A thread about the Denis Villeneuve-helmed reboot of DUNE

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.

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...

Well, at least I got the overriding allegory/subtext. I didn't get a lot of the specifics, which I'll blame on not being familiar with the book.

I was led to believe Chalamet would wear a loin cloth. All I got were two shots of bed hair.

Basically it's a serious political film about colonialism, or it's Chalamet and some older beardy guys hanging about on some sand, either works for me tbh

should also be noted that as far as motivation or whatever corny pro-am version of understanding of movies were talking about the spice is described as the most valuable commodity in the universe, mightve this already but i really liked how the movie didnt flesh out the politics too much but the shape of them made sense looming in the background

Yeah that makes sense. The stakes are clear in the first three minutes.

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?

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, October 24, 2021 5:30 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

why would an emperor want to pit two powerful aristocratic clans against each other, idk maybe theyll tell you in the sequel

Talking to my Dune-obsessed friend this morning, I didn't know to what degree the novel influenced the Star Wars mythos. Lucas made it seem as if it were all Joseph Campbell and Kurosawa and shit.

A quick google found someone calling "Foundation" the, er, foundation of *both* "Dune" and "Star Wars." I've never read it, but (obv.) it has its huge fanbase as well.

I should say, btw, that I'm not sure I mind its hazy politics, tbh. I kinda liked being just dropped into the middle of this stuff. I do think a bit more clarity might have made it a better standalone movie though, or even a better standalone "Part One."

i suspect that one issue with making the book into a movie is that the book is very long and chock full of exactly those explanations of complicated political maneuvering, thats why in the lynch version you get all that pretty bad voice over, montage and so forth, imo what they did in this one was the way to go, also it was pretty artfully executed imo, like there was some actual filmmaking involved in the scene where the emperors representatives show up and oscar isaac asks his advisor how much it cost for them to get there

wasn't lynch in line to do empire?

it’s been a while but to my recollection the book pretty much drops you in the middle of stuff as well.

likewise just saying that the original spice miners had gotten richer than the emperor off the spice says a lot

i did fwiw as i said read up on the details provided in the book as to why the spice mining license was transferred and it was interesting but i think what they provided in the movie was perfect for the movie

as far as humor goes, I can't believe no one's mentioned Javier Bardem's first appearance: the grunting, the spitting.

at first youre like oh the emperor must just feel like the original spice miners are getting too powerful so he wants them out of there and in conflict with the isaac clan which will weaken them both, but then when he allies with the original miners to attack the isaac clan its like oh his first order of business is eliminating the isaac clan and he lured them off their home turf to do so and also managed to make it look like it was all the doing of the original miners keeping his hands clean, and he managed to show the original miners whos boss and extract a huge fee for his soldiers along the way, then youre left wondering why the isaac clan would fall into this trap but then one of them says something that implies that they knew it was a trap, maybe they couldnt say no to the emperor or they felt like they could pull the job off idk, feel like all of this can be taken from the movie

I missed that that was Javier Bardem until later in the film. It was like a No Country for Old Men reunion--couldn't they have gotten Tommy Lee Jones or Woody Harrelson in there somewhere? (I thought the shrouded female overlord early on was Helen Mirren, not Charlotte Rampling.)

xp

I felt like they were browbeaten into it and weren't naive to see it as a kindly gift and knew it was 100% likely a total stitch-up, at one point Brolin (or whatever he's called!) warns Paul that things are going to get bad.

saw some "beefswelling" discourse earlier lol!

^^^ me when I saw Chalamet with bed hair

Oh yea not enough humor it should be more like a marvel movie with constant wisecracks

way more *spitting* in Dune than marvel tho

i mean, it balances out when you think about it

A quick google found someone calling "Foundation" the, er, foundation of *both* "Dune" and "Star Wars." I've never read it, but (obv.) it has its huge fanbase as well.

I should say, btw, that I'm not sure I mind its hazy politics, tbh. I kinda liked being just dropped into the middle of this stuff. I do think a bit more clarity might have made it a better standalone movie though, or even a better standalone "Part One."

