I am in the ranks of those who loved Lynch’s Dune, also the video games. I really liked the whispering voiceovers, as the book has a metric fuckload of internal dialogue and that is really really difficult to translate into the silver screen…
Jodorowsky’s Dune would have being something amazing but even more departed from the book that Lynch’s version because of his pre-production schedule:
-Discard book.
-Do drugs.
-(…)
-PROFIT?
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune could be something very interesting to see. Albeit a little too aseptic, I liked Blade Runner 2: Running Harder, and I consider Arrival magnificent.
I feel like there are some relevant parallels between the adaptations : Dune(Book/Herbert) & Dune(Movie/Lynch) with Do Androids Dream … (Book/PKD) & Blade Runner Film/Scott). In each case the film is as much an “inspired by…” type of reaction to the literary work as it is an attempt at a faithful re-telling of the specific story. (Which is - perhaps appropriate with works where the special contours of the medium are so particular).
Have always thought the strong (often negative) and certainly mixed reactions around Dune(Movie) might have been a function of whether or not one had prior familiarity with the books. It seems like it might be rather incoherent without them as a background - (although maybe Lynch didn’t let that bother him much).
Blade Runner OTOH doesn’t require the book to hold it’s own (as though it’s a different story set in the same world)- and yet it retains much more consistency (and certain elements which remain mysteries (without flaw), in the film are well explored in the book).
Agreed - absolutely wonderful cinematography, design, pacing - all of it, I feel like Villeneuve is one of the few new directors applying a visionary and artistic understanding to the digital tools that are to available to filmmakers now, as opposed to simply showing-off creating eye-candy. My only beef with each of them is that they wrapped up a bit too quickly and tidily in the final few minutes. (It almost has the signature of some studio pressure of the type : “it absolutely positively can’t be longer that 2.x hrs”. In which case - if true - with any luck we’ll have some good directors cuts to look forward to down the road).
I loved the film as a kid born in 80, It was amazing did not play the game till after the film, the film has every thing going for it if you like the 80’s, its only 80’s haters who dont like it, or posh film types who want their films to be all American beauty and make no sense in their kind of why who can not cope with films that dont make sense to films types but do to ordinary people.
Dune was a bad movie? You deserve to live out the rest of your life in a pain amplifier. It was an excellent movie; fantastic design, great music. Helped if you’d read the book. Never played any of the games.
Everyone here seems to have seen a different Dune film, or that’s how it feels.
Yet another take won’t hurt. Dune, the book, was one of a very few books I could not be bothered to finish. You have to want to believe the story’s premise. Dune had interstellar travel for a substance you could only get on one planet, which lost my sympathy with the book. Then there was the complicated alliances between the houses that controlled the traffic to Dune, with everyone stabbing everyone else’s backs, which was more detail than I needed. The Lynch film crashed through all that - you didn’t know what was going on, but Paul Atreides who we were following didn’t know what was going on either, and there was some weirding stuff which I didn’t understand either, but by that point the sand worms had appeared, and I was hooked. Oh yes, it was a flawed film, but it was also very fine.
Think of 2001 the book: full of lots of technical details about space flight - accurate, but fussy. Remember the length instructions on using the zero-g toilet? That was in the book in full - it is just a block of text on the back of the door in the film, but it is the only bit of the film where the book is allowed to peep through. For the rest of 2001 the film, where all this was just the most magnificent backdrop. Not saying that Dune was 2001, because it wasn’t, but there are parallels for me.
I guess if Lynch would have been allowed to make it into a trilogy, or at least two movies, it would have been great beyond imagination. But this one film crammed with informations, duh… Just looked like a lecture : each voice-over sounded like a teacher emphasizing some important points.
This. Even if you ignore the question of how they got there in the first place, why wasn’t the planet under direct and permanent imperial control? Why use your single most valuable possession as a pawn in political intrigues?
Herbert’s portrayal of the “Fremen” (the clue’s in the name) owes much to TE Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger’s enthusiastic portrayals of the Bedouin of Arabia’s Empty Quarter. Fremen culture is described in words liberally cribbed from Arabic. They go on “razzia” raids, wear “aba” and “bourka” robes, fear a devil called “Shaitan” and so on. They are tough, proud and relatively egalitarian. The harshness of their environment has given them an ethic of fellowship and mutual aid.
Am I the only one who thought the Lynch Dune movie was actually better than the book?
I fear for incorporating aspects to make the film ‘relevant’. The books were orientalist as fuck, and the rest of the series went to increasingly fascist places.
