Dune: Part Two (Movie)

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    Denis Villeneuve Answers All Your ‘Dune: Part Two’ Questions

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    He explains why Lady Jessica’s face is so heavily tattooed, whether Paul considers himself the Messiah and what he thinks of those Javier Bardem memes.This weekend, “Dune: Part Two” muscles back into IMAX theaters with the verve of Timothée Chalamet rodeo-riding a giant sandworm. After nearly two months in theaters, the film is the current champion of this year’s box office race, with a total take of more than $680 million. (It’s also available to rent or buy on some streaming platforms.) The film’s success is thanks in part to audiences that have returned over and over to get lost in the rocky warrens and spiritual reckonings of the planet Arrakis. One admirer reports he’s seen the movie 25 times to date.That there’s so much to explore in “Dune: Part Two” is a credit to its writer and director, Denis Villeneuve, who boldly reshaped Frank Herbert’s complex and cerebral 1965 novel “Dune.” Villeneuve split the book and its themes into two films: “Dune: Part One,” released in 2021, focused on the political struggles between two families, the Atreides and the Harkonnens. “Part Two” delves into religious fervor as the two surviving Atreides, young Paul (Chalamet) and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), ingratiate themselves with Arrakis’s Indigenous desert tribe, the Fremen, by allowing the locals to believe that Paul is their Messiah — a prophecy that, if it comes to pass, will mean the slaughter of billions of victims across the galaxy.Villeneuve has yearned to tell this story since he was a teenager in Quebec. His devotion is palpable; every frame feels steeped in monkish contemplation. Yet, he’s also a visual dramatist who doesn’t want audiences to get tripped up by too much exposition. His scripts give only passing mention to core concepts like spice, a psychedelic dust that powers everything from space travel to Paul’s clairvoyant hallucinations.Though Villeneuve doesn’t want to overexplain, he was willing to provide some answers in an interview via video where every question about the film — even silly questions! — was on the table.Does Chalamet’s Paul Atreides actually believe he’s the Messiah? What’s the meaning of Jessica’s face tattoos? Villeneuve also got into the erotic lives of his desert dwellers and the extra narrative weight he threw behind Paul’s Fremen love interest, Chani, played by Zendaya. As Villeneuve said with a grin, “Chani is my secret weapon.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.The last time we spoke, you weren’t sure what to make of the sandworm-shaped “Dune” popcorn bucket. It went on to be so popular that it sold out in cities before opening day and is being resold online for around $175. What do you think of it now?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Invention of a Desert Tongue for ‘Dune’

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      Language constructors for the movies started with words Frank Herbert made up for his 1965 novel but went much further, creating an extensive vocabulary and specific grammar rules.In Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi “Dune” movies, Indigenous people known as Fremen use a device to tunnel rapidly through their desert planet’s surface.The instrument is called a “compaction tool” in Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, “Dune,” on which the films are based. But the professional language constructors David J. Peterson and Jessie Peterson wanted a more sophisticated word for it as the husband and wife built out the Fremen language, Chakobsa, for “Dune: Part Two,” which premiered earlier this month.They started with a verb they had made up meaning “to press” — “kira” — and, applying rules David Peterson had devised for the language before the first movie, fashioned another verb that means “to compress” or “to free space by compression” — “kiraza.” From there, they used his established suffixes to come up with a noun. Thus was born the Chakobsa word for a sand compressor, “kirzib,” which can be heard in background dialogue in “Dune: Part Two.”For language constructors — conlangers, as they are known — such small touches enhance the verisimilitude of even gigantic edifices like the “Dune” series. If the demand for conlangers’ work is any indication, filmmakers and showrunners agree.“There’s a very big limit to what you can do with anything approaching gibberish,” said Jessie Peterson, who holds a doctorate in linguistics. “If you just shouted one word in gibberish, that would probably be fine. If you shouted a phrase of two words, OK. But if you tried to do a whole sentence structure in gibberish, it would fall apart very quickly. If somebody needed to respond or repeat information, it won’t cohere.”Other languages are a significant part of the “Dune” films as well. For “Part One,” David Peterson devised a chant for the emperor’s fearsome military forces, the Sardaukar, and the sign language of discreet hand gestures employed by the central Atreides family.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Christopher Walken’s Hidden ‘Dune’ Connection

