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Old 10-27-2021, 10:10 AM   #87
Hack&Lube
Atomic Nerd
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Calgary
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Quote:
Originally Posted by oldschoolcalgary View Post
Even Paul Krugman took the time to praise the movie in a column today https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/o...on-series.html
Interesting his take on the Foundation TV series, it can probably go into the Foundation thread:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Krugman
So how does the Apple TV series turn this into a visually compelling tale? It doesn’t. What it does instead is remake “Star Wars” under another name. There are indispensable heroes, mystical powers, even a Death Star. These aren’t necessarily bad things to include in a TV series, but they’re completely antithetical to the spirit of Asimov’s writing. Pretending that this series has anything to do with the “Foundation” novels is fraudulent marketing, and I’ve stopped watching.

So why was the 1984 film a disaster? Because the director — yes, David Lynch — either didn’t grasp the subtlety and richness or decided that audiences couldn’t handle it. That is, he did to “Dune” what Apple TV has done to “Foundation.” For example, in the book there’s the “weirding way of battle,” which is about using psychology and deception to overcome foes; in Lynch’s film this was replaced with some kind of gadget.

The great thing about Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part I” is that he respects the audience enough to retain the book’s spirit. He trimmed the narrative to reduce it to filmable size — and even so, his two and a half hours cover only the first half of the book — but he didn’t dumb it down. Instead, he relies on spectacle and spine-tingling action to hold our attention despite the density of the story. In so doing he made a film worthy of the source material.
Despite my qualms with the art/design choices of Dune 2021, I wholeheartedly say we are fortunate to get a movie that lives up to a lot of the original source material here and it didn't get Star Wars'd which is what the producers wanted in Dune 1984.
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