Dune: Part Two – First Look(vanityfair.com) |
Dune: Part Two – First Look(vanityfair.com) |
I always felt it would be best as a limited series so there was more time to expand on the characters / story / world and that movie runtimes - even though they're getting longer - just aren't a good medium for complex stories like this that rely on heavy background and backstory
HBO paved the way for high value high production series, seems like a more natural fit to a complex story like Dune
I will say I'm one of the people that really like it. I'm a big fan of the first Dune book and I think it does a great job of being true to the story. It's visually stunning and the score is perfect. My only gripe (and it's a big one) is that the cut the dinner scene. I don't understand that choice at all, but it wasn't enough to ruin the whole movie for me.
People that I know who don't like it think it's slow and that nothing really happens. And they're right. It also just awkwardly cuts off in the middle, so it doesn't feel like a complete movie. As a fan of the book, that didn't bother me too much because I realize it's just half the story and they can't make a 6 hour movie. But it is jarring, especially if you aren't already familiar with the plot.
And you are 100% correct that this would be better suited as an HBO miniseries. There's just way too much to cram into a movie. If you haven't checked out SyFy's miniseries and the Children of Dune miniseries, they are surprising good given the low budget SyFy had for it (compared to Villeneuve's budget at least).
[1]: The DVD copy of Dune I bought at the store many years ago has a cover with visible JPEG artefacts. It's a perfect cover.
Similarly, in the book the time period between the arrival of House Atreides on Dune and the subsequent invasion is much longer and has many other side-stories going on, all of which are eliminated in the movie. Including all that material would require a HBO Game of Thrones type approach, with each book consuming an entire season.
Deciding which material is the most important must have been a hard decision, but I think they did a very good job considering the limits of the movie format, and the overall atmospherics felt just right.
Personally I'd like to see a David Attenborough-style special on "Dune: The Ecology of the Sandworm Life-Cycle" but it's not likely.
I just wish some of the sets were a bit more dense. The room for the Gom Jabbar scene, the Bene Gesserit walking back to the ship, cone of silence scene, and especially the palace fight on the stairs. Kinda gave my Sky Captain vibes.
I also don't like cutting the tension between Jessica and Thufir, although if Thufir doesn't end up under the Baron I guess I get it.
The parts which bothered me were the Zendaya slow-mo flash-forwards being too long and too frequent with no substance, and Lady Jessica crying far more than reasonable for the character I remember.
> HBO paved the way for high value high production series,
HBO also paved the way to the superficialization of the stories of those series, the loss of themes and the reversion to sort of base storytelling patterns.
Completely agree. Modern TV is excellent in many ways – I think it's great at showing complex inter-character relationships and "politics" over long running stories, telling stories that are just a bit more complex than a 2.5 hour film, and things like cinematography have become really good.
But I don't think it's good at capturing the peak of the art of film-making. Dune is a subtle story in many ways, it doesn't really need 8-10 hours for a miniseries, it needs ~4-5 hours of really considered storytelling. The cinematography in the first film, like Villenueves other films, is also a cut above modern TV.
One thing that really bothered me is that the movie had Gurney Hallack warn Paul not to sit with his back to the door rather than Thufir Hawat. In the book, this was an important early scene because it's a setup for Thufir's death scene at the end, when he says, "The universe is full of doors." Of course Thufir's death hasn't been shown yet in the movies, but they already degraded it somewhat.
There were other changes that bothered me too. IIRC there was something crucial missing from the gom jabbar scene that left out a big part of the motivation for it. I don't remember all the details now. (Edit: Now I remember. The Reverend Mother explained that an animal would gnaw off its own leg to escape the trap. In the book, she explains that a human would fake death and kill the trapper to eliminate a threat to its kind. Whereas in the movie, she just says "What will you do?" WTF?!?) I stopped the movie after a half hour or so. I didn't see the point, when the book is so much better.
The acting in Dune is simply excellent. Everyone brought their A-game. The cinematography, special effects and soundtrack are all excellent. The screenplay is surprisingly very similar to the 1984 film.
He is currently 27 - which is a lot older than Paul is supposed to be?
The possibility of having something better does not make this movie bad.
If you can go into it accepting that: not everything will be covered, the book has lots of internal thoughts and little action which doesn't work well on a screen, the politics part was not skipped but wasn't given lots of time either - I think you'll have a good time.
Edit: Visually - it's amazing.
However I've also done a complete 180 on the book itself. I think there are just too many holes in the logistics of the Dune world for me to keep up the suspension of disbelief as an adult.
Given that, I'm pretty neutral towards the movies as the book adaptations. I hope they don't take the source material too seriously actually, because the source is honestly not as captivating to me as an adult as it used to be as a teenager.
