f13.net

Trailer out

https://youtu.be/k1kYk_awXVg

Inappropriate use of Floyd. 10 yard penalty.

I'm much cooler to this than I was. I'm tired of Momoa, he's the same thing in everything he does. The Fremen and Rabban seem very well cast though. I dig Isaac for Leto, too.

I....actually agree?

I don't have strong opinions on Dune. This looks fine, but it also seems like a lot to cram into one movie.

I also don't imagine myself going to a movie theatre in 2020. No thank you.

Hmmm.

Looked somewhat well done, though it is always hard to say from a trailer.

Though I must say, the gom jabbar looking like a fucking pen is a stupid design choice.

That and the loud sound effects when it went to Paul's throat. There are some silly decisions here.

Isn't it described as a needle?

Also, wasn't Floyd on tap to do a soundtrack for an earlier optioning of Dune?

I don't see any scenes past Paul being with Chani, I'm pretty sure this is part 1 of two films. Not quite sure where they'll break it. I would guess that the attack on the Atreides is the big set-piece of movie 1 with the aftermath being the falling action. Looks like quite a few scenes on Caladan to start.

Jodorowsky's Dune was exploring lots of prog rock groups, I think Floyd was one of the groups that was high on the list.

Yeah it is supposed to be two parts.

Looks fine. Villeneuve is worthy. Wish there was some Brian Eno in the score (may be).

I heard that this movie is only the first half of the book.

I wonder how they will depict the Guild Navigators.

That trailer was desperate to cause the tinglies and failed miserably.  ANGST overload.  The movie may be better than the trailer, but that trailer was weak.

You jaded motherfuckers. That trailer was great and Denis Villeneuve is an amazing director. My only fear for this movie isn't the quality, it'll be outstanding. My worry is it'll make like $5 in the theaters and we won't get part 2.

It is described almost exactly the way it was shown in the David Lynch version. A tiny needle attached to a finger. Not a giant fucking fountain pen held in the hand.

To things the trailer shows "right", Paul and Chani are a lot closer to the age they should be compared to previous screen adaptations. They actually look like teenagers rather than 20-somethings.

I think it was pretty cool, at any rate.

The interesting thing is to take Paul and Chani from teenager to burnt-out prophet and queen mother in the time frame of 3-4 movies, if they get that far. But they can definitely take Paul and Chani from "tell me of your homeworld" to "I am the emperor of the galaxy" in two movies.

I dont think the Arrival and Blade Runner tone works for Dune, and I don't like the tone or colour palate of this trailer.

Its just a trailer. The movie might still be good. It won't be close to my Dune though.

They have to pitch this to non-Dune fans, which they did.  I'm stoked as hell for this.

Fun fact, Paul/Chani actors from both this and Lynch's are basically the same age at the time of filming (24/25 ish). These two just look younger.

I didn't see anything in terms of color palette that you could imaginably say "Oh man that's not Dune". Like, what, not orange enough on Arrakis all the time? Caladan needs to be more blue? I actually think saving a much more orange palette for Arrakis for the deep desert that shows up in the second half is really smart (and also needed for the melange deposits).

One thing I realllllly liked was that they got the shields-and-knife-fighting perfectly right--the look of that was fantastic. I also liked the look of the Sardaukar (I assume that's them coming down on ropes).

It was just …. so … strained, grimdark, emo, and saccharine fake.  They may have lost the weight of the scenes in the trailers due to edits, but I felt like the guy cutting it thought that trailer was the best thing since Twilight. 

The whispered lines, the lingering glances, the emotionless faces, the silent screams... Replace the lead with Edward Cullen and it would be seamless.

And they do not have the message that big special effects like the sandworm are no longer the big thing... we get that for TV shows now.  if you do not have awesome special effects, you're under the bar.  If the big reveal of your trailer is that you can make a worm,

Maybe the actual film has more gravitas, but that was just a huge fail in my books. 

Not enough Patrick Stewart.  :why_so_serious:

Strained, grimdark and emo?

