#pardon the very clinical and detached language

[thebadtimeskid]

If I can be serious for a second, there's also a fascinating moment in Dune Part Two that I think is worth discussing.

As a series, Dune is about a lot of things, but among them is settler colonialism and resource wars. It was a weird sort of meme when the first one came out with people saying "Is this a commentary about the Middle East?" because as an adaptation, Villeneuve chose to carry over some of the themes that are politically prominent in the 21st Century. The new movie dials that contemporaneity up to eleven, and I can't tell if it's deliberate or coincidental.

There's a scene that kicks off the third act where out of frustration, but mostly abject psychopathy, the Harkonnens start bombarding sietches with artillery, destroying the Fremen tribe's home and forcing them south. There are various ways they show the needless cruelty of the invading force, but chiefly they show the ruins of the city, fleeing refugees, and an orphaned child.

Filming was done by the end of 2022, and was due to be released in October before it was delayed by the SAG-AFTRA/WGA strikes. so presumably the editing was mostly done by then, if not by the end of the year. I want to know if this sequence is as long as it originally was, or if there were any changes made. It's oblique because bad things happening is part of the story, but it also feels so on the nose because those are tragedies we can easily recognise from countless pictures reported (and more often than not, not reported) in the news coming out of Palestine. There's a lot to be told in the story of the film, and being economical with the audience's time is paramount when you have three hours of movie, but even still it felt very quick, and the lingering shot of an orphaned child felt a setup or resolution.

If it was in the movie like this before October, I have to imagine someone thought of what was in the movie and had to someone (even themselves) keeping it in. If it was changed at all, I desperately need to know what changes were made, and whose decisions they were.