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I don’t know if this says more about me or the movie, but I couldn’t remember much about 2021’s Dune when I bought my ticket to its much-delayed sequel the other day. What I could confidently tell you was that I liked its immersiveness — the tangible humongousness Denis Villeneuve, who co-wrote and directed both films, achieved. Such traits also turn out to define its more action-packed follow-up, whose narrative particulars are probably too doomed to not be things that linger in the memory; other problems — its emotional remoteness, the sanding down of the source material’s Middle Eastern and North African influences — remain, too.

Set in a very distant future in a very distant splinter of the universe, Dune: Part Two picks up where Part One had left off: with its chosen one-esque, erstwhile aristocrat protagonist Paul (Timothée Chalamet) continuing his transformation into something of a resistance fighter against the fascistic House Harkonnen, all-powerful on the desert planet Arrakis because of its dominion over a valuable, all-powerful substance simply known as “spice.”

Read the full review on South Sound.