Have you read Dune? I mean, I love the book, but that's the mood throughout, man. It's gigantically pretentious (in the best way), there's ominous prophecy dripping from every scene, it's a teenager dreaming (accurately) that he will not only become ruler of an entire galaxy but is also a kind of genetic superbeing, it's a teenage prince from a water planet dreaming of a teenage desert nomad who will be his wife and love, it's a prince being trained to fight assassins while also being (secretly) trained in the hidden martial and mental arts of an ancient female priesthood. It's characters who speak in grandiose profundities even when they're basically just bodyguards or soldiers. There isn't a single rounded relatively ordinary human being anywhere in the entire story--even the fucking housekeeper is a spy who provides crucial intelligence to Paul and Jessica.

Dude, just take jgsugden's doomcasting as a ringing endorsement of its actual quality and move on.   :why_so_serious:

There is a difference between grimdark and having stakes.
There is a difference between emo and emotional.
There is a difference between straining out that crap that rips you hole open, and letting the big boy slide out to release the pressure.

We'll see.

That looks pretty good.

I don't think I've read the books in 20 years.

100% with Khaldun here the source material is dripping in grand melodramatic emo nonsense that its a wonder why the series wasn't being sold in 90s hot topic with Crow merchandise.

So you want your Twilight? Enjoy.

That worm was for the fans. Come on man. Most fans were spending the whole trailer going "I need to see a sand worm!"

Anyway, I find your ranting about it hilarious. I didn't get any of that shit you did out of the trailer.

It's almost like you just want to remain willfully ignorant of the source material and its tone.

The trailer was fine - it even had some good moments, and the use of the Floyd song was great (but that's among some of my favorite Floyd music of all time, so I'm biased). My only criticism is that is seems a little too much like just a modern visual update of the 1984 movie, which again, is fine but less interesting than I hoped. However, it's Villaneuve, and his visual sense is just stunning, so I'll go with it. I may not have liked Blade Runner 2049 but it was aesthetically brilliant.

Go watch it again. Drink every time you have whispered lines, lingering glances, stoic/emotionless faces, or silent screams.  Don't plan on driving anywhere soon.

Said my peace.  Enjoy.

Thanks for confirming you haven't read Dune.

This is a book where the main character repeats that litany in the trailer multiple times both aloud and in his own thoughts: I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Where people repeat grandiose scripture, prophecies, political formalisms, etc to one another instead of basic ordinary emotional relationships. Where a mother and son relate primarily more in political terms than they do emotional ones--in fact where they both know they must not simply appear like a mother and son.

Where many lines are whispered and conspiracies abound. Where literally--no joke--some people have been trained to communicate with one another simply through facial expressions. Where the training the main character has gone through is precisely to be able to be stoic or emotionless at need, and where many of the local people are equally deliberately impassive. Where the silent scream is literally on the fucking page: if Paul actually screams in that scene, he will not only die, he will bring his father's guards and very likely get his mother killed as well for having had him in the first place, something she wasn't supposed to do.

The movie may or may not be good, but every single thing you're upset by is a direct translation of page to screen. You're just saying that you don't like Dune. Which is fine, but don't blame the movie.

Read the book. It would be one thing if your arguing that a retelling of the 1965 story should be modernize for 2020 sensibilities, its entirely different and quite frankly moronic thing to insist that the emo/grim dark tone of the trailer isn't 125% the franchise. A teenage boy talks about a unleashing a galactic genocide with the same emotion as someone ordering a mcflurry.

No, it’s grimmer than that.  He doesn’t want to unleash the genocide, he wants desperately to avoid it.  But circumstance continually hems him in until he finally accepts his role in the galactic jihad.  If he didn’t the jihad would become even worse.

I do agree with JGSugden that the trailer feels very by-the-book for this decade.  Yes, the source material justifies everything we see, but that doesn’t mean the end result of the editing process wasn’t a trailer full of cliches, up to and including a slow/sad pop/rock song.

I still think the movie looks awesome, though.  Too bad we’ll never get the second half.

I'm sure they could read that... Likely decided to make it bigger so it was properly visible in certain zoomed out shots they were going for in the scene.

$54 for the kindle version box set. I think I am going to buy and read them again.