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      The actor who plays the malevolent emperor in the new film actually brought an element of the saga to life once before. Remember “Weapon of Choice”?If you turned on MTV for any length of time in 2001, you almost certainly saw Christopher Walken flying around the lobby of a Marriott in Los Angeles. Even in an era when music videos were far more hotly discussed than they are now, it was a weird sight. Walken’s trim shock of gray hair matched his gray suit, punctuated by a red tie; he looked less like the movie star he was than some guy on a long layover.The music was Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice,” a weird little ditty that did make you want to dance. Having trained as a dancer in his youth — and done a great deal of tap and more in “Pennies From Heaven” (1981) — Walken was well equipped for the concept that the video’s director, Spike Jonze, had cooked up: Normal-looking man hanging out in a hotel lobby hears the song, starts dancing, then flies off a mezzanine before, eventually, returning to his seat. The video was a hit, winning several MTV Video Music Awards and a Grammy.The lyrics to “Weapon of Choice” (sung by Bootsy Collins) are heavily distorted — the point isn’t the words so much as the hypnotic beat. But if you listen closely, you can pick up the line “Walk without rhythm/and it won’t attract the worm.”Yes, it’s a reference to “Dune.”In Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, giant ancient sandworms that live beneath the desert on the planet Arrakis are hugely dangerous to humans, though their power can be harnessed for travel and other purposes. They’re one of the most famous elements of the story, so instantly identifiable that they were made into a dubiously conceived popcorn bucket for the release of Denis Villeneuve’s new “Dune: Part Two.” And they’re attracted to rhythmic thumps on the surface, so the Fremen — people who live in the Arrakis desert — walk in strange, loping, arrhythmic steps to avoid accidental detection.In the video, Walken even seems to be imitating those steps:These lyrics also appear. They could mean anything, of course.Don’t be shockedby the tone of my voiceCheck out my new weaponweapon of choiceBut it certainly would make sense if it was a reference to “the voice” (or is it THE VOICE?), a powerful vocal distortion that the mystical sisterhood Bene Gesserit use to control people in “Dune.”This was all a funny reference in 2021, when the first installment in Villeneuve’s adaptation of “Dune” appeared in theaters. But it got much funnier in “Dune: Part Two.” In the new film, the role of Emperor Shaddam — who engineered the extinction, or so he thought, of the House Atreides, making him technically the baddest of the bad guys — is played by Walken himself.Coincidence? Maybe. Delightful? Absolutely. More

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      The ‘Dune’ Popcorn Bucket and the Golden Age of Movie Merch

