A thread about the Denis Villeneuve-helmed reboot of DUNE

saw this last night on a moderately big screen, it flew by, each scene delicious, and i'm actually thinking abt seeing it again, so as to see it in IMAX or other REAL big screen. my boo, who was in it first and foremost for Timothee, was all in on the visuals and mood as well. a hit!

as someone who adored the book in high school and whenever i last reread it (2009?), i love that they're embracing the major major theme of Paul's alarm at the "holy war" he foresees himself pushed towards leading. always found that one of the most fascinating things in the book and presumed it one of the likeliest things to get stripped out in any adaptation. the other big thing i most loved was all the 60s-but-also-ahead-of-its-time planetary ecology stuff, which wasn't as clearly on display here.... but the way they did the Liet-Kynes material suggests they DO intend to really spend time on this. if Chani is indeed the protagonist next time, that could be a great gateway into how the Fremen have come to understand their planet.

really enjoyed the visuals at a design level, all the machines and buildings, how these super mega scaled structures seem to have been built as bunker-like slopes to handle the desert wind loads and so forth. up close, dialogue scenes sometimes had a washed-out or flat "TV look" but that coulda been specific to the projection at the 19th Street AMC. all the landscapes and spaceships and outfits and pools of healing blecchy ooze looked fantastic.

in hindsight i would have liked just a BIT more of the tense calm before the storm - more scenes between the Atreides family and hangers-on. and yeah, i do miss the emphasis placed on weird mentally conditioned humans and all that stuff. but i can't complain that DV dropped one thing i always thought was kinda neat, if he's centering several others that i found really mind-expanding at 17!

definitely curious how the sequel will stick the landing --- right now i'm sort of extending my faith that they have a solid take on the inherently risky Orientalism and real-world parallels that are all over the source material. here again i hope the idea of treating Chani as a protagonist with agency and a supporting cast/lore of her own could do some work. right now the Fremen belief system is being presented mainly as a nonsense con job put over on them by the Bene Gesserit. which iirc is part of the story! but DV leaves off *just* before we'll have the chance to delve much more into their side of the story, so there's a lot of room to show more to this picture.

i love how the human/worm pic pops up like every 90 posts or so on this thread

Good read, I thought:

https://www.vulture.com/2021/10/dune-has-a-desert-problem.html

(Also I'll be seeing it again the IMAX here in an hour.)

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.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, October 24, 2021 12:32 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

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 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is exactly how I felt. I found it a little humorless and austere, but somehow not boring. not a great movie or anything but gonna do some edibles and watch on imax in a couple days

It is QUITE good on IMAX, it turns out a large amount of the film was shot for it, including some sequences in full like the sandworm attack on the spice harvester. It also struck me that Villeneuve/the editors' sense of pacing is really good, I was able to get a better grip on how they balanced out the longeurs with concentrated action.

Minor revelations from the credits: oddly enough, given the Lisa Gerrardisms of that one motif, Gerrard IS a credited vocal performer, but not of that piece, which is...odd.

Also: one of the Bene Gesserit voices that Paul hears during his visions? Marianne Faithfull!

I'm a total unbeliever in all this "you aren't doing it right unless watching it in a big-screen warehouse" bollox being talked up by the director, without meaning to be an arsehole towards ppl who enjoy IMAX. Such an oafish thing to say and yes some of my best memories of watching movies were on a 14" b/w tv!

Yeah a film has to be good in its own right to start with. And there are tradeoffs -- at points the images were noticeably darker in IMAX in comparison to similar sequences via regular theater viewing and on TV.

IMAX was a huge step up from TV, no idea if I'd miss much watching a normal theater showing.

“frankly, to watch ‘DUNE’ on a television, the best way I can compare it is to drive a speedboat in your bathtub. For me, it’s ridiculous. It’s a movie that has been made as a tribute to the big-screen experience."

Villeneuve wasn't strictly talking about IMAX tbf on him, but still there are a lot of people who liked this movie who can't afford to or don't want to go to cinemas for various reasons rn and they enjoyed it with their headphones on in their living room or even their PC and to say it's ridiculous way to watch it like this is quite fucking ridiculous imo!

if that's how he feels, maybe he shouldn't have taken hbo's money?

I've seen one Mission Impossible movie and one Star Wars movie in IMAX and they've been pretty similar experiences to the other films in the series that I didn't watch in IMAX. nb I don't know if those movies were shot specifically for IMAX (and don't really care)

But I am jealous of y'all able to watch Dune in any kind of theater (theaters still not open here!)

if that's how he feels, maybe he shouldn't have taken hbo's money?

― When Young Sheldon began to rap (forksclovetofu), Sunday, October 31, 2021 11:01 PM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

iirc he made the film prior to hbo deciding to do day and date?

anyway half of the movie is awesome scenes of spaceships landing so of course the creator is going to tell us to watch it on the biggest screen possible and he's probably right! but we're all adults and can do what we want and he'll never know.

lol you're such a myopic poshboy!

Watching Dune on HBO Max as socialist praxis, fite!

