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Well. Thanks for replying to me to let me know?
Settle down buddy. I said “it seems a little unfair”.
I’d appreciate it if you stop trying to divine my motives and just address my comment - that’s what this section is for after all.
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The thing about Dune, that probably makes it essentially unfilmable, is that it Herbert’s ambivalence is baked right into it, and subtlety is not a film in general, and Hollywood’s in particular, strong suit.
The Fremen for example, are not really noble savages; they are incredibly, horrifically violent, and multiple characters reflect on this. The women are violent (throwing your baby onto the knives of the Saudaker to open a gap in their wedge?), the kids are violent, they all kill people including each other at the drop of a hat (they don’t exactly hold elections for leadership roles). This proves to be a useful trait for the heroes to take advantage of, but they use it knowingly and with repeated references to the self-loathing involved in doing so.
The only really good person in the book is the scientist Liet-Kynes (and of course he gets dispatched pretty quickly)-- and he is pretty much the ONLY scientist in the whole “science-fiction” series (lotsa techies, but science is pretty explicitly suppressed in that universe). He tries to protect his people, is all about ecology and balance, and his greatest nightmare is that his people will fall under the spell of a messiah, which is exactly what happens. (Ultimately, when Paul/Leto does “make the desert bloom” later in the series, its is essentially an ecological catastrophe.)
Herbert loved playing utopia/dystopia games (see Hellstrom’s Hive or Santaroga Barrier); ambiguity/ambivalence about and active subversion of what we would today call tropes is all over his work-- to a degree he inverted almost everything.
I simply do not see how that level of subtlety and self-reflection could be incorporated in a Hollywood movie. About the only guy I could see doing it would be Verhoeven, not Villeneuve, except Verhoeven got no subtlety at ALL.
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Be careful about eugenics, it can bite you in the ass.
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I actually have higher hopes for Villeneuve, due to his signature style. Long, graceful shots which make the environment feel like a real place. A lot of details that appear in the second or third watching. By respecting that the audience may not want to focus on the one thing you want them to see, so get the details on the edge of the camera view right. Leave room for the audience to make their own interpretation.
This is what I like about his work: it lets me linger as well. It lets me contemplate instead of hammering on just one message.
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That was what put me off in the first book. It was subverting expectations, but not, I felt, in an entertaining way.
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I suffered through both Thomas Covenant trilogies, I admit it. It’s the sort of book series that appeals to a teenage boy with pretensions of maturity, a sort of Narnia for grownups… or rather what a boy imagines grownups to be like. But hey, it wasn’t all bad, and in the end it did have a message of no matter how bad you fuck things up, wallowing in self-pity ain’t gonna help.
I hazarded a re-read, recently. It hasn’t aged well.
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Great, now I’m imagining Sting (in Speedo of course) and Kile MacLachlan in a dance-off for Arrakis.
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With musical accompaniment by the Spice Girls to round things off?
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Depends, is it make-out-time 2 become 1 Spice Girls or sassy Who do you think you are Spice Girls?
Who am I kidding, it’s both isn’t it?
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Nostalgia bomb. I played the hell of this song in the way back. I think I even found an excuse to use it in a school presentation, but what it was I have no idea now. Probably something about new media or VR. 
How about Spice Up Your Life?
It’s Eclipse, not Shine on You Crazy Diamond. And Hans Zimmer did the new arrangement…
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