No. (the first one, haven't seen the second)
This "Dune" is not good. It's pretty, but stupid.
For one thing, just one little thing, what's the Baron's guy's name? Not the Feyd-Ruatha/Raban amalgam. The mentat.
No one says Piter's name!? If you haven't read the book you wouldn't know WhoTF that character is.
- - - -
I could go on and on, but what I really want to say, what I want future filmmakers to hear, is just this:
Just film the book.
Don't change the dialog, don't change the characters, don't add scenes and for fuck's sake don't delete any! Just film the book. Don't second guess Frank Herbert. He lucked out, made a masterpiece, and a whole Universe so real you can taste it. (the rest of the series not so much, but "Dune" itself is a window onto an alternate Universe.) You wouldn't hack up Shakespeare, you're not going to improve on Dune. Just film the book.
Whew! That was bottled up for a while.
This is an impossible request. Movies are fundamentally different from books, they have different languages and cadences, different historical developments, different audiences, different expectations and traditions and tropes.
If you want to read the book, read the book. The film adapted from that book might not be for you and that’s okay.
> You wouldn’t hack up Shakespeare. . .
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of the greatest comedies of the modern era, and it gave us The Lion King 1 1/2, one of the greatest animated films made after the Disney Renaissance.
That would be one weird movie given how much the characters in Dune think about things rather than talk about them. There are important conversations of course, but... there would be a lot of "Paul thinking about the future" voiceover.
Peter Jackson would disagree. If you can't get it done in a single "getting longer" movie runtime, just make it into 3. Harry Potter did it in 2, Twilight did it in 2, etc. So the precedent of using multiple movies is there.
That's how we got The Hobbit series, which were getting a bit too thin/stretched IMHO. LoTR as three worked, maybe Hobbit as two could have been better (was a love triangle really needed?)
This particular iteration is trying to be far smarter than necessary or useful. If you watch the some Youtube breakdowns (not sure why you would - eg Why Dune's Editing Feels Different), you'll see that there are attempts to artfully inform the audience about things from the book through indirect means. Does it work? No. As a movie, it's pretty at times, but middling as an adaptation.
Fantastic stoner movie
For my $.02, it's a great film. I loved it; we have a cheap IMAX in our city and I must have seen it there a dozen times, and then a few times at home later. Greig Fraser was a fine stand in for Deakins, which was a relief. I love the look of the Lynch film, expected to remember it better than the DenVil designs, but then the new movie surprised me by topping even Tony Masters' fantastic Lynchian fever dream.
As the film tells a story, however, it has some weaknesses[1] that it inherits from the text, and doesn't really completely dig itself out from those. Which is bad - that's an adaptation's only job - and it might explain the sort of empty feeling the movie leaves you with. The worst of this is the choice of ending point: probably the vision in the tent would have been the latest possible moment to do a solid ending, IMO. That single change would have made the movie 10-20% better, and is the lowest hanging fruit. It still baffles me, because Dennis is no idiot, and I wonder if the payoff is next movie.
Another is the character count from the books. I'm going to say some bad things now, so get ready: the characters of Gurney and Duncan should probably have been amalgamated into a Duncan Halleck. There's zillions of other places to do things like this, because Dune is littered with characters who don't appreciably advance the story and disappear after Book 1; Shadout Mapes and Chani could, I think, be realistically amalgamated, and it would be a kick in the pants when you learn the housekeeper is daughter of Liet. Yeah, the book fans are gonna be pissed, but they were going to be pissed no matter what you did, because unlike LotR the novel is a young adult / coming of age story and people get weird about those. I've had friends screaming about the "missing dinner scene" for a year now.
Something more abstract, too, is the lack of an object - metaphorical or physical - that the danger revolves around. Lynch's film dealt with this via several devices: the signet ring, the weirding modules. Dennis' film does not. Now, disclaimer. Dune as a giant metaphor rejects, in its own way, narrative as a generic concept, or at least the heroic narrative, so you have to bite your lip and wonder if this lack is intentional, and Dennis chose to push that absence forward as a metaphor. But metaphor tricks in storytelling only work if they leave the movie's skeleton to function; push them too hard (like, IMO, The Lobster did, critic tonguebaths notwithstanding) and a film can fall apart, like a sloppy abstraction.
[0] This is "Hacker News", after all, and if there's one thing that's core to the word "hacker" it's "text".
[1] "Weaknesses" from a movie perspective, where time is the most critical resource. Vs a book or video game, which can - and does! - stay engaging even when the main character is going to the bathroom, or climbing a mountain, or chopping garlic.
