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Dune Part 2 was great (warning: spoilers) and thoughts on Dune universe
HBD nerds can be overly obsessed with SNPs and IQ distributions, blank slatists are blind to primordial truths of material reality, but the Dune universe properly understands Civilization as the volatile interaction between the gene pool and meme pool. I am happy to report that Dune Part II does justice to the book and is the best movie I've seen in theaters for as long as I can remember.
There is not much to complain about in terms of Wokeism. There was some bad casting in the first movie for characters that don't appear in this installment. Right Wing Twitter is complaining about the the love interest, Chani, being unattractive and the transition of her character to being a warrior who is skeptical of the cult percolating around Paul. This is probably the biggest change from the book, arguably necessary because Paul's internal conflict would be difficult to depict so it was written as an external conflict with his love interest.
The other complaint from the Christian nationalist side is that the movie and Dune universe are a critique of religiosity, which is only partially true. But in this case, the antagonists are godless heathens, and it's the victorious protagonist who is associated with religiosity, which is inverted from the traditional Hollywood critique of Christianity.
What Paul, the Fremen, the Empire, the Harkonens, etc. represent in terms of pattern-matching to reality or history is open to interpretation. I saw one right-winger on Twitter complain about the Dune universe as a celebration of the Islamic conquest of Western civilization. It's true the Fremen are aesthetically coded as Arabic, and Herbert actually does use the word "Jihad" in the book to denote the cults and its conquests across the universe, for example Paul "thought then of the Jihad, of the gene mingling across parsecs..."
But Paul is an avatar of all Abrahamic religion: he's the synthesis of Moses who leads his people through the desert to salvation, the dying-and-rising Jesus, and Mohammed the conqueror. And of course Paul Atreides, played by Timothée Chalamet who is half-Jewish, is named after the Jew Paul of Tarsus, "a Pharisee, born of Pharisees", who became the Christian apostle to the Gentiles. Which must bring us to the Bene Gesserit, the order in the Dune universe which manipulates imperial politics by consciously crossing bloodlines and planting the seeds of religious myth.
Of course Christians accept the revelation of Paul of Tarsus on the Road to Damascus. But if we assume that this did not happen, the alternate story of Paul's conversion and ministry is going to be closer to the Bene Gesserit of Dune than the Road to Damascus. The surface-level reading of the Bene Gesserit is that they are just a caricature of the adage that religion is a mechanism for controlling people. But the deeper reading is that the Bene Gesserit are a depiction of the mechanism by which religion creates people and directs the gene people through the use of memes (in the story, their "voice" alone can literally command someone to unconsciously obey their will).
This also leads into my broader interpretation of Religion, which has unfairly become synonymous with Abrahamic religion. In my mind, Religions are memes that direct the gene pool. So something like "Diversity is Our Strength" is a Religion not because "I'm an edgy atheist and I don't like 'Diversity is Our Strength' so I'm going to call it a religion to insult people who agree with it." It's a religion because there are people consciously directing the population to internalize this value, and this value subsequently leads to planned, massive overhauls in the gene pool of civilization.
I am fundamentally sympathetic to the Bene Gersserit. Which memes would direct civilization on a better trajectory? How would we counter memes that are hostile to our mission? You might be able to wander out of the cave, but its neither possible nor desirable to force that onto everyone else. Consciously directing the memes is the solution, not trying to make people impervious to their influence (an impossible task- postmodernism only created its own Religious grand-narrative).
Paul is squarely a representation of Abrahamic religion, but the meaning of House Atreides and House Harkonnen is less clear. I interpret the conflict between those houses as the European or Aryan duality embodied in the Apollonian and Dionysian motif in Greek tragedy with, of course, House Atreides embodying the Apollonian: "...rational thinking and order, and appeals to logic, prudence and purity and stands for reason" and House Harkonnen the Dionysian: "... wine, dance and pleasure, of irrationality and chaos, representing passion, emotions and instincts".
The relation of this conflict to Greek myth is directly alluded to in the Lore, according to which House Atreides is descended from King Agamemnon of House Atreus. Furthermore, the patriarch is named Duke Leto Atreides, and Apollo is the son of Leto, who is consort to Zeus. It is revealed in the story that Paul is related to the Harkonnens, which harkens to this duality in Aryan myth, a duality which was "often entwined by nature" according to the ancient Greeks.
The Roman Empire is likewise the best historical representation of this duality between the Apollonian and Dionysian, with the Imperial throne becoming increasingly symbolic of the Dionysian aspect as the Roman Empire declined until.... the conversion to Christianity.
On the one hand, the Dionysian excess is pruned by an ascetic desert cult. But does that actually make way for the resurgence of the Apollonian? Paul tries to keep a foot in both camps, proclaiming himself both Duke of House Atreides as well as the Fremen Messiah. I won't spoil how that turns out.
The movie was really great, it hit on all the big points which I interpreted from the books. The visual and sound design was stellar, it's a must-see in theaters.
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.
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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