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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   2762 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 12, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I just finished watching Dune 2 and took some notes while doing so. Notes, not an essay, so what you get is a jumble of thoughts.

  • The Director turned a fanciful book that made little sense into a visually impressive film that makes even less. All visual spectacle.
  • Present-day politics clearly present and accounted for. White people bad, the whiter the worse. Paul and Jessica are presented as outright villains, and Chani is the moral center of the story.
  • Soundtrack with people suddenly screaming in fantasy-arabic, ouch, my ears.
  • Emperor: A fucking joke.
  • Chani, if it weren't rude I'd say she's an ugly bitch.
  • Irulan - the acting suited the character, the speech did not, the looks did not at all.
  • Margot Fenring, Lady Jessica, Alia, pretty actresses, decent acting.
  • Fight scenes: Absolute trash. Ridiculous acrobatics VS completely passive victim-badguys. Harkonnens, Sardaukar, no matter, they just stand around dumbfounded and do some slow-motion waving once per scene, while the Fremen breakdance all over the place. And of course the Fremen have regular guns and use them...from off-screen at impossible angles, but not when it would actually make sense. None of the fighting makes sense!
  • Lasers and metal-storm like helicopter door guns looked nice though.
  • Sardaukar standing around in the desert sun in triumph-of-the-will formation.
  • Worst of all: The boots. Floppily open-topped boots in a sandy desert. Ouch. Luckily it wasn't all of the characters who wore them, but I still pitied the ones who did.
  • The Fremen hideouts are...giant highly visible architecture. How stupid exactly were the Harkonnens? Do the people of the future just not believe in reconnaissance? Same for the Fremen having a massive but completely unnoticed troop buildup just around the corner from the Emperor's army. Everything is so damn visible! But then the Fedaykin just dig themselves out of the sand at the feet of the army, so I guess nothing needs to make sense anyways.
  • Javier Bardem, I don't know if he's a good actor at all. I don't know. Feels like he's phoning it in, or was never much good to begin with and I overrated him so far because I'm a Cormac McCarthy fanboy. Or maybe he is good, but the movie is such overrated tripe that he falls flat.
  • The final duel between Paul and Feyd-Rautha is...meh. Not as bad as the one-sided fights preceding it, but it looks like stage fighting 101, with nothing but flashy, highly-visible moves meant to be easy to counter. Makes sense for a movie, of course, but still looks something in between silly and boring.
  • Now, to be fair, Dune is difficult material to work with, because it made little sense even as a book. But this is just...all shape, no substance.

A thousand apologies for a worthless post, worthlessly posted, but I needed to put it somewhere.

Present-day politics clearly present and accounted for. White people bad, the whiter the worse. Paul and Jessica are presented as outright villains, and Chani is the moral center of the story.

I wouldn't agree on Paul but it did occur to me that Jessica, due to the movies downplaying how much her going AWOL (and kicking off the deaths of everyone as a result) was about love , really comes across as vastly more malevolent not just in this movie but in the first one too.

Did they explain the original BG plan in the books? They were going to marry Paula off to Fred to breed back to the harkonnen bloodline, but would the emperor not have joined the conspiracy if Atredes only had a daughter?

Yes. And their male child would unite the Atreides and Harkonnen families. The emperor has no male children. His daughter would be married to this person.

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