Doon, too

WATCHING “Dune: Part Two” without watching the 2021 “Dune” is like that Jose Rizal quote: “Ang hindi marunong lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makakarating sa paroroonan.”

But let’s use that most used, abused, and misused word in describing my Dune 2 experience: amazing.

Yes, amazing is the most used, abused, and misused word nowadays. Everything is amazing. Anything is amazing. There’s no particular standard anymore in gauging what’s amazing. Even if it’s not amazing, it’s described as amazing.

But my Dune 2 experience was truly amazing. I cried while watching the last few minutes of the movie. And that’s without exactly understanding what the movie was all about and without knowing how Dune 1 went. Amazing, isn’t it?

In the first few frames of Dune 2, some people were bringing around a wrapped corpse, prompting my thought bubble to ask, Who’s that?

Thanks much to friends who invited me to their house to watch Dune 1 on Netflix (I don’t watch TV so I can finish reading all the books I’ve bought), I finally learned who that corpse was. Whew. And right after that, I watched Dune 2 again. And I’ll watch it again and again until I’ll get it?

The third installment in this trilogy will not be coming soon to a theater near me since it’s still a work in progress. By the time it’s released in 2028 or 2030, surely Netflix will show the first two as appetizers. There I’ll be again, trying to understand what “Dune” is all about.

For a while there, though, I gotta feeling that some Cagayan de Oro barangays, which had no water for at least two days, could relate with the Dune series: as dry as a desert. They’d need gigantic worms to ride on for their trips to and from the nearest working faucet. The more we can relate with the desert-like weather now that summer is here.

Yes, it’s already 2024 but CDO’s Jurassic water supply system is making this City of Golden Friendship morph into the City of Golden Rants. How can this city become Metro CDO if its water supply fails to keep up with the demand?

But Metro Manila has its water woes, too. I guess it’s a nationwide Pinoy challenge.

We can only hope that CDO’s water supply is not from Dune’s Water of Life unless the powers that be want the city’s residents to become Reverend Mothers. Ah, what’s the connect? you ask. Better watch “Dune: Part Two” to help you connect the dots.

I watched Dune 2 because of its all-star cast: Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Florence Pugh, Austin Butler, Christopher Walken, etc. And its trailer looked amazing, er, interesting, thus, piquing my curiosity.

Sometimes an all-star cast is not enough to support a bad script, but everything gelled in Dune 2. But still not enough to keep me awake. There were parts in the movie that lulled me to sleep, like a lullaby. Could be the result of my occasional carbo-loading? Hmmm. Occasional, as in only for special occasions. But the side effects could last for weeks and even months. Tsk tsk.