That seems extraordinarily expensive for six books you can find in most used book stores or grandparents’ neighbors’ estate sales.

We don't have room for anymore physical books. Plus our kindle plugs into my son's AR reading app and he can use my library for advanced reading credit in his class.

Damn I’m old.  I can’t get into kindles or ebooks or any of that. 

I can't either, don't feel bad. I have a Kindle and it rots. I love physical books. We have stacks of them in hallways and corners like a freaky wizard tower.

We have upwards of 4,500 books spread between the house and my office, so yeah. But I can read Kindle comfortable enough. There are times where I am very happy to have it--travelling it is a damn godsend. I think the main thing I goddamn hate about it is that I can't make a pdf of a chapter or two to assign in classes or for a colleague, which I can with a physical book--the basic IP situation of Kindles/ebooks is a fucking travesty and annoys me enough to keep me from really committing to it as a format.

Having moved twice in the last 3 years and likely to move again before too long, I'm over owning actual books.

Trailers are made by separate companies and the marketing department, not the director. Villenueve is apparently a very big fan of the book so I expect it to be very faithful to it for better or worse depending on where you stand on that (better in my opinion).  

And yes, the book is like the ur text of grim dark/emo sci-fi.  The entire narrative framing is based on pre-chapter stuff written after the events talking about how shitty it all was. Predestination is a bitch.

We don't do books anymore. I haven't bought a physical book in over a decade. My wife just moved to kindle books or digital with the library app.

Only exception is books for the kiddos.

I bought four hardbacks in the last 24 hours.

This is normal for  me.

 :thumbs_up:

My wife has had me giving away books by the Home Depot boxful.  I still probably have a couple thousand.

I tried getting I to ebooks a decade ago in the hopes I could consolidate, but just could not concentrate enough to get into anything that wasn’t at least partially visual, like an RPG book.  I found that I could read for pages and then just snap out of it and realize I wasn’t digesting what I was reading or visualizing it like I would if I were reading a real book.  And the temptation to use the device to just go on the internet for more instant gratification was a constant distraction.


But anyway, Dune. 
I like these visuals, but I found the Lynch movie more distinctive.  The books themselves slotted right into that era for descriptions of people, places and devices, so if it weren’t for the Lnch film giving Dune a specific texture when I visualized it, it would have been almost forgettable for me.

Between this trailer and recently rewatching the 1984 movie (it's on HBO!) it might be time for me to reread the novel.  Luckily I still have the paperback copy that my dad gave me ~20 years ago.   :drill:

I've read the book more than 10 times, and while I agree with the content of what you're saying Khal (and others), I still don't agree with the tone.

Dune is the hero's journey. It's dramatic with action and tension and wonderment. It's larger than life. For me the trailer has too much reserve.

If Dune was Leto's story, or Duncan Idaho's story, then then tone would fit. But the melancholy doesn't fit Paul. The plot might suit, the colours might suit, the feeling might suit... everything might suit "what actually happened"... but that's not the experience Paul see and feels and lives in Dune.

Dune is a very colonial book, and Paul is the colonial governor's son. His experience is at massive odds with that of his father, mother, etc. So while this might be a representation of the plot, it feels like it misses the point.

If this was a trailer for Dune Messiah then it would fit really well too.

However, that doesn't mean I'm saying the movie will be shit. Just probably quite a different telling of the story to the book.

I'm also not feeling the grimdark/emo aspects of the book, it never came across to me that way. If anything, it was less a "rise of an emperor" and more "rise of a messiah". The chapter heads of Irulan retelling the history of these times made it always feel more like a bible, less a history book. My perception, of course.

I would also like to agree with lamaros in an earlier post "It won't be close to my Dune though". Nobody's going to make the movie in my imagination, and this is one of the few books that won't change.

I didn't mind the tone of the trailer overall, aside from being very by-the-numbers.* But, I can't get over Paul's look specifically. I remember him starting the story as a stuffy, straight-laced noble desperate for Mom and Dad's approval, which doesn't come through at all with this Paul's messy mop of hair, tacky eyeliner, and complete lack of poise. Paul from the book never looked like he was about to declare "Fuck Batman."

