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Hard disagree.
The first movie was tolerable, and visually well-crafted. The second movie kept up with the visuals, but tipped over the edge for me in several ways.
St. Alia of the Knife got, essentially, cut. This is the most utterly unforgivable bullshit, especially given the promise of a third movie. There are fewer more iconic moments than the abominable child ending her treacherous grandfather with the Gom Jabbar. In fact, it's the only unequivocally great thing she ever gets to do, making her ultimate end all the more tragic.
The casting for Irulan seemed like a deliberate slight against the the idea of multigenerational eugenics. Her portrayal of Tatlock in Oppenheimer was grating, but Tatlock was presumably herself quite grating. Irulan is a regal character, if not indeed a somewhat ethereal one. They couldn't even pluck her eyebrows for this?
The casting for Shaddam IV was similarly perplexing. Christopher Walken played the emperor as a doddering has-been in the early stages of dementia.
In general the perversion and brutality of the Harkonnens was understated--to the point of being a fumble. This seems to have been simple cowardice on the director's part. Understandable cowardice, perhaps, but cowardice all the same.
Failure to address the Butlerian Jihad seems like a particularly egregious miss given the present level of public interest in artificial intelligence.
Chani was an interesting character in the books, albeit a minor one. She becomes a more important figure in the movie, at the cost of changing her into a boring (and fickle) Mary Sue.
Stilgar is rendered as an oaf and a dupe, the better to mock the "fundamentalists."
In its 6 book entirety, despite failing to reach the final showdown with the machines (Kevin Anderson sucks), is still a magnificent meditation on the difference between humans and human animals, on the fact that evolution continues to operate on us, and on the ways in which that poses a threat to our continued survival as a species. Paul is ultimately a failure as a messiah because he refuses to embrace his bloody destiny, instead leaving the task to his children (SUBTLE METAPHOR WARNING), who then step up and do the bloody business of putting an end to the hedonistic but stultifying preening of the human race. Here instead we get Chani asserting her agency--she won't abide a political marriage for her man--in a story that was fundamentally supposed to be about the lack of agency that is the problem Paul is supposed to solve for humanity.
Other than the wokism of casting the Fremen--but not the Harkonnens--as multiracial, I didn't see anything to complain about along that axis. The unrelenting girl-bossing of certain characters was weird, but only weirder for how badly the writing and acting neutered Lady Jessica. Dune is absolutely stacked with "strong female characters" so I guess the director had to dial that back, to better highlight his distorted vision of Chani as something less interesting than the Mother of God.
Ugh. Anyway. Just once I'd like to see a filmmaker actually deliver on the promise of Dune. It would be challenging, and consequently it would probably be unpopular. A clear portrayal of the truth of the Axlotl Tanks might well be sufficient to send the zeitgeist into total meltdown.
This is a debate that we could probably have for years, but I like the idea that the Honored Matres were not running from machines and that the Butlerian Jihad wasn't even about Skynet-style enemies. Rather, the Jihad was about maintaining human significance and freedom in a future with AI (how speculative!) and the Honored Matres were running from MANY powerful factions in the Scattering, of which they were a relatively minor one. The latter would exemplify the success of the Golden Path: no power, not even the Honored Matres (who sweep the Old Empire in short order) can gain supremacy over all humanity after what Leto II did. The Scattering is the end of such threats. This wouldn't be the only way for the Golden Path to succeed, but it would be the most dramatic, as well as dizzying the reader with the thought that the Honored Matres are just a minor faction in what humanity has become.
This does raise the question of an antagonist for Dune 7. I like the idea of something like the advanced Face Dancers, who present more of a philosophical threat to humanity - a species that can adopt countless personalities, but is never truly any of them, like the difference between hearing a recording of your dead parent's voice and hearing them speak new words. AI as an enemy was already explored by lots of people by the time Herbert was writing the later Dune novels; I think he'd want something weirder and more original as an antagonist, just like the Spacing Guild, Bene Tleilax, Bene Gesserit, Honored Matres, and of course Paul Atredis.
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It's strange. Villeneuve clearly gets the story on some level. The cuts seem reasonable to me (even Alia), and a number of the changes, as someone pointed out, externalize the internal conflict. But at the same time, it's all wrong.
