It's a spectacle no doubt, but not one without a fundamental flaw symptomatic of broader trends that significantly undermines the potential evidenced in the preceding Part, one that is, contrary to popular superstition, actually necessary to the fabric of space and time as we don't really know them.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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What is it about something that makes it indelibly written..and what is it that makes something ‘intuitably unwatchable’? And what might the criterion be for assaying these two issues pertinently with respect to their inner-most dilemmas?

In the first place, contrary to expectations, Dune, Part Two wasn’t ‘unwatchable’; rather, it was watchable for the first few moments and then, low-and-behold, the miraculous happened and the sense of watching a film retreated to the point where all that was left was pictorial representation lying ahead, directly ahead on the pixelated IMAX-screen, along with the thought: this just ‘got bad’. Which is interesting, phenomenologically, in its own right. To go from momentary indications of the spooling-out of Genre(the on-rails hype around the harvesters, again; the stupid sand dance for the fiftieth mythological time, whatever) to pure and simple B-movie genre on-screen(basically as soon as ‘Austin Butler’ makes his appearance and one of the greatest characters ever put to cinematographical depiction drifts out with his magnetic levitation apparatuses). And whereas the first film was a masterclass in presentation of impressions(presumably a result of strict adherence to trailer-type editorializing), this second-part took editing’s contribution to a whole new level: at a certain point literally anything could have happened once a new scene began, the logic of the intersection apparently capable of holding years of plot-line and narrative(or, perhaps, once the bug-eyed Emma-Stone-looking-like-a-mother-fucking-NIGHTMARE showed-up for a brief second, maybe even a Maybelline make-up commercial).

But it wasn’t all bad: the sound-‘space’ was interesting; only missing, with respect to how forceful it pushed the screen to animate itself, an on-screen equalizer visualization. Timothée Chalamet did an admirable job with his role. He’s an interesting guy in a certain sense, it’s not clear what kind of roles suit him; it seems like the film just evolved around him to the point of condensing in an emotional moment around his gestures of faith in himself and what his persona is worth to the universe writ large(toward the concluding scene during the EPIC DAGGER FIGHT!!—more on this below, please, alot of garbage from here to there). Probably reprieving Bob Dylan to the Big Screen will more fully flush-out what the Studios have in mind with this new ‘generation of casting credits’. Other roles were alright: Stellan Skarsgård was perfect(until he was kissed back by a certain someone in a seemingly unscripted over-action, then he got some color and whatever, got a bit soft); Zendaya was alright as well; there was some good humor and a solidity of obscure ThirdWorldiness to her plight that transferred nicely onto the screen. Thankfully, Duncan was dead, but there was still the ‘biscuit boy’ or whatever he said to Paul when he met him in the desert.

Technologically: the first was much more interesting. In this film, we get to see too much that makes no sense. Where is the disposable Thumper manufacturing taking place? Where are the birds throughout the film? Everyone comes with everything they need, they’re own plug-and-play tech-tree for Arrakis or Dune mentioned once. And WHAT AN EMPEROR? Oh my God, Christopher Walken could have riffed comedy straight-dope before he kissed the ring, there was a moment there on the dais. But CAN HE DO THE WORM WALK, the entire fate of the Universe depends on him doing the Worm Dance with the right asynchronous Cadence. Fair enough, he learned it in the first film, but he gets to re-learn it a few more times in this one. And if you’re going to imply a bitch gets burned to death, at least have the decency to show her get set alight, there’s still cis-gendered male-stereotype-cast trash that need to see that.

So, what’s the takeaway from Dune, Part Two? And what does the future hold for the future of Dune, Part Three? Not all that much, Johnny, would be the guess to venture. Would this have been more interesting on a digital-to-film transfer? It would have been nice to find-out, but dens that display that screen-type are few and far between; hopefully, the country will get back to projecting celluloid onto screen so we can once again have a cinema rather than search out more forceful ways for movies to affect us and dislodge us from the banal urgency in which we find ourselves in 20024 here on planet Earth. There’s nothing much left to imagine anyway, though: a Mission to Mars will be a branded nightmare and a total, absolute bore; going to the moon, a nothingburger for fucking sure. There’s no aliens around it seems that care to have a relationship with this lost-cause of a world, so who knows if there’ll any more interesting fiction that’s ever worth throwing onto a celluloid projection system anyway(everyone who knows anything knows it comes straight from their intersubjective penetrational capabilities to infuse this world with worthwhile shit). It’s a hard-rock of a place for sure: surely, having tech implanted in the brain isn’t going to transform an urge to agency into peaceable economic activity, so who knows. Dune, Part Two could have deliberately built on this very particular point(rather than left it secondary to stupid bullshit plot) and given us all something to think-about vis a vi the unnatural relationship our World has to DIGITAL TECH. The cultures depicted in Dune are an indication of what a more advanced religious natured society might value in its inter-relationship with tech-no-logy; but this ulture has lost its insight into the ineffable long ago, thinking building cheap transistor microchip junk is a pathway FOR CERTAIN to the stars. After all, there was such tech in 1970s science-fiction films so it goes almost without saying that a modern advanced society should also value these EXACT SAME THINGS as part of their natural and invariable determination to conjure such a ‘future’ into existence through force of so-called Will(but really just tech-bros lack of imagination with respect to anything in particular apart from their stupid pea-brained sexualizational vendettas). And with the distance things have managed to get from anything ostensibly(but by no means certainly) redeemably relational with respect to a spiritual nature no longer manifest in anything much but yoga mats and organic whathaveyoueatenlatelies and whatnot(Eat, Pray, Love is played-out by now as well), perhaps simply an earth-shaking monogram of single-frame-sequenced photo-displays might be a good idea for any further elaboration of the Dune conception. But it goes without saying that noone is going to beam a slide-show onto IMAX-screens, so we’ll probably end-up with more action-imagry that riles the bones but stifles the will to live in the endeavor to liberate the Global South and free Earth from the Enlightenment Shackles that have held it back from dropping itself into saline solution jars and preparing for the 10,000-year voyageo the next-closest star system to see if there’s anything there by the time they reach it and what will have become of little old Home World™ once they leave forever never to return. So. It. Goes. That’s what intuition says, so we’ll see whether or not there’s any intuitability left in the world to help redirect things in a different way, which makes The Way of Frank Herbert’s imagination that much ore salient now than it could ever have been, which is a shame because Denis Villeneuve clearly could have made that film more precisely honed and delivered purely and simply focused on it.