I think the answer there is supposed to be that if the Emperor had tried to take direct control over Arrakis, the nobles would have stopped their feuding and united long enough to overthrow the emperor (with the support of the guild who would have embargoed the emperor and prevented his ships moving anywhere other than by the previous dangerous/ illegal methods (guessing or using non-human computers or going really, really slowly)).
If everyone is potentially able to be awarded the massive spice revenues, everyone is interested in ensuring that no-one gets permanent control.
In book, the guild are the ones who actually decide the outcome of the struggle between Paul and the Emperor because they support Paul (thereby allowing direct Imperial control of the spice) when they realise he knows how to destroy spice and that he’s prepared to do it.
Except for that, the guild would have continued to support the status quo which nicely allowed the Navigators to get on with whatever Navigators do when not actually navigating, keeps their supply of spice flowing and ensured that no-one got overall control of the spice.
Uh oh. A movie. There’s so much to it that it risks repeating the error of the first movie. I finally sat through it a week or two back, and I had to laugh.
If you hadn’t read the book, you’d have no idea what was going on. Unless you were totally spaced on acid, in which case, your imagination would fill the gaps.
How they got there in the first place is because interstellar travel (and artificial gravity) is possible through the Holtzman field generator. The field is what actually folds space. However, travel is risky for vague reasons. A lot of pre-spice ships disappeared. The spice gives Navigators precognition so that they can maneuver the ship while in transit. I guess they feel peril ahead, so they give the trajectory a little tweak. They ensure that the trip is virtually risk-free.
The reason the Emperor doesn’t personally control Arakkis is because he lacks the actual ability to do so. He’s more of a U.N. figurehead, in that the various families and worlds loan him their armies, carry out his orders and use him to influence others in turn.
In fairness to @geoduck; Spice’s spec sheet is long enough that petroleum is a better fit for many of it’s stated properties. Huffing it won’t make you a mentat; but it is probably a better fit for “he who controls the X controls the universe”.
That said, I still chose it over oil because Afghanistan does the “logistically hostile location where the durable and pious locals have a tendency to turn attempts at proxy war into empire-crippling defeats; also good drugs” thing so well.
I certainly agree that it would be wonderful to see a Dune movie with the Schoenherr look – moody, austere, and unquestionably taking place in the far future. Given what I’ve seen of Villeneuve’s work so far, I can easily see him orbiting in that general vicinity.
Yep. Otherwise it would be unremarkable. Such feudal setups worked both ways: The most important lords elected the king/emperor and he in turned mediated between them and and others. The Holy Roman Empire of German nation operated on this for 400 years or so and the principle of this – have both local and national powers with separate chains of command – made it into current Germany, too.
If memory serves, it is stated that the Sardaukar, soldier fanatics of the Padisha Emperor, are supposed to be roughly the equals of the levies of the various Landstrad houses if they actually got their act together and made a United push; but since nobody is going to get everyone to cooperate with them on a “spill blood and treasure to make me emperor!” platform, House Corrino is largely free of any overt attempts to challenge them; but also can’t do anything that would freak out the great houses too much(especially when the family atomics come into play; they probably don’t want additional hyper-brutal nuclear death worlds, one is enough of those); like just taking out the Atredies or Harkonnen directly, rather than resorting to the whole “grant them a super valuable fief and then aid their enemies” Gambit that more or less makes the plot happen.
None of this is to say that you shouldn’t being a Holtzman effect suspensor to help keep your disbelief off the ground: why does Dune, where kinetic shields are largely unavailable and impractical (only thing that pisses off sandworms more than having rhythm), produce locals that are apparently absurdly good at stabbing things compared to the rest of the Galaxy’s shield-users, rather than encouraging projectile weapon proficiency? Why are shields still viable given that exposure to lagun fire causes the user to blow up horribly(the user of the lasgun as well; but the universe has drones and an abundance of heavily conditioned humans for that job), this is particularly galling when uses like shielding an entire palace are described: keeps artillery away; buy would also imply that anyone who can stash a lasgun with a timed trigger within line of sight could level the whole thing with a single shot of small arms fire… It’s also curious that, even with shields handwaving bullets away, that the books put so much faith in elite infantry produced by brutal environments: no body seems to have any scruples about using chemical weapons, which work through shields(albeit with somewhat slowed diffusion, as saves the Baron Harkonnen); and a wide variety of vehicle options for gassing the place exist, never mind what sort of cool microbes the Tleilaxu can probably cook up for you.
Come for the political intrigue and sandworms; though.
They REALLY needed a “b team” to go out to the desert and shot some footage of extras in stillsuits walking around in wide open spaces to be edited in with the actors walking around in a sand filled sound stage.