It's as though everything is a symbol for itself, to be displayed with maximum impressiveness no matter how little sense it makes. There's no subtlety, it's just beating the audience over the head. And the dialog is horrible, lacking gravitas and the nuances found in the book, with no distinction between formality and familiarity. And the delivery, especially by the two leads, makes them sound like whiny American children, sulky and pouting. But Chalamet breaks out of that at the end of the 2nd film, after he gets his vision, so it doesn't seem to be the actors' fault, and some of the other actors do give good performances. Frankly, I wonder about Villeneuve's command of the English language. And then the music is, well, dramatic, if not actually what I'd call "music". More like creaking bed springs turned up to 11, or an old house settling. And the architecture was as though someone thought "big" was a sufficient description.
On the other hand, the anisopters were cool. Shields were cool. The hunter-seeker was cool. I'm glad they gave the Fremen some sand-colored cloaks (although IIRC, in the books the sand on Arrakis was grey, but that's not important). The worms were great, especially the riding. (Although I still wonder at the dimensions of the worm described in the book: "a small specimen, only one hundred and ten meters long and twenty-two meters in diameter".) I like the military use of portable suspensors. I thought Ferguson did a great job as Jessica, and I thought Duncan-Brewster did a fine job as Liet-Kynes in the first one.
Irulan was just wrong, with again no gravitas and no sense of grace. She seemed practically autistic, very intently focused on some aspects of what was going on, while speaking in a quasi-monotone that made it clear that her history recordings were performance. I actually laughed out loud in the theater when the Reverend Mother described her as one of her best students (or whatever it was she said to that effect), since her portrayal in the books is quite the opposite (or at least, everyone likes to put her down by telling her that).
I get why it was convenient to externalize some of Paul's decisions by making the south be full of people who will follow him without question. But the repeated use of the term "fundamentalists" was jarring. What fundamentals, exactly? Obviously everyone in the audience gets what he means, but again I think it symptomatic of the problems with the dialog. It's not timeless, it's dated. "True believers" would be a more appropriate term. Same with Chani's argument about how the Fremen don't need an outsider to save them; it's trying to use current politics to inform our understanding of characters, but it sounds like a rant that came out of nowhere.
And the slow motion. And the endless scenes of people descending ramps. Or people arrayed in grids. Or slow motion people descending ramps in front of grids of other people. I came out of the first one thinking that if they'd just kept everything normal speed, they could have shaved half an hour off of the movie, and saved everyone in the audience half an hour of life. And the combat, ugh: I blame "300".
Agreed with everything except this. Many such scenes in the first movie were jaw dropping and deeply mysterious. In the second movie it was just rushed and lacked the visual effort.
I just re-watched the first half of "Blade Runner 2049", and I found a lot of the same visual tics in there, but for some reason they didn't bug me as much. I still recall ranting a bit, whenever it was that I first saw it, about how the original "Blade Runner" had a packed, bustling, "lived-in future" on the ground level, but we don't see much of that in 2049; it's mostly a series of trips to scenic vistas, interspersed with K's apartment or the police office, like a video game where you explore a new level and then hang out in the vehicle/lobby in between levels. (Also Hans Zimmer's bedsprings sounded like an acceptable substitute for Vangelis.)
Possibly I've gotten more jaded over time. I never saw the TV show "Lost", but from what I've heard, it was infamous for there being no "there" there. The mystery never led to anything, because it was purely there to create an effect in the audience. In "Dune 2", I'd contrast this with the sandworm riding, which I think was great, and which gave me that sense of awe while being an integral part of the story.
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Have not yet seen the new film, but would you say that the Lynch film and the Westwood games did a better job showing how fucked-up the Harkonnens were?
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Some of these criticisms are pretty odd. The Harkonnens absolutely were shown as perverse and brutal, a lot of that was just dumped on Feyd-Rautha here, and I liked what Villeneuve did with Feyd-Rautha very much. "Feyd-Rautha as a psychosexual Darth Maul" turned out lot better than the usual "Feyd-Rautha as a somewhat more competent Joffrey Baratheon" thing and Austin Butler was great with microexpressions. The worst thing about the casting of the Emperor Shaddam IV (not a particularly major character anyway) is that it's impossible to see Christopher Walken as something other than Christopher Walken, but other than that, casting him as intergalactic Joe Biden showcases that we're seeing a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down. I don't understand the point about Irulan.
