I'll watch that tomorrow... my overall take on that scene was that it hit harder on the page.
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It does since there's a lot more depth and context in the books and the books can spend pages and pages inside someone's mind where the movies can't. And a huge portion of the Dune saga is internal.
Until we have a media where we can project thoughts and emotions and images directly into the brain no medium can do better justice to the story than books; the movies will always be a shadow.
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Yeah. I think that's why they needed to spend more time with the characters before #### hits the fan.
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By the end of the movie, I was thinking this whole thing would work better as a series. Give more space for everything. It would be an even bigger gamble financially, though.
I read the book over 20 years ago, so don't remember much of the finer details. I didn't really feel lost though. I liked that it wasn't overloaded with detail, and that each scene really didn't rushed. You got what you needed out of them.
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There actually was a BBC miniseries, but the entire run time was only about 5 hours which this will probably come close to.
I'm actually very interested in what the director's cut looks like. Did we just watch it, or is there an additional 20+ minutes available that balance out the pacing? EDIT: Apparently there is a bunch of additional material but there are no plans to make any other cut of the movie available according to Villeneuve. I wouldn't be shocked if that changes down the road a few years, though.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Last edited by CorsiHockeyLeague; 10-25-2021 at 09:39 AM.
I didn’t find it hard to follow (unlike the lynch version) and I suspect with the success of GOT with non-readers it is more acceptable to leave mysteries open. People can either read the book or I imagine several YouTube’s will be doing breakdowns on things.
I agree, this should be done in a series. I've read the books but even a few build up episodes would make it so much easier for the non-readers to understand the story. I love everything Dune.
Still enjoyed the movie though I can understand how some didn't.
I feel like this movie has something to say, or it had something to say, buried deep within the spectacle and grimness.
For a movie built around a famous book, the characters themselves feel quite underwritten.
Never getting to see the emperor, we don’t know why he has beef with House Atreides - seems like an awful lot of rigmarole to go through just to immediately try and knock them off.
Paul and his mom can command people to do whatever they want, which seems like one of the most useful superpowers you could possibly have - they just don’t use it, except for the one time they really need to. Seems like you want at least try it before you engage in that knife fight, or at least before you’re forced to kill the dude.
I think that’s my fundamental issue with the movie - two and half hours, and all Paul learns to do is kill someone with a knife.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but from a character perspective, does he learn anything else?
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Never getting to see the emperor, we don’t know why he has beef with House Atreides - seems like an awful lot of rigmarole to go through just to immediately try and knock them off.
The emperor basically killed two birds with one stone. Atreides was getting too powerful politically, as was mentioned in the early going, while Harkonnen was getting too rich from the spice trade. Well, he managed to kill off basically the entirety of Atreides while causing Harkonnen to have to spend enormous sums of money in carrying out their plan (you heard Baron Harkonnen say to Rabban when he was in his, er, bath, that he has no idea what the whole enterprise cost him).
Pretty shrewd move on the whole, if you can get away with it. But as Paul tells Kynes later on in the movie, it depends on the Great Houses letting it pass without incident - if they decide that this sort of thing can't be allowed, they could band together and remove the Emperor, so it's a risky play.
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Please correct me if I’m wrong, but from a character perspective, does he learn anything else?
Yes. Quite a lot, largely due to the visions. If you can see a bunch of future possibilities for yourself, you basically age very quickly because in some ways you already "are" your future self, if you're seeing through your future self's eyes. You can see it in the scene in the tent where he realizes what he could become, the line about a thousand voices shouting his name and how she's made him into a sort of freak. After that his whole demeanour changes and he basically starts telling her what to do rather than the opposite - he becomes more in charge as the movie goes along. But it's pretty subtle so I don't blame people who haven't read the book and don't appreciate the change in his demeanour.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Last edited by CorsiHockeyLeague; 10-25-2021 at 05:20 PM.
