Villeneuve's Dune

[levzloi]

44 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

From the opening on Caladan in the 1984 movie, Gurney Hallack and Paul dueled; Gurney told Paul "Good...the slow blade penetrates the shield" (1:46):

 

As long as you remember that the weirding way blasters we’re totally made up for that movie.  🤔

[pengbuzz]

1 hour ago, levzloi said:

As long as you remember that the weirding way blasters we’re totally made up for that movie.  🤔

Heck...that movie beats out TF:TLK!!! lol

[levzloi]

31 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Heck...that movie beats out TF:TLK!!! lol

it's not 100% awful, it has a lot of redeeming features, but the constant voiceovers were a poor choice, and the deviations in the weirding way were really stupid.  If you feel like watching it one last time, check out the spicedivers edit on youtube.  He took the theatrical release, the extended edition, TV version, and deleted scenes, and edited them together in the most logical way possible.  Sill not a great movie, but not 100% awful like I said, and I love it for nostalgia as well. 

[pengbuzz]

8 hours ago, levzloi said:

it's not 100% awful, it has a lot of redeeming features, but the constant voiceovers were a poor choice, and the deviations in the weirding way were really stupid.  If you feel like watching it one last time, check out the spicedivers edit on youtube.  He took the theatrical release, the extended edition, TV version, and deleted scenes, and edited them together in the most logical way possible.  Sill not a great movie, but not 100% awful like I said, and I love it for nostalgia as well. 

As a matter of fact, I was just watching the Spicediver's Edit last night. I like how he combined all of them into the final result, and I agree about the voiceovers; if you have to keep explaining to the audience what's going on, then you're not filming the story correctly.

As for the "weirding way"; I never really cared for the concept as a whole, so it didn't make much difference to me. But I do agree that turning it into hand-held blasters was a mistake. It makes it to where anyone could use it, and reduces it to just another weapon someone could grab in a fight.

 

For folks wanting to know what the "Spicediver Edit" is, here ya go:

 

[electric indigo]

While the 84 movie has some issues, it still delivered on the visual side IMO. The Baron's introduction and the Navigator scene freaked me out, and the costumes and art direction were pretty unique back then.

[tekering]

33 minutes ago, electric indigo said:

While the 84 movie has some issues, it still delivered on the visual side IMO.

I recently revisited the Dune miniseries from 2000, which expands the story to four and-a-half hours and relies heavily on CGI... yet still felt much more claustrophobic and constrained visually, lacking much of the scope and spectacle of Lynch's film.  Nonetheless, I was amazed at how faithful both versions adapt the book (warts and all). 

If the trailers are any indication, Villeneuve's film will have an even greater scale to the visuals, but is likely to veer further from fidelity to the source material; in fact, there's more new dialogue present in the trailers alone than previous film versions contained in their entirety! 😅

[Podtastic]

7 hours ago, tekering said:

Nonetheless, I was amazed at how faithful both versions adapt the book (warts and all). 

I noticed that too.

My problem is I couldnt get past Lynch's perverted and disgusting floating fat man. No. Just no.

The book had more class.

The one thing in the film that did intrigue me was the Sardukar. Why did one appear to die when his faceplate was breached? Were they breathing a different gas in those suits? Was that part of acclimatising to the horrifically brutal conditions on Selusa Secundas?

And if they were meant to be disguised Harkonnens why were their uniforms the same at the final battle?

[Big s]

After the talk of how most movie sites are calling The Suicide Squad a financial failure, I’m becoming increasingly worried about the prospect of sequels for this film. I hope this one is a good version of the story and if so really hope it does well, but the free option seems to be hurting the wb movies.

[azrael]

20 hours ago, Big s said:

After the talk of how most movie sites are calling The Suicide Squad a financial failure, I’m becoming increasingly worried about the prospect of sequels for this film. I hope this one is a good version of the story and if so really hope it does well, but the free option seems to be hurting the wb movies.

I worry lots of movies may end up as "failures" since they may have low ticket sales vs streaming. At least until 2023 (2021 is turning into a write-off, any recovery will be slow in 2022).

[CoryHolmes]

On 8/11/2021 at 5:58 PM, levzloi said:

 but the constant voiceovers were a poor choice, and the deviations in the weirding way were really stupid.

The voiceovers were stupid, but a necessary stupid.  There's so much thinking and planning and plots and wheels within wheels that there was no way to get it across without having characters monologue their meanings at each other; and that looks just as stupid.

