It seemed impossible, but Dune: Part Two is even more magnificent than Dune, and must already rank as one of the greatest and most ambitious science fiction films ever made. It picks up where the first film left off, adapting the middle part of Frank Herbert’s novel – sometimes faithfully, sometimes loosely – in which Paul Atreides, played by Timothee Chalemet, joins the Fremens to execute his revenge upon House Harkonnen for the death of his father. There are so many characters and subplots here that a simply summary doesn’t do them justice, but then again part of the brilliance of the film lies in the way it remains equally focused on these specific plot details and the broad epic arc of Denis Villeneuve’s vision. For, even more so than Dune, this is an exercise in envisaging the atavism of the future, a simultaneous evolution and devolution of humankind into a cosmic feudalism where power depends above all on the mythologies that individuals are able to fashion about themselves.

As with the original film, the hallmark of Part Two is an extraordinary and apparently endless texturality. From the opening scene, which sees Paul peeking over sand dunes, Harkonnen soldiers floating above the desert, and an eclipse of sun and two moons over Arrakis, Villeneuve’s direction and editing is remarkably sensual – as attuned to the textual modulations of the desert as the sandwalking the Fremen adopt to allow them to pass unheeded by the sandworms. The aesthetic is all the most remarkable in that the space of Dune is, on the face of it, quite similar to that of the latter-day Marvel Cinematic Universe – especially the abstract desert of Eternals, the point at which public opinion started to conclusively turn against the franchise. Like the MCU, most of Dune takes place in voids of empty space, but the result couldn’t be more different, since Villeneuve uses these vacancies and aporia as challenges to his own powers of texture, atmosphere and filmic world-building.

That’s facilitated by the fact that the surface of Arrakis (or Dune, as the Fremen call it) tallies so beautifully with Villeneuve’s personal aesthetic, which has always oscillated between analog granularity and digital smoothness. Before seeing Dune, I was a little concerned that Villeneuve might have already made this film in spirit, so I was astonished to instead realise that this was the film he was always meant to make – that all of his vision to date had been a preparation for the grandeur needed to bring Herbert’s novel to life. That approach only intensifies in Part Two, where even the most seamless CGI vistas of the planet always return to the granularity of rock and sand, to the point where the film feels like a manifesto for a new analog-digital cinema, or a digital cinema that has absorbed all the best lessons of analog cinema – a testament to Villeneuve’s capacity to (literally) ground virtual spectacle in physicality and materiality. The entire film feels both sculpted out of analog and ethereally digital, a paradox encapsulated in the sandworms, who in Villeneuve’s vision (as in Herbert’s) are not merely organisms but ripples in the entire spacetime of the cinematic medium, suffusing every mise-en-scene with the vital and preternatural power of spice. There’s more of them in the sequel and their presence proliferates into scene after scene in which other objects or people ripple just below the surface of the sand, or lend their own agency and volatility to the thin layer of surface sand that forms the main venue from which the Fremen fight the Harkonnen; a cipher, in its own way, for the sensual surface of the cinematic screen.

By intensifying the presence of the sandworms and what they represent, Villeneuve is able to move even more vertiginously between the materiality and liquidity of his vision, immersing us in the particulate matter of the desert as never before while also framing the desert as a kind of dream of the oceans that the Fremen cannot conceive, whether in the extraordinary scene in which Paul first rides a sandworm from a standing wave of sand, or his recurring vision of sliding down an enormous dune and finding himself face to face with the ocean. Aridity and liquidity are both estranged from us and each other, as befits an era ravaged by the prospect of climate change, while Villeneuve bundles these two spaces into a broader obsession with keeping the scale of his world perpetually surprising. For Part Two continually requires recalibrations of scale, starting with a beautiful sequence in which we move from a close-up of a hopping mouse, to a sea of Fremen snorkels poking just above the sand, to the first major battle scene, which takes place on a cosmic scale. It makes sense that Paul chooses the hopping mouse for his Fremen name, since this sequence initiates a cascading challenge to orient ourselves in terms of the scale of the sand, with many of Villeneuve’s shots equally legible as extreme close-ups or extreme long-shots, most memorably – and cutely – in his alternation between a grandfather sandworm and a baby sandworm during the second act.

In other words, scale itself – the scale of Herbert’s world, the scale of Villeneuve’s vision, the scale of the cinematic screen itself – is never neutralised nor normalised, making for a film that demands to be seen on Vmax at the very least, and ideally on IMAX; in any case, on the biggest available screen in any city. By making that demand upon his audience, Villeneuve strikes to the heart of science fiction’s capacity to generate wonder, awe and sublimity, while also restoring the horizon as the defining spectacle of American cinema. Time and again, the arrival of distant sandworms forces us to gaze upon the most remote horizon as a site of unimaginably sublime import, most beautifully when Paul calls the grandfather worm for his first ride, and this allows Villeneuve to produce an epic cinema that has withered away in an era when small screens (and tiny screens) have become the norm. It’s the Lawrence of Arabia of science fiction and, like David Lean’s film, draws upon the insane scale of silent cinema, the sense that this medium could accommodate any and all ambition, especially since Hans Zimmer’s extraordinary score – one of the best of his career – often renders dialogue unnecessary. Even when we retreat from Arrakis to the Harkonnen stadia the scale remains, now transmuted into the fascist cinematography of Leni Riefenstahl, itself a kind of apotheosis of silent cinema, since this is also cinema pitched as stadium spectacle, science fiction attuned above all to the stadium styled seating of the most cutting-edge IMAX theatre.

Amidst all that sublimity, Villeneuve and co-screenwriter Jon Spaihts extend the world-building of Dune into a broader sense of ritual and ecology that percolates and weaves its way around even the climactic fight scene. Again, in contrast to the MCU model of science fiction, in which every part of the intellectual property must be known, quantified and franchised in direct response to market forces, Part Two brims with the arcane, the strange and the exotic. Its mythology is opaque and emergent, some of it drawn directly from Herbert’s world, some of it drawn indirectly from Herbert’s world and some of it grafted on top – and all of it collectively lived and written by its characters, meaning that the prophecy that envisages Paul as “the one” destined to save the Fremen feels bigger than any single individual’s intention or inclination, especially that of Paul himself. In fact, most characters in the film feel confused, ambivalent or indifferent to this prophecy that drives the narrative, allowing Villeneuve to capture the way in which religious dogma emerges piecemeal, syncretically, from precisely the serendipities that constitute the film as a whole. Afraid of the fundamentalist fervour surrounding him, and plagued by a dream that sees him only access power at the expense of “billions of corpses scattered across the galaxy,” Paul eventually has to become multiple or manifold to accommodate the divergent expectations that are foisted upon him: “I see possible futures all at once.” And it is on that sense of indefinite and proliferating futurity, that evocation of a universe too complex and extensive to be contained in one trilogy, that Part Two ends, an immediate masterpiece of science fiction that’s too big for just one viewing.