I understand the Alia criticism - I had been quite averse to early rumors on how Alia would be handled but ended up being OK with it, I guess that the murder toddler would have been something that might have become ridiculous too easily - and share the Chani criticism, though that might have also worked better if Zendaya was a better actor outside of the love scenes, which she handled well.
Personally I thought that the part with Paul taking the worm juice could have been handled (a lot) better and Dave Bautista was kind of wasted in this movie.
They really weren't, though. Pointlessly killing underlings is Darth Vader level "brutality." Gladiatorial combat is merely Roman. There was a hint at cannibalism, a hint at sadism, but "these are outrageously wealthy people who get high while they rape and torture slave children with impunity" was presumably soft-pedaled due to there being too many recent real-life analogies for Hollywood's (or the general public's) comfort. Most importantly, though, they are depicted as being out of control, rather than frighteningly in control. The Harkonnens of Villeneuve's Dune barely rate as comic book villains, to the point that viewers have to be told, rather than shown, that Feyd-Rautha is a "psychopath"--a word that never appears in the original book at all.
My memory from the books is that Feyd-Rautha was, while certainly Harkonnen, actually both competent and powerful, in contrast to Rabban. It was his reliance on underhanded fighting tactics that made him an otherwise-comparable foil to Paul (who decides to not use the Voice during their battle, though he could easily have done so). I don't mind his portrayal overmuch, but portraying him as a skilled and even potentially noble fighter ("you fought well") is a definite and unnecessary departure from the text.
Yes, but it fails to cast him as a formidable enemy. He was practically sleepwalking. I mean--this scene would have been much better, where Fenring declines to serve as the Emperor's champion:
An emperor of a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down does not sleepwalk through the confrontation with Paul. He desperately claws at every possible escape, even as the walls close in around him.
Irulan is described thusly:
I would describe Florence Pugh as a bit sturdy for the role, her features too dark, and her hair was atrocious--it looked like she just never washed it. Her tracheomalacia makes her voice earthy rather than haughty. Ten years ago I'd have said Emily Blunt or Natalie Dormer. Today, maybe Anna Taylor-Joy? Pugh, I honestly don't know how she keeps getting jobs, she's by far the least-interesting player on the screen in everything I've ever seen her in.
I feel like most of the "Other Memory"-related plot points are included grudgingly, like Villeneuve knows he can't just abandon those entirely but kind of wishes he could. There are throwaway lines about knowing the past and predicting the future but unless you've read the books, I can't imagine getting much out of those. And if you haven't read the books, I can imagine being really confused about everything touching on the Water of Life. And they never address the "sandtrout" at all.
I just reread the book fight scene: underhanded Feyd and Paul are at such a level,with so many plans within plans, that it'd honestly be hard to show visually. Making Feyd honorable and having a more straightforward fight seems like an easy fix.
Since they cut out Hawat and a lot of the Feyd and Duke maneuvering around each other (here I simply give them a pass due to time), it's easy to also just "fix" the Coliseum scene by having Feyd show he's formidable but capable of being honorable. Otherwise you have to get into BG control words and Paul's inner struggle to try to play into the finale and...
This is kind of my problem: it's hard to tell how all of this comes across to a totally virgin audience since I've known about some of the plot points so long. It seems that Vileneuve gave people enough to essentially grok what was going on (even putting aside Jamis' words and Jessica's own initiation, the Harkonnen reveal shows there's some ancestral memory shit going on - and how else could Alia be sentient?). But it feels a bit hollow from my perspective.
The problem is the Harkkonnens are supposed to be utter monsters. The movie fails to show that, especially with Feyd. He's brutal, sure, but he lacks the terror-inducing psychotic insanity he's supposed to have. Worse, the movie likens him to Paul rather than contrasts him -- not only does Paul openly declare he's going to act like the Harkonnens, he treats Shaddam IV much the way Feyd treats Rabban.
I mean... if you've read the books, there's a very good reason for this.