I definitely felt like the big screen and the fantastic sound (so much sub-bass in the sound design) was a factor in my enjoyment of it, but I’d hardly tell anyone they shouldn’t watch it on their phone if that’s their jam.

if you have a 70-80" TV and a good 5.1 speaker setup a theater isn't really necessary, especially because you can freely abuse drugs at home

I'm idly wondering if Villeneuve makes more out of a theatre ticket than a stream.

lol we don't even have a cinema! (actually we really don't) the last one in Town was a 2nd hand furniture warehouse for decades + now an empty building and there is no blue plaque informing people that David Peace was a regular. And yeah people do have impressive home cinemas these days, hardly a ridiculous option at all during a pandemic.

I saw it in the cinema and it was worth it tbh, but ill watch it again on the tv no bother, its the sound ill miss

the desert sun touched lightly on
the eyes of Lucy Jordan
in a tleilax ghola's vat-room
next to gaius helen mohiam

I saw it at Cambridge IMAX and it was too loud :( but I am a delicate bloom.

The VOICE bits reminded me of the "LOOK AT MOI" bits from Kath & Kim.

Kath evidently the Fountain Springs representative of the Bene Gesserit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSMmxyGeEb4

the last time I went to a cinema it was only because I had to kill a few hours and it was too rainy to walk about and too early for a pub and it was a grim choice between Postman Pat the movie and some X-men shite in 3d. Too loud, too expensive and I should have chose Postman Pat obv.

postman pat and his deadly mentat

lol you're such a myopic poshboy!

― calzino, Sunday, October 31, 2021 11:24 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

interesting, thanks! i don't have any thoughts about you at all.

😢

Finally got to watch this Saturday night, I liked it quite a bit. There probably could have been 20 minutes shaved off, mostly in the slo-motion dream sequences, but the set design was fantastic. Watched it with my 10 year-old, who loved it - especially the 'thopters and the way they showed the shields, and my wife, who (with no previous experience with the book or the 1984 version) found it confusing, but mostly enjoyable.

Had fun with this but still really hard for me to turn my brain off during sci-fi battles in any franchise where insane technology exists but people still fight and die in battle where they should just use robots/drones or whatever. It's one of those things I can't get over. That hang up goes further than the super common "why swords" question specific to Dune, and even accepting that premise there is no logical answer to "ok but why not also have sufficient armor under the shields"? But the overall human/alien soldiers logic issue, no matter how much fun sci-fi battles are, is such a discrepancy it drives me nuts.

people still fight and die in battle where they should just use robots/drones or whatever

Robots = a.i. = the Dune universe's big no-no.

Why not? I'm new to it all tbh.

Also it could be remote controlled robots (drone robots). All the actual soldiers working from home, mouse & keyboard FPS robot army.

computers and a.i. are banned in dune because of a bad thing that happened long ago

also people fight with swords because dune universe scientists designed a shield that causes a nuclear explosion if it were to be hit by a laser

Which in the movie makes the two laser uses kinda...dicey? Like how were the Sardaukar sure that anyone on the other side of that door wasn't shielded? They had just fought and killed a guy who was!

(Obv I'm well aware they have lasers in the books, but they're always clear about limited/specific use because of that minor potential issue.)

-Thanks

-Right I've heard the nuclear explosion thing but I was going beyond that to ask "ok but why not also have sufficient armor under the shields", but I haven't seen a good answer. Usually the real answer is "look, accept that there isn't a good explanation, it was an attempt to write a sci-fi universe that also has sword fighting for some reason and it's not perfect" and sure, fine. So I might as well apply that acceptance to the entire genre (in regards to my why-soldiers-at-all frustration), but it still bothers me because everything else about the universes of these franchises are so thought through, and we have to ignore this big genre plot hole in order to keep space battles as exciting as possible and for no other good reason.

xxxp

no matter how much fun sci-fi battles are

Battles are always the most boring parts of these films to me

The shields in the lynch version are cool, & it’s kinda classic that you don’t actually see them used at all after that one training scene (iirc, my mind wanders in the battle scenes because see above)

there's some brief shield action during the Harkonnen attack, but not much

I like it when Big Dunc just yells at a bunch of lads and they back off looking disinterested and not very up for it

haha, I noticed this. No one really wanted to deal with him getting on that 'thopter.

Had to check i hadnt wandered into the prem league thread for a sec tbh

everything else about the universes of these franchises are so thought through

citation needed lol

Well, they are literal universes, so there generally is a lot of detail to establish! A lot of worlds building you know.

m y guess is that herbert was resting a heavy foot on the idea that you wouldn't get the feudal structure he was interested in here with a post-feudal battle technology -- and then treating spaceships as if they were even less of a technological disruption than sailing ships were in the 1500s (which is a massive handwave, but i guess the "known space" get-out clause ensures they're not encountering unknown diseases or the economic chaos that the discovery of the new world created)

the various forbiddings (no computers, no robots, no atomics) are world-bulding axioms that don't need explanation in themselves -- imagine a far-future universe which once had these and now doesn't and we're not going to say why, you have to imagine that

I mean if you quibble here what movies do you actually get through, is my question

the practice of SF is "let's see what we get when we propose this and ban that"

what movies you get is what you're finding out

a thing i found out from rereading the wormbook is the perhaps unstartling fact that a person in a stillsuit entering a normal room absolutely stinks lol

the smelly jihad

Conquest of the universe carried out via gas warfare.

it's basically a fancy colostomy bag that you drink out of