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      The hilariously suggestive misfire is a reminder of the days when too-weird-to-be-true film mementos could be found in every kitchen cupboard.When I first encountered an image of the popcorn bucket that AMC Theaters is selling to promote Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two,” I stared at it for a beat trying to process what I was looking at. The item is supposed to represent a giant sandworm, the beasts that slither under the desert planet Arrakis. On top of the normal container sits a lid that depicts the cylindrical body of the creature emerging from the ground. The opening where you are ostensibly supposed to reach in to snatch some kernels is fashioned like the worm’s maw with its many tendril-like teeth, here rendered in plastic. The bucket is intricately designed, but appears, well, especially anatomical — to put it politely — and somewhat difficult to use to actually get treats into your mouth.The “Dune” popcorn bucket has become a genuine mini phenomenon. The film’s cast and crew have been asked to comment on it, and Villeneuve even told The Times, charmingly, “When I saw it, I went, ‘Hoooooly smokes.’” There was a “Saturday Night Live” sketch that rhymed “bucket” with a phrase that is unprintable here. Yet, the more I followed talk of the bucket, the more I wanted to possess it. (And no, not for the reasons you’re thinking. Get your mind out of the gutter, please.) As a fan of movies and their ephemera, I began to feel as though I needed to have this piece of hilariously suggestive memorabilia in my home.The bucket, both in its sheer strangeness and in the way it has become a cultural moment, reminded me of an earlier era of collectibles — of tie-ins like those McDonald’s “Batman Forever” mugs with badly drawn versions of Jim Carrey’s Riddler that seemed to be a mainstay in 1990s cupboards. But it also is reminiscent of the too-weird-to-be-true marketing misadventures of yore, things that are so unintentionally off-putting that they are also sort of amazing. See the Jar Jar Binks lollipop in which the Gungan alien’s mouth opens to reveal a candy tongue that you are supposed to suck. Ew, to say the least.In some ways the “Dune” bucket is “ingenious,” said Griffin Newman, an actor and merchandise obsessive, because it inspires people to go to movie theaters to buy it. Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThere’s even a history of this with “Dune” itself. When David Lynch’s 1984 version of the Frank Herbert epic was released, you could buy a sandworm action figure that, once again, looked unnervingly phallic. (There’s one on eBay if you’re willing to shell out.)Not all of my nostalgia is for the unsavory. The recent frenzy reminded me of the things I used to covet when I was a wee fan starting to fixate on film. My main obsession was Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, so when Burger King released a line of light-up goblets with the visages of characters like Aragorn and Arwen etched on their sides, I knew I needed them. (I had other “LOTR”-themed glassware as well, including mugs that revealed the inscription on the Ring of Power when you filled them with hot liquid. Pretty sure those are still in my parents’ house.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Jodorowsky’s Dune’ Documentary Chronicles the Movie Adaptation That Never Happened

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      ‘Jodorowsky’s Dune’ chronicles a director’s determination to film his vision of the saga, one that would have included Mick Jagger and Gloria Swanson.This week sees the release of “Dune: Part Two,” the second installment in Denis Villeneuve’s eye-popping adaptation of the 1965 Frank Herbert novel. “Dune” was also adapted in 1984, by David Lynch, who hated his version (or the cut that made it to theaters, anyhow) so much that he disavowed it.Perhaps you’ve seen the Lynch version, which I find kind of charming in its flawed state. (Nobody should be that sweaty on the planet Arrakis.) But if you’re heading to “Dune: Part Two” this weekend, you owe it to yourself to be acquainted with another “Dune” adaptation that doesn’t technically exist and, somehow, is also larger than life.I’m speaking of the “Dune” we glimpse in Frank Pavich’s 2014 documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune” (streaming on Max). It chronicles the “Dune” adaptation that never happened, the bright dream of the avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky (who did make “El Topo” and “The Holy Mountain”).“Jodorowsky’s Dune” is a chronicle of a man — to mix my literary allusions — on a quixotic quest for his personal white whale. Jodorowsky was hired in 1974 to direct the adaptation, and his vision was gargantuan. Over the next several years, he worked with the producer Michel Seydoux (grand-uncle of actress Léa Seydoux, who appears in “Dune: Part Two”) to wrangle artists, musicians and actors for the project. Pink Floyd was set to record some of the music. He wanted Salvador Dalí to play the emperor. (Dalí asked for $100,000 per hour on set; I’d wager Christopher Walken, the emperor in the new film, did not quite reach those heights.) Jodorowsky also wanted Gloria Swanson, Mick Jagger, Udo Kier, David Carradine, Orson Welles and more to star. Jodorowsky cast his 12-year-old son to play Paul Atreides, the role filled in this version by Timothée Chalamet. To judge by his screenplay, the film would have lasted 14 hours.All of this is wild, but what makes the documentary so fascinating is the storyboards, which Jodorowsky created with the artist Jean (Moebius) Giraud — 3,000 images that covered the entire film and are just as psychedelic as you might expect. The production ran out of money and Jodorowsky’s vision never came to fruition. Eventually the film rights lapsed and were scooped up by Dino De Laurentiis, who, after his own long and winding road, hired Lynch.The documentary is almost certainly the only cinematic version of Jodorowsky’s “Dune” we’ll ever see. Through interviews with a bevy of people who were involved or who admired what it might have been, the documentary makes the case, pretty compellingly, that even the nonexistent movie had an outsize influence on science fiction. And the film is a great peek into how miraculous it is that any movie ever gets made — a fitting frame of mind to enter before seeing Villeneuve’s epic. More

