Like the other adaptations of “Dune,” this new one can’t do much with the exotic mix-and-match appropriation of Middle Eastern traditions, language and religious concepts except keep them, since the story wouldn’t be “Dune” without them. But it does seem to consciously lean into it a bit more in the second chapter, perhaps by way of provocation and complication, while maintaining plausible deniability about what it might be up to.
The movie casts the more radical tribespeople on Arrakis with darker-skinned actors and foregrounds the fact that they’re from “the South” of the planet, but it also includes quite a bit of dialogue skeptically debating whether Paul is a messiah or if he’s just cannily modeling himself on the prophecy. Paul and his mom are definitely coded as “white” though, whatever that means ten thousand years into humanity’s future. Javier Bardem’s Stilgar, a man of the people, is also a representative of the presumably more credulous and conciliatory Northern Arrakis and is often held up for ridicule or at least criticism by characters like Zendaya’s Chani. Bardem plays Stilgar with hilariously unselfconscious gusto. He desperately wants something to believe in and is borderline pathetic in his eagerness to convert everyone else within earshot. The character is as much of a hype man for the teenage would-be Che Guevara of Arrakis as George Kennedy was for Paul Newman’s chain-gang Jesus in “Cool Hand Luke.”
The film is a bottomless galactic gumbo-pot of cultural and ethnic allusions and metaphors that sometimes creates dissonant or allergy-provoking reactions but at least seems like a deliberately constructed thing that’s meant to be argued about, or decoded, rather than digested without thought or objection. This “Dune” goes difficult places with a spring in its step. The result is far more compelling than a hypothetical version that tried to make Frank Herbert’s novel “modern” by superimposing 21st century North American college liberal attitudes onto it and making sure that we know that when the characters we’re supposed to identify with do objectively horrifying things, it’s because they had no other choice, and we’re not bad people if we get a thrill from watching them slit throats and blow things up. There is also an enhanced sense that things are happening in the in-between spaces of existence, on other planes or maybe inside of individual souls, that cannot be explained or quantified, but can be channeled. Spend a few hours in this world and it makes the “Dune”-inspired elements in “Star Wars” seem quite tame.
The Force is a thing that can be mastered, but the supernatural or paranormal parts of “Dune” are startling in their ferocity and unknowability. The characters crack open doors to somewhere else, and what they see and feel transforms them.