Dune: Part Two is big on sand; big on big worms; big on apocalyptic visions, hair-raising vocal melodies and religious bloodlust. It’s not big on laughs. There are, at best, two or three things that could generously be called jokes across the film’s entire 165 minutes. The most notable of them is when Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) denies that he’s the messiah, prompting Javier Bardem’s Stilgar to exclaim that only the messiah would be humble enough to say such a thing. It’s a riff on the blind ideological loyalty that’s about to launch a galactic holy war. Fun.
The film is even more serious than the first instalment. At least that had the presence of Gurney Halleck and Duncan Idaho, two Atreides notables who take the time-honoured narrative role of wise-cracking mentor to the young hero. But Gurney has a tangential presence this time around, while Duncan died in part one – just as well, given his full name sounds like the address of a remote American town where the main attraction is a rock in the shape of a moose.
But the more you think about Dune: Part Two, the funnier it is. It’s full of giant worms whose mouths have a slightly unfortunate anatomical resemblance. The main villain, Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha, ogles everyone with come hither eyes, even (especially) those he wants to stab to death. He also smooches his uncle, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, who spends much of his screen time chilling in a pool of black goo, while toking a futuristic shisha pipe like some sadistic Turkish uncle.
That director Denis Villeneuve plays Frank Herbert’s novel very straight is an exception to the fantasy norm. Star Wars soundtracks the Mos Eisley cantina scene with swinging jazz, and wheels out the same catchphrase – “I have a bad feeling about this” – whenever the heroes are in peril. Lord of the Rings features hobbits pining for a “second breakfast”. Jokes that undercut big CGI spectacles are in the norm in Marvel blockbusters. Deadpool even makes the jokes the entire point.
Here, the Swedish actor talks Baron Harkonnen, Austin Butler’s voice, and what the Baron’s oil bath is actually made of
Why is Dune different? The films, especially the second, work so well because they’re so serious. The world Herbert created is a very strange and complex one, even by sci-fi standards – any hint of humour would bring Villeneuve’s painstaking cinematic replication toppling down. It is also a very dark world. Dune Messiah, the sequel to the Dune book (and the source material for a potential third film), includes Paul launching a jihad which spreads across the known universe and claims the lives of 61 billion people. This is not the basis for bright and breezy cinema.
Villeneuve can get away with being so serious – with refusing to touch any of Dune’s many opportunities for a nudge and a wink – became the way we watch films has changed. Films exist in the cinema and on our TVs, as they’ve done for decades, but they also exist online. And online, they mainly exist in the form of memes. Dune has been (unlike Arrakis) fertile ground here: we have Stilgar fanboying over Paul sinking a beer; Lady Jessica’s obsession with religious apocalypse; and (courtesy of our own fair publication) a sandworm league table. Saturday Night Live even managed an actually-quite-funny sketch about how Dune’s sandworm-shaped promotional popcorn bucket looks a lot like a sex toy.
It means that we can have it both ways. We can go to the cinema and submerge, like the Baron with his goo, into a spectacle that’s totally undiluted by irony. Then when the lights come up and we turn our phones back on, we can laugh about it. While promoting Dune: Part Two, Villeneuve said that film, which should be about “pure image and sound”, had been “corrupted” by the dialogue-heavy style of television. “Frankly,” he said, “I hate dialogue.” Call him pretentious if you like, but that allergy to quips helped him make a cinematic near-masterpiece.
