A thread about the Denis Villeneuve-helmed reboot of DUNE

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

whatever failures you want to level at the Lynch version, it was undeniably an aesthetic triumph

Absolutely.

As for the Guild, in the original books, again, it's opaque as an organization but like the Mentats it seems they emerged/evolved in the wake of the Butlerian Jihad and basically operate on a 'you gotta let us do our own thing or the rest of you are fucked' level.

in dune messiah a key character with a very specifgic skill comes from tleilax, tho i don't recall if we actually ever visit the planet itself

Härkönen

This would actually be pronounced more like "Hair-coin-en", I think...

what is the Dune version of blockchain?

https://www.bashfineart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/11262_detail.jpg

Meantime on the technical front

https://www.wired.com/story/dune-sandworm-vfx/

No matter where anyone stands on the film itself, the FX are remarkable.

I liked this. Soundtrack was wonderful, I assume Lisa Gerrard was in there?

I see the planned tv series is a spinoff about the witches and not the main story (which would have been crazy).

That was one of the loudest films I've ever seen, Dunkirk included.

The technical stuff was pretty masterful, and reminded me of all the scifi paperback covers I used to stare at in the drugstore as a kid, the John Harris-type illustrations

i can't believe this film made me give a shit about dune

(i love the lynch film but not because it's dune)

It's funny, we were at a basketball game Friday night, and my wife's Apple watch gave her a dB alert. Something like 90dB? Anyway, that's how loud the Bulls game was. I wonder what "Dune" measured?

they don't have 'decibels' as a unit of measure in Duneland, they are called "kevarks"

They're called "thumps," iirc.

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!"

Vocals are Loire Cotler, not Lisa Gerrard... who does work with Zimmer a lot

Yeah I'd noted their collaborations but I've watched a Gerrard documentary that said a ton of people sprung up in the film business deliberately imitating her, which is bizarre.

Popular/distinctive artist gets imitated by a bunch of people in their wake? You don't say!

I dissent! Was thinking of braving an imax showing full of unmasked popcorn munchers, but am very glad I finagled a "free stream" instead.
The CG is so sterile and disposable, basically about the level of prestige TV or one level up from a videogame cutscene -- nothing you can really complain about but nothing that immerses you, either.

There should be a level above uncanny valley where the effects aren't so much creepy as it is depicting something that subconsciously forces the viewer to think of green screens and racks of servers grinding away at a render. I feel like there's ways to get around this (like maybe having a tiny bird in the corner smash into a spaceship as it's landing, or have people react to it in a specific rather than non-specific "gaze at this white ball on a stick" way), but it seems like the better CG gets, the less directors feel like they have to orchestrate things to compensate.

Not that Lynch bothered with it either, but if you're on Dune, why not more little scenes of people dumping sand out their boots or gagging on sand, picking sand out of their teeth and eyes?

I liked the CG and aliens in Arrival much better; the thing that took me out of that movie was Amy Adams living in Dr. No's pad on a linguist's salary.

Ned - It shouldn't be surprising and it does make sense, but it still surprises me that a singer from a band like Dead Can Dance ends up in the biggest films imaginable. Same with Diamanda Galas in mainstream films.

Arrival was real science fiction - I felt like Dune is similar to the Star Wars-WWII world, but also as a metaphor for oil prospecting in the middle east, with a bit of 60's mysticism thrown in, and of course giant worms

Not that Lynch bothered with it either, but if you're on Dune, why not more little scenes of people dumping sand out their boots or gagging on sand, picking sand out of their teeth and eyes?

Well it's worth noting that Villeneuve got closer -- at least at points, would have been nice to have full consistency -- to the stated idea that the stillsuits really are full body coverings, where it wasn't just the mouth/nose being covered up but the eyes were hid behind goggles of some sort built into the a face covering. Having it be just the eyes exposed at points was a reasonable enough balance but again, wasn't really done down the line.

Ned - It shouldn't be surprising and it does make sense, but it still surprises me that a singer from a band like Dead Can Dance ends up in the biggest films imaginable. Same with Diamanda Galas in mainstream films.

To my mind it's just a reflection of two intertwined goals -- a desire on the part of musicians like that do more (and certainly get more to live on) combined with not only contemporaries who enjoy the work as they find it but a slew of sensitive artistic teenagers who worshipped said artists becoming working artistic creators who can do something about said fandom after a certain point. (Also worth remembering that another reference point for that kind of vocal approach, especially in terms of the European popular imagination, are Bulgarian women's choirs; I wouldn't be surprised if Zimmer was coming more from that direction.)

is johnny marr on the soundtrack tho

He's the Emperor

I dug the eye-rolly move of mentats calculating, but you could weirdly see the pupils underneath, so is it not really an eye-roll but a white flap of eyeball membrane moving up?
If that was so, they could have done a quick thing of this eyeball-flick white membrane ejecting some sand and grit. Also, could have included a scene of Bautista going ape on a servant for not picking off every grain of sand on his space pizza. What better way to establish why he's the BEAST Rabban?