The first Dune film of the new Dune era—which is to say, director Denis Villeneuve’s version of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel, both stark and maximalist at once—was a lot of flash with dismayingly little substance. The film, shot by Greig Fraser in eye-popping washes of fiery orange and forbidding black, was an aesthetic marvel, a Hans Zimmer score groaning away as the the noble House Atreides (including young heir Paul, played by Timothée Chalamet) moved to the desert planet Arrakis and quickly fell victim to a terrible assault by their galactic rivals, vicious House Harkonnen. Dune suggested grandeur but its good looks belied a thin narrative, one more predicated on mood than on compelling incident.

That’s largely because Dune is actually a part one; it’s a preamble, ornately setting the stage for Dune: Part Two (in theaters March 1), in which the real meat of the story is served. Part Two is thus a more engaging film, a robust space opera of revolution and religious fervor built off of the first film’s collection of storyboard images. 

Paul and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), are now living with the Fremen, Arrakis natives who have been warring with colonialist powers for decades. Fremen tribe leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem) and crack soldier Chani (Zendaya) have enlisted Paul to aid them in guerilla raids on the Harkonnens, who have seized control of the planet and launched a campaign to eradicate its indigenous peoples. Chani is sweet on Paul and sees his militaristic value, while Stilgar is guided by a much deeper conviction: he believes, along with an increasing number of cultish Fremen, that Paul is the fulfillment of a prophecy, that he is a messiah sent to Arrakis to deliver the Fremen from subjugation. 

Paul knows that this myth is propaganda seeded by the all-powerful magical nun collective known as the Bene Gesserit, of which his mother is a member, and is wary of feeding into a lie meant to keep the Fremen in thrall to a higher, off-planet power. And he is having an ominous recurring dream of his own—another, more credible sort of prophecy that he terribly fears coming to fruition. 

And yet, he’s a young man who, by nature of his birth, does have some kind of innate call to power. It’s intoxicating, the idea that he might one day surpass even his revered late father in might and influence. Temptation creeps toward him. Which is the interesting tension of Part 2: will Paul give into these pressures, external and internal, to become a great leader, even though he fears that way lies ruin? 

As Paul wrestles with his impulses, the film stages a series of stunning sequences. There’s a bracing raid on a lumbering harvesting machine; there’s a harrowing first attempt at riding one of the enormous worms that course their way through the desert. We travel into the towering front of a sandstorm, toward an undiscovered country. There’s also a trip offworld, to the black sun-lit home of the Harkonnens, where we meet the vicious nobleman killing machine Feyd-Rautha, played with arresting snarl and strut by Austin Butler, the best new addition to the cast. 

Heavy with spectacle and theme as it is, Part Two is often surprisingly nimble. As a filmmaker, Villeneuve has long had trouble balancing plot with picture, but here he almost gets the calibration exactly right. It’s only toward the end of the film, a mighty crescendo in which big, universe-altering choices are made, that the film trips over its own momentum. Paul’s complicated evolution is slow and steady until, all of a sudden, it’s moving at breakneck speed. It feels as if we’ve skipped a crucial expositional step in order to get to the massive finale sequence. Chalamet is an effective communicator of Paul’s tortured ambitions, but he has trouble making it legible when it really counts, because Villeneuve hasn’t given him the time. 

Time is very much of the essence with Dune, premised as it is on a tangle of mythology denser than a black hole. Part Two mostly manages to juggle its many components, and does arrive at something like a satisfying conclusion. But it’s more the ending of a chapter than of a whole saga. Future films, should they ever exist, would allow Villeneuve the temporal space to flesh out what he really only teases here. Presumably we would see more of, say, Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), the daughter of the Emperor (Christopher Walken), who is just making her way into the story when Part Two ends. 

But how many of these films can we really expect from Villeneuve? They’re massive undertakings, taking years to put together. Which is why, I suspect, Villeneuve (who wrote the script with Jon Spaihts) decides to close as many doors as he leaves open. Part Two functions well enough as a finale, but it could also serve as yet another launching pad. Whether Paul continues on toward his dangerous destiny will of course depend on Villeneuve’s continued interest, and on studio willingness. Should the Dune arc end here, though, that would be just fine. An accomplishment, when considering how many planes—er, starships—Villeneuve had to land.

Dune sits in a tricky position. It shows the powers-that-be that serialized films, if they must exist, can be artful and strange and grim and still stoke the kind of hungry-for-more addiction that the bright and comestible comic book stuff once did. But, such a victory may be pyrrhic, stoking a franchise mentality that has been gradually eroding Hollywood’s capacity for innovation. 

It might be better for the long-term health of the industry, then, if Villeneuve and Warner Bros. took some kind of principled stand and let Dune be done now, that they stopped here and made a bold assertion that a rare artistic and commercial success can and should be singular, not simply fed back onto the factory line until the product deteriorates into nothing. Part Two expands on its predecessor’s promise and delivers. Why then risk corrupting such an achievement in the reckless pursuit of an empire?