Almost certainly because of acting ability and attributes critical to the story…
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Yeah I saw the photo and thought, oh that must be Chani, sure that’s cool, hmm let’s read down here… “Mother!?”
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Yeah those people look the same age to me. I would be OK with it if everybody looked young in the future, but somehow I doubt that’s what they are going for.
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I suspect you’re thinking of The Manchurian Candidate (original version), where Angela Lansbury played Laurence Harvey’s mother, despite being only three years older than him.
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Honestly the Lynch version stuck a lot closer to the source material than most film adaptations of famous sci-fi novels.
Frankenstein wasn’t set in the right century. Starship Troopers didn’t come close to depicting Heinlein’s vision of interstellar combat. And Harrison Ford’s character from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? didn’t even HAVE an electric sheep.
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I just rewatched that recently and it took me a while to realize the actress playing that character! I guess I’m just from the wrong generation, I remember her from the “‘Murder’, She Wrote” character.
You owe me a new drink, keyboard, and display.
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It must have been the late 70s when I read the book (the New English Library Bruce Pennington version) so, say, five-six years before the film? And I have to say I enjoyed the film. I kept getting flashes of recognition of scenes I remembered from the book, and by the end of the film I was surprised at how much of the book Lynch had managed to pack in - unlike “adaptations” where the only thing the book and the film have in common is the title (yes, I’m looking at you, “I, Robot”).
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I sincerely, almost desperately hope this film will be well done. Although my teenage infatuation with Dune has long faded to fond memories, I’d just like a decent science fiction film I can watch. I am a child of the mid-20th century, so few films appeal to me any more. I don’t like ridiculous stunts or car chases or shoot-outs or superheroes or franchises or reboots or most of the chewed-over dreck that comes into theaters these days. I don’t understand why online fanboys become so outraged at the slightest deviation from their film expectations – I just want a well-written story, good acting, and beautiful framing of scenes. I wouldn’t care if Paul Muad Dib were portrayed as a three-legged pansexual salamander, as long as there was a good story around it. I just want something enjoyable on the movie screen.
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I’ll cop to loving the Lynch version, for Lynch reasons. Tried to read the book half a dozen times and hated it. I remember liking the mini series quite a bit at the time, but revisiting it later it did not hold up.
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To be fair, Philip Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? also doesn’t have electric sheep.
Only an electric frog is shown, at the end of the novel, to Deckard’s wife. Other electric animals are talked about, or thought about, but not actually shown to the reader.
And who can trust talk or thought in a Phil Dick novel?
But then, one also can’t trust the evidence of one’s own senses – or anything else, except for the pink beam of intelligent light – in Phildickiana, USA.
UPDATE: So wrong am I, see replies. But I plead time shenanagins: the past has been altered.
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So I guess Reddit doesn’t read the internet–these casting choices were announced many months ago.
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Hey, that spice stuff can do amazing things.
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I think in the first few pages, he goes up to the fake grass on the roof to check his sheep. It made a big impression on me because getting a real animal seems to drive Deckard.
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I suspect you’re thinking of The Manchurian Candidate (original version), where Angela Lansbury played Laurence Harvey’s mother, despite being only three years older than him.
It’s done with men as well. On the TV show Blue Bloods, Len Cariou (80) plays Tom Selleck’s (75) father.
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People are spoiled by the high quality of straight sci-fi/fantasy/comic adaptations today. They don’t remember when Captain America fought the Red Skull who did not actually look like a Red Skull. The don’t remember when Edgar Allen Poe’s the Raven had nothing inspired by Poe, and was instead about wizards.
The Lynch Dune movie tried (painfully) to translate the actions in the book onto the screen, while also trying to convey the real meat of the story (the thinking, not the actions) into voice-overs. It was pretty poor as anything but a costuming/puppeteering spectacle, but it was still better than most genre movies fans could compare it to.
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I remember walking into the lobby (after the movie was over), turning to a stranger, and saying, “Well, that was terrible.”
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Well, at the very least, the movie is obviously going to look great.
And I like what Villeneuve says about Skarsgard as the Baron: “thinking, thinking, thinking…”
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But Sally Field had to play Forrest Gump’s mom over a longer range, beginning when Forrest was a little boy. So it probably made more sense to cast a younger actress and use makeup to look older later on.
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