As it stands, then—and this is a HUUUUGE lift for Chalamet—the entire Way
hinges on his single momentary look(when he looks like he’s about to be killed). It’s not nothing, FOR SURE, that momentary look, but is. it. really, enough? Answering that will take a profound look into character, casting, personages and suchcraft to sift what it is that is actually managing to make its way to cinema screens, why and how and wherefore can it possibly all be heading if the selection criteria predominantly revolve around principles having to do with simple affectationality divorced from any context other than that of an ostensible social-media origin and referentiality to which these characters ‘looks’ seem primarily directed(although who can really say what might be coincident with these looks or what might be coincidentally possible with respect to them, particularly when so many of them are absolutely glorified irritants—speaking with regard to the effects created with respect to the audiences they are presumably selected to ‘address’). Sure, maybe it’s true and it’s possible random chance will intervene at some point and this is the ‘best’ any advanced civilization, knowing full-well the empirical nature of ‘reality’ as such as thoroughly a-causal as it seems to be with regard to human-being’s agency in the world of living beings(with respect to one-another rather than indirect effects transmitted through the coercion of a supra-structural junk technologicality), can do, as such, having distinguished the representational nature of an aesthetic from that of the more primal moving force of nature underlying it but that is, on account of the ‘advanced nature’ of this logic, not primarily concerned with the aesthetic itself but what it demonstrates as a form of style for public consumption. In the case of Dune, while Villeneuve certainly move mountains to make this fictional world come to life, the problem still pertains to the inspirational force-majeure with respect to his motivation to present this imaginary world: is it to propound the capability to do such from a cursory read of the novels; or is it, rather, a profound insight into what these technologies mean within their contexts. In the former, merely something aesthetical; in the latter, an actual aesthetic(which can become the full-cloth clothing for a future of human-kind, rather than an empty placeholder for a force of nature). These things don’t come from nowhere—which is the truth of it—and demonstrating the profound respect necessary for them to become such in the context of an endless array of refining(and refined) rationales for extracting from things things other than what those things could or should be is no small endeavor(particularly when they are given full-cloth in another’s imagination and need to be distinguished from mere contrivances relevant to simple narrative or plot development); but it is, nonetheless, what’s required to render an aesthetic an aesthetic as such rather than an aesthetic for the sake of having an aesthetic(aestheticality, as such, defined, which also gives the key to technologicality).

That is what it is as far as I’m concerned. It made a zillion bajillion-dollars so there’s no reason anyone should get themselves in a knot about it. There will probably be make-up kits to take to the next movie eventually when these things really get super-duper because this one, I’m sorry to say is just fuckin’ shy of that mark..

It is in this sense and this sense alone that both the indelible and the intuitional come to the foreground. First: the fact of the film not being indelibly authored(like so much of today’s so-called over-stylized and rationalized calculation provisionally assembled into ‘last-version’ stasis, i.e., cultural ‘production’ writ-large through everything thanks to copyright freaks infringing on everything they can get their hands on¹) which, on that account alone renders its aesthetic as contrived for purposes other than producing the underlying force of nature’s expression to which the aesthetic should ‘correlate’ coincidentally as if by natural occurrence. And second: the fact of being so-contrived leads to the production of yet-another enormous semblage of coherency that, because it hues so close to being what it presents itself to be runs the risk of enmeshment of one’s subjectivity into networks of incoherent relationality one will be lucky if they’re ever able to extract themselves from them in part, piece, or fragment. This is that to which an ‘intuitional element’ corresponds; i.e., to the problem of ensuring one doesn’t get lost in the full-cloth nightmare digital tech-people are creating along with their bandy-wagon of sycophancy masquerading as high-school-dropout expertise with respect to what they believe is simply logical’.

Footnotes