Dune: Part Two Is The Closest To Experiencing The Story As Frank Herbert Intended
Time to return to the desert!
If you somehow missed the Dune hype train in 2024, you now have no excuse not to catch up. As of now, the critically acclaimed, and almost universally loved Dune: Part II has landed on Netflix. While both Dune (2021) and Dune: Part II (2024) are still on HBO Max, the latter has hit Netflix for a limited time. If you missed it the first time, here’s why you should watch the movie right now. And if it’s been a second since you’ve seen it in the theater, here’s why you should dive back in.
Mild spoilers ahead.
One thing to remember about Dune: Part II is that it's not really a sequel. This is just the rest of the first book since Dune Part I stopped roughly in the middle of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel. This act break roughly matches up with the original publication order of Dune in magazine format. Analog published three parts of “Dune World” in 1963-1965, and then in 1965, the serialized version of the novel was completed with five magazine installments called “The Prophet of Dune.” Why does this matter now?
Well, although casual fans tend to think of Herbert’s novel as a massive single-volume tome, there were several points in his process that the author considered publishing the first book in different parts. Various non-English translations also split the book into two books, including, most likely, the French translations that Denis Villeneuve first encountered in his younger days. In a sense, splitting the first Dune novel into two films wasn’t exactly a radical idea, but a formatting decision that more or less honored the way Dune first was rolled out.
But is Dune: Part II a standalone movie? Can you watch it without having any idea of what happened in Part I? The answer is mixed and depends on your point of view. For those who though the 2021 film was slow or overly contemplative, Part II is the opposite. It’s a propulsive action movie, which actually fills in much of what the book glosses over. In the novel, battle scenes are fairly quickly described, whereas in Dune: Part II, we get a greater sense of the ins and outs of the Fremen's struggle against the Harkonnens on Arrakis.
Best of all, watching Dune: Part II as a standalone movie simulates the same way readers of Analog may have encountered the story back in the early 1960s. Like with comic books, if you missed an issue of the magazine, your imagination had to fill in the gaps. Judging Dune: Part II with this metric probably is more fun than thinking of it as the epic conclusion to a movie that came out four years go. Plus, the fact that we’re getting a third film in the form of Dune Messiah at some point (and maybe a fourth movie beyond that) means that, in some senses, the Dune saga will be ongoing.
To put it another way, like Star Wars, we’ll always somewhere in the midst of the Dune saga, neither at the beginning or the end. Watching Dune: Part II with this in mind will make the film seem even better than it did the first time. And, if you’re somehow a Dune newbie, oddly enough, Part II is a great introduction to the wild world of Arrakis.
