A thread about the Denis Villeneuve-helmed reboot of DUNE

I was still referring to Stilgar but actually yeah, that wasn't so badly handled. Paul is initially skeptical, then resistant, but eventually gives in (has no choice really); Chani remains faithful to his "human" side and to her people.
I've reread Dune and Messiah like three years ago and I have already been told that I don't pass the fan test cause I couldn't explain everything when we left the cinema lol.

Alia in the womb - appropriately chilling / disconcerting

imagine this happening to you and you're NOT a bene gesserit who has been raised in their culture. freaky-ass fetus

it was absolutely appropriate that she was chilling in the womb rather than running around murdering barons or what-have-you.

how can we make a creepy-ass child even creepier?

they should figure out how to integrate Alicia Witt back into Dune, though

i only just realized that was alicia witt in the first one; it's cute that Lynch has continued to cast her in stuff through the Return. Would love to see her show up in these films again. Would also no be opposed to a pug.

she could easily be evil aunt Alia in Children of Dune

https://www.gq.com/story/weird-dune-sequels

good summary of the 5 upcoming dunes by max

Ride the worm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E6AcXUKSVA

Saddest action blockbuster ever? Liked it much more than the first. Did not find it lacking in weird. Making Feyd sorta likable was surprising but worked great.

Making Feyd sorta likable

Like almost the first thing we see him do is immediately cut one of his servant's throats, so are you sure about that?

with a song in his heart

Denis has a weird thing about that, happened in Blade Runner 2049 as well

This is why I said "sorta". They make him a likable psychopath, e.g. the way he dies helps add to the oppressive weight of tragedy at the end.

i think charismatic is more the word i would use than likable

compelling

I think the main thing is you don't feel unbridled joy when Paul stabs him through the heart. You feel regret. Choosing power and revenge sucks, even if it's your only path to survival.

Can't...say I agree?

Fair. But Villeneuve could have used a beat somewhere in the character's last couple minutes to remind you how evil he is, and he doesn't. Instead you get "you fought well, Atreides."

What if Hamlet had taken mushrooms and they cured his indecision? Turns out the play still would have been a tragedy.

this was incredible

xpost lukas idk that you need to be ~reminded~ of Feyd being evil in that last moment, what with, idk, *sweeping hand motion* THE WHOLE MOVIE already establishing that?

if there's a bald person in a movie, i immediately assume he's evil

i dont take it for granted that we know enough about the servant/stabbing dynamic to judge the character tbh?

it seems a well established routine to me.

at worst id say he's the best of a bad bunch

obsessed with challoumi's kermit walk in this, so so good

otm

Things I liked less:
- Too long

i think ive come to what might be an obvious realisation but nothing that is good is too long and nothing that is bad can be short enough.

this wasnt long enough.

To me the dichotomy with Feyd is his extreme vulnerability for which he compensates with ferocity. He is a monster but so is Paul, in a different way. They are both products of a breeding program intended to bring together a wide variety of characteristics into a single person. Thus both are complex and flawed, layered and conflicted, but he doesn’t get the screen time that Paul gets to really work through that and arrive anywhere. Despite being coddled and showing off in sham fights on the regular, he is not a coward when it comes to a fair fight. I’m not saying he’s a great dude, the story demands that we hate him and consider him evil. But there are nuances to him- look at how easily he was led, like a wide-eyed child, into a trap by the Bene Gesserit. And then he survived the gom jabbar, so there is something deeper to him, though implied only by his survival- his intellect can overcome his baser instincts when it comes down to it.

book-feyd is not at all a developed character! (character development is not really herbert’s wheelhouse)

but epistantophus's point -- that in terms of millennia of BG breeding programme FR is indeed the mirror of paul (the back-up plan in fact, since jessica went rogue: she was meant to birth paul as a girl, to marry FR) -- is v correct, and it's good that the film somewhat manifests this (and amplifies what's bad abt paul having to unleash his inner harkonnen to win)

in general i think villeneuve does good work faintly beefing up some of herbert's always cardboardy secondary characters (not just chani but also irulan, for example) -- plus also injecting the idea that fremen politics has more than one wing (which he then kinda renders two-dimensional again, by overuse of the word "fundamentalist")

Great points, tho I will soften my "Feyd is a lovable teddy bear" stance, I did forget about the flamethrower scene.

Having Stilgar pray to Arrakis Mecca on a prayer rug was bold.

I mean, his second-last line's about how he is going to torture Chani, and the ones before that are about how he killed his mother - I am concerned about your bar for 'evil'!

maybe it's fine

He’s perfect and I won’t hear a word against him

Thought this was solid and looked cool. Props to my wife for sitting through it despite not seeing the first one, or having read the book, or having any idea what it was it about.

Got to praise Bautista again for really seeming the Anti-Rock in routinely playing tough looking guts who get their ass kicked by a smaller dude

guts? guys

i dunno, if villeneuve ever brought berserk to the screen i could see bautista playing guts

I agree with the second post. It is unnecessary to make this. A lot of these remakes, reboots feel like shameless attempts to cash grab and squeeze whatever's left of the intellectual property. Like the Beetlejuice 2 trailer came out a couple days ago and I'm just rolling my eyes. I don't even know if it's a bad thing because people seem to enjoy them, but I can't be bothered watching stuff like this anymore.

Dune has never had a very good screen interpretation. I'm glad when they remake films that didn't work out well the first time (as much as I like a lot of it, Lynch's Dune did not work out), rather than remaking things that were good. This is a very good interpretation of the book.

XP

generally agree with that except for a case like to this. I watched the first half hour of the Lynch Dune last night and as much I like pretty much everything else Lynch has done that movie is terrible. It's ok to remake or readapt bad movies

Yeah, we watched Lynch’s dune last week and hoooooboy. I have a pretty high tolerance for bad movies, esp if they’re interesting / quirky / offkilter (which this was) but my god, I just kept wishing it would be over.

Always makes me laugh when people cover for Lynch's Dune with "but he didnt have final cut!" as if that was the main issue

I feel like Lynch's Dune serves as a bit of a rebuttal to the obsession with Jodorowsky's "lost" version. Like, you can imagine a scenario where the Lynch one got scrapped and all that remained was some production design images and there would be this whole, "Imagine what David Lynch's Dune would have been like!"

i think the backlash to jodorowskys dune vision and the work in putting it as far as it went is gone a bit far mainly because the documentary and documents that do exist and the stories around the entire effort seem to me to be more than enough output/justification

jodorowskys dune did get made, in the same way that lost in la mancha is gilliams don quixote

good take

in the same way that lost in la mancha is gilliams don quixote

Didn't his Quixote movie finally come out though?

it did and absolutely no one watched it. i have no idea if it's any good or not.

I stopped paying attention after he turned into a total crank old man. Shame he disappeared and never made any more movies

Shame he disappeared and never made any more movies

Brazil was a hell of a note to go out on, though.

i got time for parnassus actually

but he as a persona i could do without pretty much from day 1

it did and absolutely no one watched it. i have no idea if it's any good or not.

it was bad. but even if it had been good, it would have been redundant next to lost in la mancha anyway