Dune: Part Two — An Honest Review (Stunning, Flawed, and Worth the Ticket)

Open on black-and-white that is not black-and-white: a gladiatorial arena on Giedi Prime, shot in infrared — a black sun, crowds the colour of spoiled milk, Feyd-Rautha walking out to slaughter for sport. Two minutes in, and you are watching the most alien image blockbuster cinema has produced in years.

The quick answer: Denis Villeneuve's 166-minute sequel earns its scale — Greig Fraser's cinematography, Hans Zimmer's score, and a sandworm set-piece that reminds you why cinemas exist. It drags in act two and the Chani rewrite divides people, but mostly it justifies every minute.

What earns the ticket

• Greig Fraser's cinematography is the headline, and the arena is its thesis — the Harkonnen homeworld should feel like another planet in every sense, and it does.
• Hans Zimmer's score: he reportedly built new instruments for it — throat singing, distorted vocals, drums that arrive like weather.
• The sandworm mounting: the sequence where Paul first mounts one is the set-piece with the scale, the sound, and a camera with the nerve to hold still.

The acting you might not expect

Rebecca Ferguson is the film's quiet MVP as Lady Jessica, a mother possibly manufacturing a messiah. Zendaya's Chani, promoted from Part One's vision-and-glance role into a sceptic with her own compass, gives the story its conscience.

Where it honestly drags

Act two. The desert training and the raids stretch, and a tighter cut could lose ten minutes without losing anything essential.

• The Chani rewrite: I think it makes a better film and a weaker adaptation.
• Herbert's own warning: Frank Herbert said he was showing "the superhero syndrome and how you shouldn't follow leaders" — Paul is the cautionary tale, not the hero.
• The stakes: the holy war that follows him kills sixty billion in the book.
• The ending: Villeneuve shoots it as a trap springing shut, blue-eyed and cheered — the tension between thrill and warning never fully resolves, and I have made peace with that.

The real Arrakis

The desert is not CGI, and you can visit almost all of it:

You can sleep in a Bedouin camp in Wadi Rum under more stars than the film's own night skies. One note for parents: the film is a hard PG-13 — bloodless but relentless, and the Harkonnen scenes genuinely disturb.

And that trip is our kind of file: the Jordan visa from Pakistan, the Amman-to-Aqaba run, a desert camp booking, a Petra add-on if the itinerary has room — built the slow way, from the same desk that watched the film twice: HTG Travels.

Pro tip: Rewatch Part One the same week — Part Two assumes you remember who owes allegiance to whom, and the arena hits harder unspoiled.

The Fremen's bond to their land and their water is the film's real love story, and it reads differently now, when Palestinians are fighting to simply remain on theirs — may that rootedness outlast every empire's interest in it.

Want the desert yourself? Message HTG Travels on +92 317 5054959 — voice notes work, and the desk answers when the comments section needs a vacation.