A thread about the Denis Villeneuve-helmed reboot of DUNE

The year's most OK movie. I'm not enamored with Villeneuve; there's a lack of spontaneity to his compositions I can't get over, like he's photographing a space calendar.

otoh I wasn't bored, which given this project's history is big shit.

i love how good he is at HUGE BUILDINGS in space

his movies always have good scale & things feel like real places you could go to but also otherworldly

OK so the big question: Is the experience of seeing this on the big screen sufficiently bedazzling to justify the $80-plus it will cost for our whole family to go (probably more like $100 once you factor in popcorn etc), or should we content ourselves with watching on our 55-inch TV at home for free? ("Free" meaning we already pay for HBO Max.)

I'm leaning toward couch viewing but am open to persuasion.

The biggest plus for me was the scale and sound. Otherwise .... $80 is pretty steep. And the movie is pretty slow, so couch could be appealing.

is it really that upsetting

Yes.

i love how good he is at HUGE BUILDINGS in space

his movies always have good scale & things feel like real places you could go to but also otherworldly

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Sunday, October 24, 2021 9:36 AM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

this is the movie that confirmed for me: villanueve good (i adore blade runner 2049)

i am genuinely glad i saw this in a theater

"playing a different corpulent bad guy in a world where there is no Brando or Apocalypse Now"

no evidence of this, dune in set in the year 10,191 i.e. 8212 years after brando's performance in apocalypse now, so baron harkonnen could easily have watched it. he seems like a guy who'd watch old movies abt monstrous ppl like himself (bald)

his movies always have good scale & things feel like real places you could go to but also otherworldly

this is otm and what I took away from his Jake double movie.

I watched on TV and now very much want to see in a theater

Some of the huge city sets in this reminded me of the first blade runner. Do any of you know how much he uses models and miniatures versus CGI?

Did a first viewing in theater and it was well worth it

As is frequently the case, my daughter and I sometimes struggled to hear the dialogue over the noise, but we don't know if that's the theater, the mix, the fact that we were struggled to understand terms we didn't know ...

yeah this is definitely a movie to see on the biggest screen possible, if just to be overwhelmed by the experience etc

otoh I wasn't bored, which given this project's history is big shit.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, October 24, 2021 12:33 PM (fifty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

feel like this was notably less boring and dumb than the rest of his movies

i watched on computer and i wish i had seen it on the big screen baby going to the movies is nice

“Stop initiating a holy war” ummmm I’m literally neurodivergent and a minor…lol pic.twitter.com/wtvo8fYw8H

— 🐈‍⬛Autumn Leaves & Bloody Trees🐈‍⬛ (@mayzierita) October 23, 2021

Glad I saw this at home for the subtitles

how did it render "gom jabbar"?

If I haven’t read the book – but keep meaning to! - would you consider it okay to see the film, given that it’s only half the story? Like, if I enjoyed the movie, I could pick up the book and (reading from the start) still have a lot of new stuff to discover. I’ve gotten about 100 pages in, on a previous read – enjoyed it but didn’t have the resources for such a long book at the time.

it's definitely ok by me

I watched this last night (SOBER) and thought it was really great. The trailers made me think it was gunna be overly slow and portentous, and well yeah, it was slow and portentous but entirely appropriately. Perfect director choice for the material. Great cast doing the best work of their career, Momoa's general presence used perfectly, OI found his natural zone, Chalamet is obviously a very pretty young man but could be quite wan, oh yeah here's him leaning into that and the character overcomes it and ACTING along the way, no kidding he was great in his Emoting

I was planning to rewatch Lynch today but Football, could do it now but I have some other stuff planned, maybe tomorrow evening

Haven't read the book, haven't seen the Lynch film, and don't see many science-fiction films, so I have no idea what I thought I'd get out of this...I liked Arrival okay, so I guess that was the draw. Didn't work; I just sat there waiting for it end. (Knowing it was Part 1, and that the ending could come at any time, was a helpful carrot.) One thing I do tend to think on the rare occasion I see films like these is that having a sense of humour must be outlawed in the future.

having a sense of humour must be outlawed in the future

Seriously. Alien and Aliens are the last far-future SF movies in which I can remember characters laughing and joking with each other, and acting like co-workers or even people who met each other before that morning.

how many sandworms does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

can't help but think there was a scene between chalamet and momoa that delivered the exact thing you're complaining about it missing

"you're growing some muscle!"
"I am?"
"no"

That might have done the trick if either Chalamet or Momoa were capable of impersonating human beings on camera.

I enjoyed this, it conveniently ended pretty much where I stopped reading the book 4 years ago

btw im putting out a dunecore album under the name Beacon, it’s called spice in the tent

That might have done the trick if either Chalamet or Momoa were capable of impersonating human beings on camera.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Sunday, October 24, 2021 1:53 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

they both deliver really good performances in this movie

I remember that exchange, plus one or two other times someone said something intended to make someone else (or us) laugh...in a 150-minute film.

correct amount of jokes imo

xxpost agreed!

i dont like Momoa much usually but he was perfect for Duncan, or at least fitted how i pictured him

Which is the Herzog movie where the cast was supposedly hypnotized? "Heart of Glass"?

I mean, I'm not asking for Tootsie, I realize this is not that, but I'd be hard-pressed to think of a film that is not first and foremost a comedy that was hurt by the introduction of a little (or a lot of) humour: Rosemary's Baby, Taxi Driver, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc.

Like I said, I thought the movie was fine and glad I saw it, but one issue related to your issue is that it's hard to pinpoint (at least at this point in the story) just what is at stake and why we should be invested in it. It's a lot of portent over stuff that it barely delves into or elaborates, and while I assume that's coming, the seriousness admittedly doesn't entirely seem earned, imo.

uh the spice hello cmon

I didn't laugh much either but I figure the problem is Herbert and (maybe) Villeneuve, not the script or actors. And what laffs I got came from Josh Brolin's reprise of his McGruff the Crime Dog routine.

guys dune is serious business check out adam sandler if you want to laff

Cubans care about spices, so I get it. My supply of garlic powder and sal de aji dried up last week and I almost called my Harkonnen agent to get me more, whatever the price.

an indigenous population is being abused and exploited over a natural resource (the existence and mining of which also makes their land increasingly uninhabitable) and an emperor looking to control that resource forever sabotages one of the more powerful houses in duneciety and murders the shit out of... most of them? this is what i took from what was being presented to me on screen. seems like a serious story

well, yeah, but it's still a sci-fi in which there's an emperor and a princely heir with mysterious powers

but the humor or lack of it isn't why I judged it okay not great -- it's an awful lot of exposition building to a pretty good climax. And "okay not great" while setting up a future Dune is fine.

We haven't learned much about said indigenous people, except that there are a ton more of them than the baddies thought, right? And baddies, I don't know what they or the emperor want. Power? To rule? Are there other planets? I suppose so, right? And isn't the emperor already the emperor? So emperor ordered baddies off the planet to send in the goodies so that they can murder the goodies and ... send back the baddies? For that matter, we haven't really learned much about the good house either, have we? Except they are not the bad house, and their heir is magic/Jesus/white savior or whatever it always is.

But yeah, keeping in mind that it's setting up a future Dune, it's all fine, though I do wish this one were just a touch longer to build up just a bit more momentum.

Like, the new James Bond is even longer, and it's just James Bond doing James Bond stuff (I assume) for the 30th time.

one thinks there was too much exposition one thinks there was not enough, both are wrong, there was the perfect amount

I don't think it needed more exposition, I think it needed a little less dreamy slo-mo and a little more character development.