David Lynch’s 1984 film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel Dune is best described as an interesting failure. Much of the failure was Lynch’s—he didn’t really understand the source material, and he made some questionable artistic calls—but blame must be shared with Universal Studios, which insisted Lynch significantly cut the intended three-hour runtime to a more manageable two hours. The result was a rushed third act that barely feels like a movie at times, and that hits many of the major beats of Herbert’s novel without giving them the necessary space to mean anything. At one point, the passage of time is conveyed through a montage while a narrator solemnly intones, “Paul and Chani’s love grew” as Kyle MacLachlan and Sean Young smooch to a Toto guitar riff. No wonder Lynch’s Dune was a critical and commercial flop, and no wonder Lynch himself still hates to be associated with it.

With Lynch as a cautionary tale, it’s understandable why Denis Villeneuve insisted Warner Bros grant him more than five hours to tell the same story, split into two parts. The first of those came out in the fall of 2021, after pandemic-related delays, to mostly positive reviews; now, after strike-related delays, the second is finally here. Both halves were worth the wait, and having rewatched Part One in theaters less than 48 hours before watching Part Two, I feel confident saying that Villeneuve understands how to pace Dune in a way Lynch never did.

Even with all that extra time, a hard-core fan of the novel might still flag some missing scenes and characters and concepts, but that’s forgivable. Villeneuve is clearly a hard-core fan himself, but he’s also trying to make a complex story work in a different medium, and the scenes and characters he does include need a chance to breathe. If it matters to the story that Paul and Chani’s love grew, then we need to see it grow, and we need actors—in this case, Zoomer icons Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya—capable of investing us in their romance.

When we left off at the end of Part One, Paul (Chalamet)—heir to the noble House Atreides and possible end product of an ancient Bene Gesserit breeding scheme—had only just been introduced to Chani (Zendaya), a young Fremen warrior native to the planet Arrakis, and had fallen in with her desert tribe. Though Zendaya narrated the opening sequence of Part One and appeared in Paul’s prophetic visions throughout, her role in the first film was marginal; this time around, she’s given far more screen time and emerges as the film’s moral center.

And if ever a film needed a moral center, it’s this one. Lynch’s Dune fundamentally misunderstood the story Herbert was trying to tell, which was meant to be about the dangers of religious fundamentalism and messianic hero worship; instead he filmed a conventional hero’s journey that ended by recognizing Paul Atreides as an actual messiah. Villeneuve has made clear in interviews and implicit in Part One that he wouldn’t make the same mistake, and only an unusually dense viewer of Part Two would miss the underlying........

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