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, October 24, 2021 4:53 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

It’s a repudiation of Foundation if anything so I guess in that sense it’s “influenced”

they both deliver really good performances in this movie

oh give me a break with this

idk i don't give a shit about good acting so ok

this was very well done. i appreciated that this baron won't give me nightmares, unlike the one in lynch's movie.

btw this is how herbert solved the problem of exposition

not sure why the whedon-pilled mob is screaming for more joaks, the only thing more hilarious than a relentless irulan-voiced whisper-over is just dropping explanations completely lol: "landsraad?" "make em work it out from context!" "context?" "reduce it to a nubbin!"

(i approve of this reductionism, make ME work it out plz)

anyway what we get in DUNC 1 is primarily "meet the planet" -- arrakis is not skimped or mocked imo, and that's why we get 20 mins of the rainswept caladan seaside and also why the ppl now gathering on or around arrakis seem pint-sized and unfleshed-out

proof that herbert had a subtle sense of humour

i: he recognised that we were all sick of quotes from irulan's stupid histories by dune messiah and makes her one of the conniving villains
ii: in some of FH's other (often much better) books, he starts to make a thing of following character x's expositional info-dump dialogue with character y thinking to themselves "now what did they mean by that??!?"

"Yueh! Yueh! Yueh!" goes the refrain. "A million deaths were not enough for Yueh!"
— from "A Child's History of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan

haha seen as a template for how the reader is to respond to yueh this technique is known as TELL DON'T SHOW

(but i guess it does also quietly and fiercely and obliquely set up exactly how fkn grim and monolithic the atreides imperium is going to be)

Oh yea not enough humor it should be more like a marvel movie with constant wisecracks

Yes, that's exactly what I meant. Same for the other films I mentioned, Rosemary's Baby and Taxi Driver, I want them to be more like Marvel movies.

I liked this line abt Herbert from Chip Delany on Facebook the other day

my image of Frank was a nice guy who did not have particularly exaggerated notions of what he could do

wasn't lynch in line to do empire?

― When Young Sheldon began to rap (forksclovetofu), Sunday, October 24, 2021 11:01 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

No, Jedi. Lynch apparently came down and spent one day with Lucas, and that was enough to have him on the phone to his agent begging "Get me out of this!"

ewoks but theyre pustuled foetuses wrapped-up like mummies flying through a forest of dead trees stood up in mud, jabba the hutt sucks on sex-gas thru a bane mask

none of the villains have names, just nicknames like The Dark Shadow, The Wrinkle

there's a thread for gritty remakes, non? if ever one needed to be made...

Lapti Nek but sung by Julee Cruise

^^^ would pay handsomely for such a boon

Forgive me for asking mundane shit about the economy of the Dune univers, but I read the book maybe ten years ago and recall that computing devices were banned - so how do they build ridiculously complex things like spaceships? Is it just AI that's banned and there are 'dumb' robots that manufacture things?

I did love that unlike the Lynch version in this they accent the first syllable of 'Harkonnen' so now it sounds like the Finnish surname I always hear in my head when I see the word.

Or Ikea furniture.

computers are indeed banned but humans with super-trained minds (aka mentats) can do highly sophisticated calculations just with their brains

in the lynch version they were also helped in this by their vast bushy eyebrows

i guess the shipbuilding is artisanal tho, william morris wd be very happy

oh shit it actually is a finnish surname:

He came across the name "Härkönen" in a California telephone book and thought that it sounded "Soviet", though it is in fact Finnish.

I knew about the mentats, but was wondering if there's factories full of them with slide rules building analog spaceships.

In-universe, there's essentially two spots of advanced tech -- Ix (as mentioned by the navigator in the Lynch film), which remains explicitly technological, and Tleilax, which pursues genetic research, cloning and so forth. Both are essentially kinda-sorta tolerated by the Imperium as an outlet for fancy toys, if you like. (I'm sure the post-Frank Herbert novels go into more tendentious detail about each; in the original books they were never visited and remained appropriately mysterious and weird.)

this movie could have been improved with some brainy dude that looks like Brezhnev with chapped lips