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It's probably common for fans of books with new movie/TV adaptations be overtly worried about new audiences understanding the plot without the (often frankly not all that necessary) context the books provide. I remember that when GoT TV series was announced a lot of posters on westeros.org were convinced that it's going to be pared down and dumbed down a lot since the "normie viewer" would never understand ASoIaF plots and so on, and then the first four seasons were pretty much straight adaptation from the books and the normies mostly understood it just fine.
Point taken. But, in our defense, iirc part of it was the worry that the writers would feel that way.
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I remember watching the Harry Potter movies before reading the books, and was totally confused by parts of movies 3, 4, and 5. (These are some of the longest books, but don't have correspondingly larger movies than the first two.) Lots of other people I know IRL feel similarly.
GOT is different because they got a whole season to explain a book instead of just a movie.
For what it's worth, I don't consider the Harry Potter movies to be "stories" as such, but rather an "illustration" of the books. I'm not an art snob, and I'm not using that term derogatorily. They're very very good illustrations. But I don't think they stand alone the way Game of Thrones did. They were like "Passion of the Christ", but with wizards.
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I find book five meandering and confusing. I know a lot of people love it, but I think Order of the Phoenix was the point where Rowling desperately needed an editor to tell her to cut it down, but she was too big at that point to be reined in.
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The first thing I saw her in was Midsommar and she was great, made me want to give her a big hug in every scene she was in.
Maybe I'll check it out. I think the first thing I saw her in was that Black Widow movie, where she came across as Disney's "we have Scarlett Johannson at home."
If you do, I recommend the director's cut.
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Okay, but this is unfilmable without dubbing in everyone's thought balloons, and everyone craps on the Lynch movie for resorting to that. Visually it's just two guys looking at each other and maybe making a face.
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So I have to ask, which do you think was better, David Lynch's Dune or the new ones?
I know Lynch's Dune wasn't perfect. It's profoundly 80's. He's on record at various points in his life saying he hated it, softening to the point where he regrets he didn't have final cut, and softening some more saying he's glad it has some fans.
I think I love how much it leans into the weirdness of Dune, and how utterly alien it all is. I don't even mind that it goes all tell instead of show by just having characters inner monologues going all the damned time. I don't even hate the "creative liberties" that were taken with the weirding way. At least not as much as I used to, since I've seen how much worse current year nonsense can make things than merely goofy.
Admittedly, I'm probably a more casual Dune fan. I think I only read the original 6 books 2 or 3 times, and maybe I'm just dense, but I can honestly say I never picked up on the themes than Paul is a villain or a cautionary tale at all. That's all anyone seems to talk about now on the youtubes.
Lynch's Dune is like a first girlfriend for me, so I judge it by different standards. It was one of the fist science fiction films I saw as a young child, along with Star Wars and bits of the original Star Trek films (I was too scared by those to watch them all the way through until later). Lynch's Dune didn't make a lot of sense to me, but no grown-up films made 100% sense to me at that point, and what I could understand was exciting, inspiring, and mentally stimulating. The weirdness probably helped to make me a sci-fi fan; in particular, of that sort of "alternative societies" and "mythology in SPAAACE" sci-fi. Were it not for the queering of sci-fi, I suspect I'd still be a fan of new sci-fi books; as it is, there is a wealth of stuff from when sci-fi offered ideas that I couldn't find in a SLAC.
I actually wrote entire novellas (30+ pages) in notebooks when I was about 10, which were basically ripoffs of Lynch's Dune ("except mine is on COLD planets... And there are these shadow-aliens from a parallel universe...") which in retrospect is less embarassing when I consider that this was before I knew about fan fiction and that telling your own stories in other people's fictional universes/stories is a perfectly natural, very old way for imagination and fiction writing skills to develop.
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Lynch's Dune was totally whack most of the time and some of the effects haven't aged well (riding the worm??) but there are some really great moments that i feel are missing from the new movies. For me Piter's introduction really sticks in my mind, sampled to great effect in some classic dnb. The bizarreness of it all (the eyebrows, the giant mouth) is really unmatched.
And the aesthetics. Maybe Lynch is responsible for my instinct on this issue (I saw his film before I read the books) but I have always thought of the Dune universe as vivid. Giedi Prime is black and putrid green. The women are beautiful. The Baron is disgusting. The worms are huge and alien. Paul is expressive and vibrant (ok, that really doesn't match the books, but film is a different medium). The spice-coloured eyes are glowing blue.
