A thread about the Denis Villeneuve-helmed reboot of DUNE

https://travelwithyourcat.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/do-cats-like-sand.jpg

Shai-HuMewed!

against my better judgment but bcz i wz a bit sleepless last night i started to reread DUNE the book last night

— first chapter is the GOM JABBAR chapter so yes, we very much jump into the midst of stuff
— everyone is expositioning non-stop at one another even when they aren't chapter epigraphs by the princess irulan
— i feel when gaius helen mohaim says "a REAL human will lurk in the trap in order to kill ther trapper when they return" this gives paul a permission he does not then take
— paul keeps saying "arrakis! dune! desert planet!" to himself, "desert power" is actually an improvement on this device imo
— the general quality of prose i judge to be OK at best lol (dune messiah is actually better written whatever you think of it as a contribution to the series)
— in terms of scene-setting, action and establishment of stuff we want to find out about it nevertheless does its job

Heavy metal band Iron Maiden wrote the song "To Tame a Land" based on the Dune story. It appears as the closing track to their 1983 album Piece of Mind. The original working title of the song was "Dune"; however, the band was denied permission to use it, with Frank Herbert's agents stating "Frank Herbert doesn't like rock bands, particularly heavy rock bands, and especially bands like Iron Maiden".

the fremen exclamation "KULL WAHAD" literally means "DEATH TO FALSE METAL"

think i'm one of the only people to have watched the truly awful syfy Children of Dune miniseries (james mcavoy! susan sarandon!). they pronounce the girl's name "Cheney," it's a wreck

I saw it when I was a teenager and enjoyed it!

Arrival was an ambitious attempt at filming a spectacular and unfilmable short story and my only real criticism of it (aside from the fact that it couldn’t possibly do justice to the Chiang story) was that some of the original story dialogue was repeated onscreen word-for-word and didn’t translate well at all

i thought arrival was totally plausible in that it would take an alien form of language cutting your consciousness free from linear time to make someone fall in love with jeremy renner

lol

it's funny how a movie can hurry through big plot elements and show you how they sit next to each other -- watching this i was like, wait the BG plan is maybe to kill off the heir to a great house? just because his hand hurt too much? wouldn't that cause some waves? just tell him thanks kiddo and fuck off! so much for directing events from the shadows

much to consider

https://www.gawker.com/culture/who-should-play-dark-twink-feyd-rautha

I'm not sure if I should be asking this because I'm about halfway through the book and I've watched the new movie and the Lynch one and I can't quite understand or remember the exact reason why the Emperor just randomly decides to hand Arrakis over to the Atreidis family only to then send in the cavalry and try to destroy them. Or am I missing something glaringly obvious?

Basically it's a headfake everyone knows is a headfake -- the Emperor is sending a popular local leader who could be a locus point of resistance to his reign to a place that's highly important but where he's been set up to fail. The Atreides go in knowing this and assume that's it but what isn't known is the extent of the Emperor's military involvement -- the cover story is in essence that the Harkonnens were pissed and reconquered the place on their own. The Sardaukar's involvement and therefore the direct hand of the Emperor in destroying a potential rival is meant to be secret. Thus in the film Duncan Idaho's rage towards Kynes when they first meet about whether she will tell the truth or not.

Seems like a lot of trouble, why didn't they just poison dart everyone?

EPA (Emperor's Poison Regulations) issues.

Well that acronym failed but anyway.

Harkonnen, Atreides, Arrakis :: Russia, US, Afghanistan

who are house Ordos?

Where does Tarkus fit into all this?

paul is UBL and harkonnen is usa

is there any backstory suggesting that house atreides are actively gunning for shaddam or is it just that the padishah emperor is grumpy someone else is more popular than him at the landsraad

also if the landsraad actually has enough heft that shaddam is worried abt being found out, how is it going to respond if it thinks that the (unpopular) harokonnens just went back in and murdered all the (popular) atreides and shaddam -- having ordered the handover -- just says "eh"

everyone's plan is terrible! this known universe needs a jihad imo

otm

the more i learn about it the more im starting to appreciate the finger painting style of dune, it makes enough sense to be compelling but not really enough to withstand examination, good stuff

the movie sort of hints that the atreides are justly popular and admired, but the harkonnens aren't just brilliant and cruel but extraordinarily rich (and likely have their own huge base of support) and have been manipulating the spice market instead of handing it all over to the emperor and the guild, i guess?? or something?

like youre all thats crazy the space witch is just going to kill the heir to a major house what, then you realize its just some cool shit

on the other hand a brief perusal of history will confirm that during the era where there were monarchs and great houses they were constantly doing completely insane bloody schemes

but also maybe the witch was just bluffing, feel like that might be overthinking it tho is what im saying

maybe lynch was the perfect director for this impressionistic intrigue, too bad they didnt give him three movies to do it

what spoils the lynch version is DL's very evident dislike of sand

and catamites

Tolkien stated “I dislike DUNE with some intensity,” but he did not give a reason why

^^^found in quora while looking for answers to questions ITT

lol drama

sand must play havoc with those old bolexes

Now that I think about it, I'm not sure I remember any sand in Lord of the Rings.

or catamites

My only major disappointment with this film is the lack of "mood is a thing for cattle and loveplay."

"im in the mood (for cattle)"

this known universe needs a jihad

https://c.tenor.com/O9fwyX_poqkAAAAC/joker-jack.gif

i never really got why the most important planet in the universe is handed over to feudatories to run instead of being held by the imperial house directly. lagoon otm

The Emperor dirty his hands with mere COMMERCE? Tsk.

guild wouldn't allow it

bc the emperor controls like 56% of CHOAD or whatever and the landsraad holds the rest and control of the fiefdom of arrakis is a power-sharing compromise

guild is definitely who keeps arrakis obscure and unknown, this is explicitly noted

why doesn't the guild seize the monopoly themselves? bcz they peeked the future and saw it held catastrophe

their best bet is putting pressure on emperor and landsraad to enact "insane bloody schemes"™️ at one another

guild is definitely who keeps arrakis obscure and unknown, this is explicitly noted

Wait so the general galactic public doesn't know spice comes from there?

lol i just read a thread on a wikifan site where various contributors were screaming at one another abt how much or how little is generally known abt spice

it sometimes gets called "geriatric spice", which i guess does suggest that routine public knowledge abt its uses is limited

Tolkien stated “I dislike DUNE with some intensity,” but he did not give a reason why

man you're supposed to skip over writing political economy entirely, not half-ass it!

maybe JRR just hated his language. "kwisatz haderach" is some clunky shit.

kwisatz durbatulûk, kwisatz gimbatul

i always assumed that chakobsa was some native american tribe or tongue but no:

Chakobsa is a Northwest Caucasian (NWC) language (possibly in the Circassian subgroup), also called "shikwoshir" or the "hunting language". It was originally a secret language used only by the princes and nobles, and is still used by their descendants. Jacob Reineggs (1796, p. 248) was the first to record any Chakobsa: a list of 19 words. Though the overall appearance of these words seems to be NWC, they have no cognates in any language of that family or any other. In the Bzhedug dialect of Adyghe the language is called /šʿˊakʾ°abza/, literally "hunting language" (/šʿˊakʾ°a/ "hunting" + /bza/ "language"); the modern name "Chakobsa" is based on an earlier form of the word, */čʿˊakʾ°abza/. An informant has asserted that Chakobsa is based on Circassian, encrypted by reordering words and changing phonemes, rather like Pig Latin but more complex. Although not yet confirmed, this seems a reasonable hypothesis.[1]

"rather like Pig Latin but more complex"

top work there frank, no wonder tolkien was disdainful