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      ‘Dune: Part Two’ Review: Bigger, Wormier and Way Far Out

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      Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya make an appealing pair in Denis Villeneuve’s follow-up film, and the actors fit together with tangible ease.Having gone big in “Dune,” his 2021 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s futuristic opus, the director Denis Villeneuve has gone bigger and more far out in the follow up. Set in the aftermath of the first movie, the sequel resumes the story boldly and quickly, delivering visions both phantasmagoric and familiar. Like Timothée Chalamet’s dashingly coifed hero — who steers monstrous sandworms over the desert like a charioteer — Villeneuve has tamed a Leviathan. The art of cinematic spectacle is alive and rocking in “Dune: Part Two,” and it’s a blast.The new movie is a surprisingly nimble moonshot, even with all its gloom and doom and brutality. Big-screen enterprises, particularly those adapted from books with a huge, fiercely loyal readership, often have a ponderousness built in to every image. In some, you can feel the enormous effort it takes as filmmakers try to turn reams of pages into moving images that have commensurate life, artistry and pop on the screen. Adaptations can be especially deadly when moviemakers are too precious with the source material; they’re torpedoed by fealty.“Dune” made it clear that Villeneuve isn’t that kind of textualist. As he did in the original, he has again taken plentiful liberties with Herbert’s behemoth (one hardcover edition runs 528 pages) to make “Part Two,” which he wrote with the returning Jon Spaihts. Characters, subplots and volumes of dialogue (interior and otherwise) have again been reduced or excised altogether. (I was sorry that the great character actor Stephen McKinley Henderson, who played an eerie adviser in the first movie, didn’t make the cut here.) The story — its trajectory, protagonist and concerns — remains recognizable yet also different.“Dune” turns on Paul Atreides (Chalamet), an aristocrat who becomes a guerrilla and crusader, and whose destiny weighs as heavily on him as any crown. In adapting “Dune,” Villeneuve effectively cleaved Herbert’s novel in half. (Herbert wrote six “Dune” books, a series that has morphed into a multimedia franchise since his death in 1986.) The first part makes introductions and sketches in Paul’s back story as the beloved only son of a duke, Leto (Oscar Isaac), and his concubine, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson). When it opens, the royals, on orders from the universe’s emperor, are preparing to vacate their home planet, a watery world called Caladan, to the parched planet of Arrakis, a.k.a. Dune.The move to Arrakis goes catastrophically wrong; Paul’s father and most members of House Atreides are murdered by their enemies, most notably the pallid, villainous House Harkonnen. Paul and the Lady Jessica escape into the desert where — after much side-eyeing and muttering along with one of those climactic mano-a-mano duels that turn fictional boys into men — they find uneasy allies in a group of Fremen, the planet’s Indigenous population. A tribal people who have adapted to Dune’s harsh conditions with clever survival tactics, like form-fitting suits that conserve bodily moisture, the Fremen are scattered across the planet under the emperor’s rule. Some fight to be free; many pray for a messiah.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Dune: Part Two’: Here’s Everything You Need to Know