Also, though Lynch's film misses the moral ambiguity, it works really well as a portrayal of the Dune story as the Fremen themselves might tell it thousands of years later. Paul is a supernatural hero who saves the universe and then instantly brings rain. He understood the power of words, which were literal sound guns! Jamis? Who is Jamis?
It's the same sort of selection and compression that means that our idea of what Moses or Buddha was like could be hilariously different from what a god's eye narrator would tell us.
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I’m kinda with you on Lynch. What I love about the approach he took is that he never really lost sight of Dune as a very distant, very weird future and leaning into it hard. Even the telling parts and voice overs really push the point that this isn’t just like Earth. He fails more because of how stuck he was with the time frame. He only got one movie and had to cover a lot of ground and explain things to the audience at the same time. But I love it for the ambience and the ambition. I loved that he didn’t go straight for the obvious of making the Fremen into I-can’t-believe-they’re-not-Arabs and instead showed them having a unique culture that had echoes of Native American and Mongolian and high tech culture as well. The 2000 miniseries whiffed on exactly that count, and basically turned the Fremen into Muslims with really nothing unique.
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Lynch, I suppose. It's pretty campy but I agree that its commitment to the foreignness of the Duniverse is appreciated.
I don't think it's fair to call him a villain, and I don't think Herbert ever did so (though I could be wrong about that!). I seem to remember Herbert suggesting that Paul is an anti-hero, and that Dune Messiah was intended to bring that out a bit more clearly. Paul is solving some very big problems, but he's doing it by throwing a lot of bodies into the meat grinder of war. Far, far better to be ruled by Paul than by the Harkonnens! And yet. The brutality of nature is one of the biggest themes of the texts, along with the threat of predation. It's a deeply Darwinian story, and these days people are nervous about thinking too hard about Darwinism as it continues to apply to human evolution.
You know, I mentioned it before here, but to me the entire Dune franchise was about the human condition being stretched to a breaking point. About human shaped pegs being hammered into horrifyingly shaped holes not meant for them. But then again, it's been probably 15 years since I last read them. I should probably take them for a spin again.
That's my take too; it's in a random OCB quote: Thou shalt not mutilate the human soul.
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A film adaptation of Alia would be difficult. Casting children is difficult enough, casting a child who is supposed to behave like Alia at the age of 2 or 3 seems impossible. I'm sure they did some exploratory casting to see if they could make it work. They would either need to age her up or age her down, and I think it makes sense to do the latter and I'm sure we'll see her in the next movie.
Agree on the brutality of the Harkonnens being understated, "casually kills underlings" is a trope I find pretty boring, demonstrate their brutality in other ways!
Paul is not a failed Messiah, he's a failed Übermensch in the Nietzschean sense. There's an important distinction and I do think Herbert was influenced by Nietzsche.
I don't know. If anything, Paul succeeds at being the Übermensch, insofar as he eventually decides to act in accordance with his own desires, rather than in accordance with his visions. He refuses to become a slave to the survival of humanity. His apparent ability to see the Golden Path means that he knows someone has to become God Emperor. He decides to not do that. Leto II steps up to the task; to dedicate one's own vast superhuman lifespan to the good of mankind is Messianic, not Übermenschian.
Paul's humanitarian preoccupations drain his will-to-power, whereas in Nietzsche's conception those things are overcome by the Ubermensch. Leto II becomes that ultra-aristocratic figure who transcends morals and directs the evolution of mankind at his will. Paul embodies the humanitarian Messiah, Leto II is the ultra-aristocratic God Emperor.
Yeah, you've definitely got it exactly backward. Remember, the Übermensch is the "man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength." Paul is undoubtedly strong, but he is ultimately self-regarding; he doesn't want to be the one to save humanity, he doesn't want to pay the price, so--he doesn't. Leto II does direct the evolution of mankind "at his will," he doggedly (one might say "slavishly") pursues the Golden Path, which is not his choice but merely the product of perfect prescience. Leto II us ultimately unfree. Arguably this is also by choice, so you could argue that he is also a kind of Übermensch, and I'd maybe buy it. But to say Paul had "humanitarian preoccupations" seems like a mistake; Leto II was the one who framed his own death as a gift to his species.
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