I particularly appreciate hearing someone other than me point out that Dune is very much not the hero’s journey. The first book sure rhymes with it, with some odd dissonant notes if that’s all you’re expecting. I loved the Lynch movie, but it basically leaned into the hero’s journey on acid, so it worked (for my adolescent self) as a movie, but was clearly not something hewing to the point of the series.
I feel like this new take is much more likely to capture the ambiguity of operating at the scale of galactic civilization rapture and stasis. We’ll have to see the next film to know!
I am shocked every time I hear people be surprised that the dinner scene was removed. There’s no way to translate that scene to film in a way viewers could understand, and I don’t get why people feel it was so load bearing to the novel.
Curious to see what other tid-bits from the book they will keep in part 2. Hopefully we can see some Fremen Sietches.
On another note, I've always wanted to write a load tester library, I would call it Gom Jabbar. If the service falls over it fails the test.
The biggest miss was Villeneuve not including Dr. Yueh's conversation with Lady Jessica that provides more context to why he did what he did.
(Emphasis mine.)
This is a very funny summary.
I of course understand the nature of media reporting and the constraints of a piece like this. And so far Villeneuve has shown himself to be as trustworthy as they come with themes more complex than base moral plays.
But, still funny.
> better off as crusaders rather than jihadis
At the risk of sounding edgy, I'm not sure I see the distinction between these two things? My impression of Herbert is that the pseduo-arabism that he draped over his themes didn't serve as a moral judgement or a stand-in for motivation, but to provide some remove for his immediate audience (lot of assumptions in that phrase I realize) so that they can examine morality without getting immediately defensive?
He seemed interested in discussing Religion, the phenomenon. Not the phenomenon of a particular real instantiation.
Or is that what you meant, too?
Even re-releasing The Fifth Element would trigger this, I think. Or The Exorcist, with the first sound being a muezzin blaring Allahu Akbar.
Chapter 16:
* https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/dune/summary/...
(I have nothing against good fanfic.)
Kevin Anderson is a mediocre sci-fi writer, but those books are so much worse than his worse non-Dune books.
I read the first Brian Herbert book when it came out. Didn't bother with any since (life is too short).
Are you referring to Paul's visions of future jihad? That is definitely in the novel. Paul takes advantage of the Fremen seeing him as their Mahdi, and uses their zeal to fight the Harkonnen, avenge his family, and win control of the Imperium, all the while having visions of a future bloody galactic-scale jihad, which he struggles with, ultimately causing him to leave The Path, and in the sequel, become The Preacher.
The 2022 screenplay is more or less identical to the 1984 screenplay, scene for scene, except for giving Duncan Idaho his due, at which the 1984 film notably failed. They did not reinvent the wheel here, and I don't blame them. It would be a daunting task.
And yeah, no dinner scene, and no conservatory, as far as story telling beats
We still haven't met the Emperor or his Daughter, the Imperial Court (beyond an emissary. No dinner party means no Fenrig and Margot), the Guild (as political players) CHOAM? (I forget if it's even mentioned). All of these could be worked in (and it seems like they will be given we see casting of Irulan at the very least), but you can imagine a version of the story that is less concerned with the broader politicking than it is with the action on Arrakis.
They also fundamentally changed the nature of Kynes' death. So it is possible they are not even interested in (or, to be kinder, that they feel they don't have time for) the planetological lifecycle of the worms and the spice. That it will serve only as a mcguffin. But that's pure speculation.
No.
Also: no confrontation scene between Jessica and Gurney.
"Jihad" also has a much-broader meaning than "crusade" without needing to reach into figurative senses of the word, which colors the whole thing rather differently.
[EDIT] Oh, and the book pretty clearly draws fairly heavily from Lawrence's Seven Pillars (at least a couple scenes or sequences are practically lifted from it, aside from the general vibe and structure of an untested officer from lush England being sent to a distant desert, proving himself among the locals, gaining insight during a nigh-fatal fever, and playing a major role in leading them against a superior occupying force while leaning heavily on the local forces' distinct mobility & supply advantages, with the ultimate goal and final culmination of the project in the taking of a major capital city) and downplaying the Muslim elements of the Fremen pushes that aside a bit, which is... fine, I guess, but not exactly an improvement.
My own personal speculation is that the provocative nature of the word Jihad wasn’t actually the main controversy they were trying to avoid. I think the pagan nature of the Fremen, and the depiction of Paul as the Mahdi would be far more objectionable to a Muslim audience. But in any case it shows a lack of courage from the filmmakers. Rather disappointing imo.
But I do agree that that particular axis is one of the weaker parts of the adaptation. Though I'm not convinced personally it subverts the theme entirely; just maybe skips a few steps.
My wife and all my friends loved it.