Dune 2 Is The Movie The U.S. Deserves

The Fremen represent oppressed people everywhere. (USAF museum website, USAF photo no. 050610-F-1234P-011, Wikipedia from E! Online)

When the United States carpet bombed Northern Cambodia, an area Henry Kissinger determined was wise to hit so as to destabilize shipping routs for Vietnamese militants, the country inadvertently gave birth to the Khmer Rouge. Historian Greg Grandin, as documented in The Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry Kissinger, writes that the genocidal movement used leaflets and propaganda citing the United States’s bombing campaign as reason to join Pol Pot’s crusade. This was not a new externality to witness from the United States’s tinkering internationally, but one that is a bit less well-known than others throughout the last few hundred years of neoliberal tomfoolery.

It’s a pertinent example as Dune: Part Two hit theaters in late February 2024. The sci-fi novel, written in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, deals with themes of exploitation, resource extraction, and colonialism head on. The movie handles these themes at times better and at times worse, but moreover it’s significant that the movie debuts around the fifth month of the ongoing invasion of Gaza and the possible genocide of the Palestinian people. After Hamas hit Israel, killing about 1,2000 citizens and taking hostage hundreds more, Israel has launched what has become an extermination campaign of Gaza. Just like in Dune, with the emperor moving pawns around the planet of Arrakis, President Joe Biden both administers billions of dollars in support of the invasion while taking the State of the Union to implore citizens, who obviously wield less international power than his administration, to stand with Gaza in these trying times.

The central villain of Dune is a tremendous, globular plutocrat. (John Schoenherr from The Illustrated Dune)

How can self-proclaimed liberals watch Dune and other movies like  Star Wars – which have heavy-handed anti-imperial themes (it’s in the name of the bad guys, y’all) – without making these historical and geopolitical connections? Chris Hedges writes about this in War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, describing how fictional death is tolerable and exciting but not real death. Like Star Wars, Dune  2 — generally a continuation of the same plot points of the first movie, which is roughly about a family taking over a resource-rich planet at the behest of a global empire before being betrayed by said empire — frames the power structure and invaders as bad guys. “This world had a Fremen name then,” Paul Atreides, Timothée Chalamet’s character, whispers to one of the indigenous people. But, as some reviewers have already pointed out, the behavior of the central cast does not rectify the situation but further exhausts the historic issues, all while securing their own power.

Now, this is not a review of the movie, which has polarized critics. Zendaya and Chalamet’s performances are very Zendaya and Chalamet, meaning lots of poutiness and the cringey non-edginess of a college philosophy major. Yet this is a movie so thinly veiled with greed and profit motives, with major plot points such as (spoiler alert) the protagonist drinking the sand worm’s blood to gain access to mystical foresight. The liquid is literal extraction of the locals’ beloved local creature, effectively a deity in their culture. The main character’s mom even fully tattoos her face and subsumes the role of reverend mother, infiltrating her family into the power structure to gain power. It’s giving Iran-Contra Affair vibes.

There are direct and indirect allegories to our world in other, sometimes problematic ways. Joysauce’s Siddhant Adlakha points out the white-washing of the movie in comparison to the book. An example being when the battle cry “ya hya chouhada” is anglicized to “’ya hya shuhadā,’ a real slogan yelled by Algerian freedom fighters against French forces in the years before Dune was published, further remarking on the use of the word “jihad” throughout the book. The Bene Gesserit, with their own religious overtones, effectively stand in for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, doling out sneaky structural adjustment programs just as Nixon and Reagan sent their own minions to do, in accordance with these global instruments of finance and control. Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the globular titan installed by the emperor to subvert the heroic Atreides family, is later deposed much like Saddam Hussein in Iraq was backed by the United States only to be later vilified and overthrown.

But it’s Florence Pugh’s character, daughter of the unapologetic emperor, who notes in her journal that the south of Arrakis is an area where only faith allows residents to survive. It’s the same thing people say these days about how people can survive in Gaza at all, an area now riddled with famine. Well-wishing, like President Biden, with no actions taken to support that little prayer. Aspire not to be Paul Atreides, who shouts “long live the fighters” before leading the local army to a battle meant to install he and his mother as universal rulers. Aspire to be like Chani, Zendaya’s character who ceaselessly fights for her cause while holding invading forces accountable. She shouts that the prophecy of the savior from another planet will end them, forcibly seated by another off-worlder. She might as well have been yelling directly to the global north and west, be it in Cambodia, Iraq, the Western Sahara, or anywhere else.