be fully on-board and the Syfy outing showed all the signs of being a made-for-TV miniseries at the turn of the millennium.

Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 Dune, however, was everything I wanted in an adaptation of this epic space opera. To be sure it could at times be a bit distancing, and there were moments when the director’s artsy instincts and concern for the visual threatened to overwhelm the human and emotional stakes of the story (which makes sense, given his own expressed distaste for dialogue). More than any on-screen version of the story, however, I thought that the first half captured some of the truly epic grandeur of Herbert’s work.

Now, at last, we get the second half of the story. Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides has begun to feel the overwhelming weight of his visions for the future, even as he slowly falls in love with Zendaya’s Chani and the Fremen way of life. Meanwhile, his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), driven by her own visions and her ambitions for her son, works to forge the Fremen into a fighting force that will allow her son to take his rightful place as ruler of the universe. Elsewhere, Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), the daughter of the Padishah Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV (Christoper Walken), keeps an eye on the unsettled affairs on Arrakis, even as the Harkonnens tighten their grip on the desert planet.

As with the first half of this saga, Dune: Part Two is concerned with the darker side of the epic tradition. Paul may be the one fated to pull humanity into a new future and as such the agent of historical change, but he is also, paradoxically, at the whim of those very changes. Tormented by visions as he is–which only become more acute after he imbibes the Water of Life–Paul can see the future but can do little to change it. No matter how hard he tries to avoid the fate that has been laid out for him by those who have come before, particularly the Bene Gesserit, he is in some ways a slave to both genetics and to fate itself.

This is precisely why I think Chalamet was always the ideal person to play Paul. He’s always excelled at playing young men who are haunted, caught up in forces that are beyond his control, whether they be desire (as in Call Me By Your Name) or a sinister conspiracy of candymakers (Wonka). You can see the weight of his destiny behind those dark eyes, the burden that weighs down those frail shoulders and finds expression in the increasing hoarseness of his voice. This is a young man who will shoulder what has been thrust upon him, but it’s also clear that he will go his own way, whatever others may think.

It’s also particularly significant that the film takes pains to frequently juxtapose Paul’s tiny figure against titanic forces, whether it’s the giant sandworm (which he learns to ride, one of the final tests he must take to prove that he is truly one of the Fremen rather than just an outsider) or the gathered soldiers that he has now forged into a weapon to thrust into the heart of the corrupt Imperium. These scenes render visually legible the extent to which Paul, like so many of the great epic cinematic heroes–Maximus of Gladiator, Judah Ben-Hur of Ben-Hur, and Spartacus of Spartacus–is a man of both great agency and profound impotence. He seems to recognize that a holy war cannot be stopped once it has begun, and though Villeneuve doesn’t overindulge in battle and action sequences, those that do occur make it clear to us as viewers that we are witnessing a true turning point in human history.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t more tender moments. I don’t care what others say, I sensed a great deal of chemistry between Chalamet and Zendaya. Indeed, it is Chani more than anyone else who tries to bring Paul back into the realm of the human and to remind him of the consequences of the forces he’s setting in motion. This is in sharp contrast to Javier Bardem’s Stilgar who, like so many other zealots throughout human history, filters all of his reality through the prism of his religious faith. Small wonder that he becomes one of those cheering Paul on to lead the Fremen into a jihad against the rest of the universe.

Paul is not only subject to the tides of history; he is also manipulated by his own mother. Jessica may have gone rogue and flouted the wishes of the Bene Gesserit by giving birth to a boy rather than a girl, but she has still adopted their calculating and far-seeing ways as her own. She is as driven as any of the rest of the Sisterhood, but she is unbound by their orthodoxy, which makes her even more dangerous than a cold political operator like Gaius Helen Mohiam (a criminally underused but always fascinating Charlotte Rampling). As she has done throughout her career, Ferguson excels at portraying a woman with a shrewd and ruthless understanding of how politics works (more than once I sensed her channeling Elizabeth Woodville from The White Queen).

If I have one complaint about this half of the Dune story, it’s that we don’t get to see nearly enough of the Harkonnens. Don’t get me wrong, Stellan Skarsgård is as brutally effective as he was in the first half. Unlike the previous iterations of the character–which have ranged from the diseased and deranged (Lynch) to the campy and more than slightly ridiculous (Syfy)--this version is more a force of nature than a character, per se. He looms large in any frame in which he appears, no more so than when he is on his home planet of Giedi Prime, which he rules with an iron fist. Villeneuve, in a bit of heavy-handed artistry, paints these sequences in glaring black-and-white, a visual reminder of how much (ever-so-slightly queer) Harkonnens have drained their planet of life, turning its populace into a faceless horde screaming for blood.

Of particular note in these sequences is the Baron’s younger nephew, Feyd-Rautha, played with scenery-chewing strangeness by Austin Butler. There’s a feral beauty to Butler/Feyd, with his pouty lips and his glinting, hard little eyes, and it’s clear that there’s a very damaged soul lurking within. As Lady Margot Fenring remarks, he is motivated at least in part by shame, which makes him uniquely susceptible to manipulation and to control by the Bene Gesserit. I do rather wish they’d included this character in the first volume, because his story here is truncated, even though Butler makes the most of what he’s given.

Fittingly, Paul ends up being the agent of the Harkonnens’ destruction, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt a cathartic rush when Paul finally gets the revenge he has long sought against the man who orchestrated his father’s downfall. Just as poor Duke Leto had to suffer the ignominy of sprawling naked while the Baron gorged himself in his residence, so now Vladimir has been reduced to a sprawled mass of flesh, just waiting for Paul to strike him down. When the young Atreides informs him that “you die like an animal,” it’s impossible not to feel the same savage flush of satisfaction as he does. We, after all, have seen the Baron is capable of, and so there’s an even more potent sense of catharsis, of a grievous wrong having been set right at last.

More than almost any film of recent memory–except for, perhaps, Ridley Scott’s flawed by enjoyable Napoleon–Dune: Part Two truly does provide a sublime experience of history as it unfolds. This is particularly true if, like me, you’re fortunate enough to see it in IMAX, which truly works to envelop you and immerse you in this strange, unsettling, and achingly beautiful world. For make no mistake, for all that people like to remark on the extreme strangness of Lynch’s version, Villeneuve is just as idiosyncratic in his approach to Herbert’s world. However, it is precisely this strangeness–one might even go so far as to say uncanniness–that allows his two-part adaptation of Dune to really sing.

I don’t know what lies in store for the presumed third installment of Villeneuve’s adaptation, though it seems safe to say that his version of Dune Messiah will diverge quite sharply from its source material. Nevertheless, given the triumphs that both Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two have been, I have faith that Villeneuve will give us something epic in every sense of the word.