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I haven't seen the Dune films, but it does sound to me like there are a lot of things missing from them that are extremely important to the text, such as Frank Herbert's weird psychosexual theories, or the entire Arabic/Islamic/Middle Eastern element - I think they steered away from the word jihad? And I remember glancing at the cast list and being shocked by, well, pretty much every casting, as well as the total absence of Middle Eastern actors. It looks to me like every single human ethnicity is in those films except for the ones that are actually appropriate. I don't know how you take a story that's about a Greek family falling in with Arabic tribespeople in order to overthrow a Persian emperor and manage to not cast a single person who looks remotely Greek, Arabic, or Persian.
Oscar Isaac (Leto) was probably the most "Middle Eastern" looking cast member, but he's Guatemalan
IMO, Javier Bardem "passes," but now that he mentions it, it is weird that there are no obviously Middle Eastern cast members. The Fremen are all either black, Mediterranean, or mixed race (like Zendaya).
I'm not watching the films until using generative AI someone fixes that. Fremen not being a single race after spending thousands of years isolated on a planet with no caste system of their own is ludicrous.
Also Zendaya has to go. It's not that she's half black, it's that she's actually ugly. Incomprehensible casting decision.
They are a planetary population spread across most of Arrakis. In real life our planetary population has not blended into one race.
To be fair, the book feels like it takes place across an area no larger than maybe Arizona at the outside. There's no indication of cultural variation.
In fairness, I think even the book's appendices and such almost tacitly imply that it might as well be Arizona's population stretched over an entire planet.
It never really feels like a planet. Travel distance is never relative, only we're going to the city, we're going to the desert, never we're going to this place which is twice the distance as this other place. There's only one city, and really only two or three tribal Pueblos that matter.
There's the city, the former sietch they take temporary refuge in (in the first movie), Sietch Tabr, that spot (temple?) where Jessica drank the water of life, but there's also the South, which is literally the southern hemisphere, inaccessible unless you have some way of getting past the storms (like, I dunno, spaceships? Even Feyd Rautha didn't think of that). I got the impression the abandoned sietch was rather close to Arrakeen, Sietch Tabr and the temple were a bit further and near each other, and the South really damn far away.
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