The weirding way blasters I can accept.  I think the early 80s western audiences weren't quite ready for a mystical martial art, and with the success of Star Wars, a blaster of some sort would be absolutely familiar to get the gist across to the audience.  Plus it lead to one of my favourite lines of all time:

 

 

[tekering]

10 hours ago, CoryHolmes said:

The voiceovers were stupid, but a necessary stupid.  There's so much thinking and planning and plots and wheels within wheels that there was no way to get it across without having characters monologue their meanings at each other; and that looks just as stupid.

Trying to tell the story of Dune in under three hours was stupid.

10 hours ago, CoryHolmes said:

Plus it lead to one of my favourite lines of all time

It's my favorite scene, next to the opening sequence with the Guild Navigator; both, significantly, not from the book.

I think Lynch's biggest problem was trying to adapt the novel too closely, incorporating too many secondary characters that served no purpose in his film (Princess Irulan, Thufir Hawatt, Duncan Idaho, the Shadout Mapes, etc).  Hew too closely to the text, and you end up with dreck like that SciFi Channel miniseries...

Like, I didn't like what Lynch did with the Harkonnens, but at least it was interesting, you know?

I have high hopes for Villeneuve's film, if only because it's just the first half of the novel.  The sequel (if it even gets made) will likely be weaker, simply owing to the nature of the story.

[technoblue]

Eh, say what you want about the multipart SciFi miniseries. I mean, the effects were sometimes charmingly low budget like classic Doctor Who and other times off putting, but that team did forward the story past the war for Arrakis and Paul’s rise to power. That gives SciFi’s effort true cred, in my opinion. 

Lynch’s version wasn’t a very good adaptation. As much as I respect him for his work in other projects like Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, and Twin Peaks, his version of Dune was too subversive for its own good and lends to this mythology that Herbert’s series of novels cannot be translated to the big screen. Spoilers for Lynch’s version:

Spoiler

The ending where Paul brings rain to Arrakis, destroying the galactic economy, and halting all space travel was nonsense all on its own. But then, if you remember the worm/water connection, how the Bene Gesserit use the water of life to increase their numbers and forward their prophecies, that particular ending makes even less sense. 

Villeneuve’s film has some tough hurdles to overcome. It has to show that Herbert’s novels can be entertaining and can attract modern-day audiences when many people are reticent to go out and about. If it does well, I’m hoping that we will see some of Frank Herbert’s later plot points realized on the big screen. There is so much more to Herbert’s story than this snapshot we get of Paul Atreidis in the first book.

Really, Herbert created a cautionary tale. Dune, without the later novels is unfinished in that context.

Edited August 15, 2021 by technoblue

[azrael]

8 hours ago, technoblue said:

Villeneuve’s film has some tough hurdles to overcome. It has to show that Herbert’s novels can be entertaining and can attract modern-day audiences when many people are reticent to go out and about. If it does well, I’m hoping that we will see some of Frank Herbert’s later plot points realized on the big screen. There is so much more to Herbert’s story than this snapshot we get of Paul Atreidis in the first book.

Really, Herbert created a cautionary tale. Dune, without the later novels is unfinished in that context.

That is a problem with the Dune-series. Things happen that end up taking the next novel or the next next novel to come to fruition. And it's hard to convey that, in what may be, a standalone. Syfy's version was able to convey that because they had more time (Syfy has more than double the run time of Lynch's version) and were able to bring Dune Messiah  and Children of Dune to screen (and there was still more). Dune needs time, both within the fiction and for the audience, to tell its story. Unfortunately, it may not have it.

[pengbuzz]

5 minutes ago, azrael said:

That is a problem with the Dune-series. Things happen that end up taking the next novel or the next next novel to come to fruition. And it's hard to convey that, in what may be, a standalone. Syfy's version was able to convey that because they had more time (Syfy has more than double the run time of Lynch's version) and were able to bring Dune Messiah  and Children of Dune to screen (and there was still more). Dune needs time, both within the fiction and for the audience, to tell its story. Unfortunately, it may not have it.

I think perhaps then that the best way to do Dune is as a regular series on something like Netflix, where they can do all the episodes and drop them "as a book". Each season could be a "book" then, and hopefully convey the grandeur of the saga, while giving each the time it needs to work.

Edited August 15, 2021 by pengbuzz

[Big s]

I’d watch a full series 

[505thAirborne]

What can I say, the Drinker is entertaining. 

