The (Not So) Hidden Spirituality of Dune: Part Two

The film is being heralded as a caution against religious extremism, but it is so much more

Lady Jessica in Dune: Part 2

The following is a review I wrote on Dune: Part Two. I wrote it late into its release, because I did not get to the theater until early April, but I feel it’s still spritely and incisive enough to publish here. Afterward, I will share a few observations I gleaned from my second viewing of the film.

As one of the few people on the planet who has actually read Dune, I was very excited for the release of Dune: Part 2, the latest film by Deni Villenueve that covers the second half of Frank Herbert’s 1965 literary masterpiece.

It is difficult to compare the two movies. Dune 2 is decidedly different in flavor from the first movie. Things move at a much swifter and darker pace. In Dune 2, we are treated to throat-slashings, people getting burned alive (though, thankfully, offscreen), Fremen jihadism, drug-induced convulsions, corpses falling from the sky, piles of corpses getting burned, corpses getting the literal moisture sucked out of them–well, you get the picture.

Despite all that, I am relieved to say that the dark images do serve a purpose. Dune 2 exists as a case study of the holy war, a phenomenon that has affected religions for centuries, manifesting in both the Christian crusades of the middle ages and the more recent militant Islamism in the middle east. It is a force that made Jerusalem flow with blood up to one’s knees, and that knifed into the south tower in 2001. So it is unsurprising that Villenue modernizes the source material a bit by narrowing the focus of the story on a central theme (holy war) and building out from there.

Frank Herbert’s original inspiration for writing Dune sprang from an article he wrote on the destruction of sand dunes in Oregon. He was heavily invested in the idea of terraforming; of changing a planet’s ecology and environment. In Dune 2 however, this serves mostly as a vehicle for another religious concept: paradise.

The Fremen, a rough nomadic people that are uniquely qualified to subsist on the arid desert planet of Arrakis, are split up into two groups: northern moderates and southern fundamentalists. Paradise, for both of them, means the terraformation of the planet from an uninhabitable wasteland, where water is so scarce it must be harvested from the bodies of the deceased, into a green oasis of life. The southern fundamentalists, however, believe this paradise will come through the film’s central figure, Paul Atreidies.

Having escaped the assassination plot of House Harkonnen in the first movie, Paul Atreidies finds himself being worshiped as the long-foretold prophet-savior of Fremen tradition. There are some parallels to Christ: Paul’s prophetic title, Lisan al Gaib, translates to “off-worlder”, and the Fremen expect him to be a military messiah, much like Christ was expected to liberate the Jewish people from Roman occupation. That is where the comparison stops.

Unlike Jesus, Paul is a military messiah through and through. From the very first scene, he is pictured leg-sweeping and stabbing Saurdukaur warriors twice his size. After taking a magical potion dubiously called the “water of life”, he loses much of his boyish charm and sort of becomes a one-note extremist for the rest of the movie, in keeping with his character arc in the book. But he is a self-conscious extremist. He does not believe in the prophecies that he claims to fulfill, but is willing to do anything to get the Fremen on his side and defeat the Harkonnen invaders. Even though he is nowhere close to being a “good guy”, after watching his psychotic antagonist Feyd-Rautha kill his Harkonnen colleagues with the impassivity of someone clipping their toenails, there is no question as to who one should be rooting for.

All that being said, ultimately, Dune 2 is just a really beautiful movie. While Hanz Zimmer’s score feels a little tamer compared to the first film, possibly to allow for the digestion of so much critical dialogue, it is nonetheless stirring and operatic in scale. Beyond the music, the soundscape of the film is incredible. There is one protracted shot wherein a massive sandworm travels across miles of desert until he passes right in front of Paul. The progression of the sound of its passage from a low rumble to a waterfall-esque roar is quite an experience in the theater.

The flicker of sand in the sun, the orange dusk of a solar eclipse, the textured, weathered costumes, the arabic-sounding Fremen language — all of it adds to an immersive experience that no movie will beat for a long time. I know — I watched the trailers.

“I don’t care what you believe, I believe!”

On my second viewing of Dune, I was again struck by the deep spirituality of the film. This is arguably the most spiritual movie to come out in theaters in the last few years, excepting religious hits like The Chosen, of course. But we are talking about mainstream Hollywood here (to the extent that one can call Deni Villenueve “mainstream”).

The movie does nothing to forward the case for religious faith, and actually takes quite a few self-conscious pot-shots at it. (Witness Zendaya’s line: “You want to control people? Tell them a messiah is coming; they’ll wait for centuries.” Ooh, burn.) However, by its very emphasis on the nature of spirituality, the film implicitly affirms the reality of this oft-ignored sphere of human existence. From the imbibing of the magical potion, which results in demoniac spasms (not included in the book), to the genuine belief of the southern fundamentalists, to Paul’s prophetic visions — all of it is pointing to something. Even the fine-grained detailing of the Fremen religion with artifacts from Islam, like the prayer mats used by Fremen faithful and the mosque-like fundamentalist sietch, is surprising in its fidelity to the lived experience of many people. Maybe if modern people took “lived experience” as seriously as they say they do, they would change their minds about spirituality being bunk.

Another line, delivered later in the film by Princess Irulan (played by Florence Pugh), seems to refute Zendaya’s skepticism. Her emperor father (Christopher Walken) boasts that the Fremen are no match for his army. “You underestimate my Sardaukar” he tells her. She responds: “You underestimate their faith.” Well, her father reasons, we’ll just kill their leader. Wisely, she responds that religions grow not despite, but because of the death of their leader. Though inaccurate for obvious reasons (it was the eyewitness testimony of the resurrection of Christ that inspired the growth of Christianity), this is a surprisingly fitting description of the explosion of the first-century Christian church, which, in the span of a few years, transformed from a small group of non-proselytizing jews into a multinational movement that would spread to the far corners of the Roman Empire despite violent persecution. As the saying goes: The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. But why is that, exactly? Why is it that faith can overpower an iron rule of centuries, whether it be the Roman empire or a fictional intergalactic autocracy? The answer is simple: Faith, not survival instinct, is the bedrock of human nature.

As Stilgar says to Paul, who continues to stress that the prophecies are an invention of the Bene Gesserit: “I don’t care what you believe, I believe!” One article summed up the implications of this quote brilliantly:

[Stilgar] is living proof of how much power faith can give someone. He believes so wholeheartedly in Paul that he’s willing to sacrifice his own life, so Paul can take his leadership position. Without faith, people like Stilgar wouldn’t exist. Without people like Stilgar fighting in hopeless battles, the war is already lost.

In the early centuries of the church, many pagans and skeptics came to faith after witnessing the slaughter of Christians who willingly died for their faith in Roman coliseums. Indeed, the term martyr comes from the Greek word for “witness.” It is this aspect of faith — the way it inspires a sheer disregard for one’s very life — that most troubles and confounds the skeptics of our day, much like it did princess Irulan’s father. That a belief could override one’s survival instinct — an instinct, which evolutionists tell us, colors everything we do — is inexplicable on a scientific level. If our reason was a gene handed down by our ancestors for our survival, why is it that people will go to suicidal lengths to carry out the dictates of their religion? Surely something bigger is at play here. It is almost as if they were possessed by something not of their own biological making.

I am not here to say that Dune: Part Two proves that Christianity is true. I am saying that it demonstrates a reality that most in our culture would rather ignore — namely, that of a spiritual realm.