Theocratic authoritarianism, colonial violence, the pitiless economics of resource extraction: These subjects are present in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies, not as vague allegories gestured at between action sequences to add some thematic heft, but as the very substance of the story. With the release of Dune: Part Two, all the meticulous (some might say exhausting) attention Villeneuve paid to building out the first movie’s vast and complex world—an interplanetary empire governed by multiple competing families, each with centurieslong dynastic histories—pays off. More than any science-fiction epic I can think of in recent years, the Dune movies, each really constituting one-half...