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For some reason I'm reminded of Lawrence of Arabia.
Intentional.
Denis Villeneuve has said that Lawrence of Arabia changed his life when he watched it when he was 19 and that the journey of Paul in joining another culture is paralleled with Lawrence of Arabia.
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I haven't read the books, and watched the movie last night. There were moments where I thought the scenes were cool and well set and well created, but overall the story lacked originality. It's everything we've seen with superhero movies, plot wise, where the "evil" guy wants power at any cost, and they play that character visibly. Casting wise, Jason Mamoa seemed like he was reading lines and played a character you know was going to die in the way he did, because again, we've seen this before 100 times over. Anyway, aside from the set and visuals, I wasn't impressed with the story or the characters.
The originality comment is interesting as Dune was original in the 60s but has been copied to the point where the chosen one and superhero tropes and everything in much of sci fi (like Star Wars) we see were actually inspired in a large part by Dune.
As far as the villain, it's really more of Game of Thrones political grab by the Imperium and one House to play off the others. The Baron and Harkonens are actually incredibly sanitized and tame in this adaptation. They are truly vile in the books.
What the movie's fault was all this runtime devoted to visuals but failed to build up the characters and relationships. Duncan and Gurney are both just warriors and you barely see their relationship and duty to the Duke and his son. You don't see Gurney as the Bard. You barely see any interaction with Thufir, mentats and Paul's upbringing as one is deleted completely.
Spoiler!
I fear the lack of early characterization and relationships will lead to less payoff when Gurney returns. It won't have the same feeling of filial love when Patrick Stewart found Paul in the desert in the 1984 film. Same when Duncan Idaho comes back as a Ghoula
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I am sad to say this but I really despise Villeneuve's style. He's a great auteur and I can see that but his style simply does not fit with my personal tastes.
All his movies look exactly the same with the same cold and sterile blandness. I would almost say he was inspired by the brutalism of 1970s Montreal architecture. Whether it's Arrival or BR2049 or Dune, everything is sanitized, simplified, brutalist, clean. Nothing looks lived in. It just looks like stone washed concrete. The ships are the simplified round pods of arrival turned on the side. The Atreidies Starships look like concrete sandcrawlers. He managed to even make mentats and Harkonen look clean when they should be mutated by chemicals, spice, and the industrial pollution of their worlds. Everybody just wears grey. There's very little flourish.
Dune is a story of great houses with thousands of years of history and pomp and extravagance. The 1984 Lynch film actually captured some of this Rococo in the Imperial court and in the spacecraft. For example, the docking port of the Guild Heighliner with it's architectural flourish. I'm not saying everything should look like Warhammer 40K but there should be some feeling of millenia of decadence and decay to things.
Giedi Prime and the Harkonen lack the industrial, polluted, grotesque look to them. Arrakis is just more barren concrete that looked just the same as the port on Caledon. In fact there was nothing unique about Caledonian architecture at all aside from looking like it was in the Scottish Highlands. Everything there was just brutalist concrete as well. There isn't the desert mosaic HR Giger uniqueness to the alien world or stillsuits.
The costumes were all boring, everybody is just wearing your standard modern day superhero armor in various shades of grey. The one future dream of the Jihad had everybody in gold Ironman armor. There are hardly any touches of military tradition or decoration. The Sardaukar just look like astronauts (why are they even in this anyway? they shouldn't show up at this point or the Landstraat would learn of Imperial meddling).
Everything is just clean and desolate and I would be ok if this was a stylistic choice but the fact that every one of his movies looks like this just makes me unhappy with his films as they are not compatible with my perspective on these universes. I came away from BR2049 incredibly disappointed that it didn't feel lived in like the first one and felt just as cold and sterile as does Dune and Arrival.
I still enjoyed the film but his style is just not for me. Everything looks like the Montreal Metro and the 1976 Olympics.
Last edited by Hack&Lube; 10-26-2021 at 11:34 AM.
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