[sqidd]

21 hours ago, 505thAirborne said:

What can I say, the Drinker is entertaining. 

Beat me to it.

[505thAirborne]

On 8/19/2021 at 2:54 PM, sqidd said:

Beat me to it.

 

Now I'm waiting for Drinker to do an Eternals trailer 2 review... that'll be a popcorn/whiskey moment. 

[technoblue]

Hm. Villeneuve wants to do a trilogy that spans from Dune to Dune Messiah. That could be very interesting to see. In recent interviews, he seems confident that he will finish the two-part Dune entry, at least.  

https://www.darkhorizons.com/denis-villeneuve-teases-a-dune-trilogy/

And yeah, for the moment, that’s good enough for me.

Edited August 23, 2021 by technoblue

[Dynaman]

They always sound confident till the box office receipts come in.  I'm hoping he does get the chance to do the second two though.

[Bolt]

Let's just get through Dune and see what happens.

Edited August 24, 2021 by Bolt

[pengbuzz]

On 8/23/2021 at 8:37 PM, Bolt said:

Let's just get through Dune and see what happens.

Anakin can't...

[renegadeleader1]

This film reeks of the Golden Compass situation. That film spent it's entire run building up to something it never paid off ending on a cliff hanger and promising everything would be answered in a sequel that never came due to it's failure at the box office. At least we got the His Dark Materials series out of it.

 

That might be Dune's best bet, ending up as a big budget series on HBO or Showtime ala Game Of Thrones.

[azrael]

Let's just get through Dune before we get to Dune Messiah. If this was any other year I probably wouldn't worry but given our current pandemic stats...

 

[Big s]

I wouldn’t mind if the movie were a jumping off point for a high budget hbo series, but not as much for a reboot of a film that has yet to be released that more than likely will be considered a blockbuster failure due to same day free streaming.

[TangledThorns]

Hmmm...

IGN gave it a 7.

https://www.ign.com/articles/dune-review

 

[azrael]

This movie ends with the start of the Freman jihad, yes?

[levzloi]

3 hours ago, azrael said:

This movie ends with the start of the Freman jihad, yes?

Somewhere around there I would guess, haven’t heard for certain. 

[JetJockey]

People seem to love Dune. I watched the original movie once and can't remember it that much. I do like the director of this one. I see Dune is on my cable box this month. Perhaps I'll watch the original again.

[azrael]

The Twitter-verse seems to like it. Critics seem to have a slightly muted response so far.

[pengbuzz]

Think I'll go watch the original Dune...

 

*sits down on beach for 3 hours and stares intently at the sand*

[Bolt]

The Guardian gave it 5 stars..I'll form my own opinion , when I watch it. Read all the books and still loved David's version when it came out. Looking forward to this new interpretation.

8 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Think I'll go watch the original Dune...

 

*sits down on beach for 3 hours and stares intently at the sand*

🤣

Edited September 4, 2021 by Bolt

[renegadeleader1]

11 hours ago, azrael said:

This movie ends with the start of the Freman jihad, yes?

 

7 hours ago, levzloi said:

Somewhere around there I would guess, haven’t heard for certain. 

The Fremen jihad is something that isn't even depicted in the novels, and we only see the repercussions and effects of it in the the plot of the follow up to the first book Dune Messiah.

 

If any of it is depicted in this film outside of a few spice induced visions then this film will be even more condensed than what even David Lynch's version was. Either that or this film is deviating even more wildly than Lynch's from the original plot.

[jenius]

My guess: Zendaya said she filmed for like four days so the movie must end with him doing something that establishes himself as the leader of the Fremen but before they strike back at the Harkonnen/emperor. The next movie would be him older, with a newborn, striking back and ending with him becoming emperor. 

This is one of those things I got into later in life, after lots of people told me "Oh the Dune series is so great!" Honestly, I found it mediocre, completely bogged down by prophesy and messianic meanderings. If I'm right about where the movie splits, it will be kind of funny because the book is such a slow burn up until it gets to that point and what I'm guessing is a second movie seems to go by in a flash when you finally get to those events. 

This seems like a really dicey time to release this film. It's easy to view the story as racist, some elements as homophobic, and the primary strength of women is sex, weaponizing sex, and making the right babies... some elements may not have aged so well. I'm definitely going to see it in the theaters to see how they handled all the plodding story points and those sticky points above and hopefully get wowed by some visuals. 

[Dynaman]

Dune is a product of it's drug culture (and counter culture) time.  I found it middling at best but a decent read.