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      Before you see the second film in Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the sci-fi epic, try this refresher on spice, the Imperium and the Kwisatz Haderach.Since the weird, wild universe of “Dune” emerged from the pages of Frank Herbert’s novel in 1965, filmmakers have yearned to bring it to the screen. In the 1970s, Alejandro Jodorowsky was thwarted in his attempt to turn his elaborate vision into cinematic reality. In 1984, David Lynch was forced to cram volumes of lore into two hours, and the result was an ugly-beautiful disaster. In the latest foray, Denis Villeneuve has created an engrossing, believable world, smartly dividing the first book in the series into two parts. “Dune: Part One” was a critical and box office hit when it was released in 2021, and now “Part Two,” which opens in theaters nationwide on Friday, is poised to pick up where the last film left off. Here’s a primer to bring you up to speed.Where are we?In the film, Paul Atreides becomes a member of the Fremen, a native people of the planet Arrakis living mostly in its hidden corners. Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros.“Dune” is set about 20,000 years in the future, and much of the series takes place on the desert planet of Arrakis. Part of the galactic empire of the Imperium, which is ruled by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam, Arrakis is vital because it offers a necessary resource — spice — that exists nowhere else. In “Part One,” the emperor transferred control of Arrakis from the brutes of House Harkonnen to their longtime foes, House Atreides. But the gift was a trap, something Duke Leto Atreides suspected but hoped to turn to his advantage by establishing an alliance with the Fremen, a native people of Arrakis who live mostly in its hidden corners. Before Leto’s plans could bear fruit, the emperor secretly sent his elite force to aid Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) in regaining control of the planet and in destroying Leto’s troops and family. (In the process, Leto died.)Why is spice so important?“Part Two” opens with the words “Power over spice is power over all.” After a religious revolt against robots millenniums before the start of the series, the use of intelligent machines was banned. People have since relied on preternatural abilities that are developed through training and the use of psychotropic drugs such as spice, which can expand consciousness and extend life. The resource is particularly crucial to the navigators, who enable interstellar travel.What’s the deal with Paul Atreides?Paul Atreides battling Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (Austin Butler) to determine who will control the spice — and the universe.Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros.Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) is the son of Leto and his concubine, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), who is a member of the Bene Gesserit, a mystical sisterhood that surreptitiously manipulates the levers of power. It has been seeding self-serving myths and conducting a breeding program for generations. The relationship between Leto and Jessica had been arranged in hopes that she would give birth to a daughter who could then conceive the Kwisatz Haderach — a male Bene Gesserit with “a mind powerful enough to bridge all space and time.” Instead, Jessica bore Leto the son he desired. (A Bene Gesserit can control everything that goes on in her body.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Interview: Timothée Chalamet and Denis Villeneuve on the ‘Dune’ Films

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      The director Denis Villeneuve and the actor Timothée Chalamet bound into the room talking at, and over, each other in rapid French. Villeneuve is from Quebec; Chalamet was born in New York City but has dual American and French citizenship. Together, they’re a dynamic tag team dressed near-identically in head-to-toe black, although Chalamet’s shiny leather layers have more swagger. The topic of the day is galactic genocide and dubious messiahs, central themes in “Dune: Part Two,” the second installment of their cerebral space epic based on the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert. Yet, the pair are prone to giggle fits.“We didn’t see each other since a while, so it’s like a holiday,” Villeneuve, 56, said apologetically, switching to English. When coffee arrives at the room at the Four Seasons hotel in Los Angeles, the two clink mugs. “That’s our spice,” he chuckled, referring to the psychedelic substance found only on the movie’s planet Arrakis.In “Dune,” spice is the most valuable resource in the universe. Herbert conceived of it as a glittering dust with the power to expand minds, fuel interstellar travel and incite bloody battles over its distribution. Combine the brain-melting effects of peyote, the geopolitical strife over oil and the violence of Prohibition-era bootlegging. Multiply that by the number of stars in the sky and you get the idea.The previous “Dune,” released in 2021, won six Academy Awards. It climaxed with Chalamet’s sheltered scion, Paul Atreides, abducted from his family’s spice-mining compound and left to die in the scorching Arrakis desert, patrolled by fanged sandworms the size of the Empire State Building. To survive “Part Two,” Paul’s mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), encourages the Fremen, a tribe of desert-dwellers, to believe that her son is their long-awaited savior. The danger is that Paul might be swayed to believe it, too, even as the hallucinogenic spice peppers him with visions of a jihad waged in his name.Heavy stuff. Not that it’s weighing down their mood. As Chalamet, 28, grinned, he said, “The great irony of working with a master like Denis is it’s not some pompous experience.” The two spoke further about the next potential sequel, the impossible quest for onscreen perfection and those infamous “Dune” popcorn buckets. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Scenes may look simple, the director said, but he took pains “to make sure that we have the right rock at the right color at the right time of the day.”Warner Bros.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More