I'll still see it.

*unexpected cover of a classic hit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAOdjqyG37A), indeed

This is an important takeaway.  The trailer house was very clearly going for a modern summer blockbuster vibe and that's fine, the movie can and should be judged separately.  The cast is fantastic and so is the director, so this is an automatic watch for me.  And anyway, would drifting from the books or the Lynch film be so bad if you're already intimately familiar with those?  There's an argument to be made that if those are all you want, go watch your director's cut Blu-Ray and move on?

On the visual look, outside of the aforementioned gom jabbar writing utensil and the sandworm's teeth being just stupidly long (I wonder if we can get them to redo the CGI like they did for the teeth in the Sonic the Hedgehog movie?) things seemed to be pretty decent.

While I love most of the production design of the David Lynch movie, there are some pieces like the Sardaukar uniforms which definitely were terrible and it looks like they may have done a good job with this new vision. I like that they kept most of the aesthetic of the Lynch version stillsuits.

I kinda liked this vision of the worms - I thought maybe they switched out teeth for something like baleen. For filtering through sand, it kinda makes sense. There's no animals on Arrakis for the worms to actually need teeth - but they do need to filter spice and sand.

Except for the whole fact that an important part of the story is the whole crysknife being the tooth of Shai-Hulud thing.

wow you people are fucked in the head

i may brave a theater for this and i was certainly never planning to do that any time soon. director is world class, cast looks great, crying that the needle is a pen is peak nerd fucklord for my week. bravo.

Truth. where you go with that thought feels like an insane reach.


this is the only halfway decent founded in something we actually saw complaint in the whole thread imo. but then again there wouldn't be a ton of scenes of that Paul no doubt and actors can act etc.

Yep I spaced on that. Good catch.

 In the book it's kind of a subtle side plot on them which ties analogously to the whole outworlders stumbling around the mysteries of Dune. I wouldn't be surprised if it is just entirely cut out of the film given the time and narrative limitations of the movie format compared to a book. Some sacrifices like that will likely have to be made to deliver a good movie.

The sandworm teeth are meant to make the sandworm' so pen mouth look like a giant eye staring down on Paul in that shot.  Or a butthole.

Boy, I didn't realize there were such strong opinions of Dune on F13!

I thought the trailer was perfect.  Everything about the ascetics, tone, actors.... everything about it was way closer to my internal vision of Dune than anything else I've seen before.  But boy, obviously a lot of people here read that book differently than I did.  Not to call out Lameros specifically, but I just thought it was interesting he said:
When I took away the exact opposite from the books.  For me, Leto and Duncan are very much the classic hero's you'd expect from a fantasy sci-fi.  They'd fit the usual tropes and more action/upbeat style.  Paul though is a moody teen with a lot of fucked up mental shit done to him since birth and the start of the book.  Trying to come to grips with that just as his family is thrown into some major turmoil and he goes through a lot more trauma as the book progresses on top of fucked up mental shit coming from is mom.  The tone of this trailer for me was much more on  point for him specifically.  I have a similar disconnect with a lot of other comments about it in this thread, so I just find the contrasts interesting.  To each their own, but I was not tracking this movie at all to this point ('oh god, another Dune attempt!') and now I'm more excited for it than anything else for a long time now.

Just realized the word Spice was never mentioned. 1/10, will not watch.

But spice was shown in the last frames of the trailer.

I really don't get the proposition that Dune is not melancholy or that Paul's journey is the conventional hero's journey.

He is not Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker or Taran. All of them may have sad things happen on their journeys, but when they triumph and come into their own, they defeat Voldemort, the Emperor, or Arawn Deathlord. He's not even Frodo, who ends up badly hurt but who at least (with Sam's help and Gollum's accidental own goal) sees Sauron overthrown.

Paul wins out but he's in a trap from the very beginning--that's the point, his entire journey is a gom jabbar ordeal. He doesn't cry out; he doesn't gnaw off his own hand. He is not an animal. He knows he's in a trap. He knows that the spice agony will make him a messiah and he knows that being a messiah is a tragedy not a victory. It's just better than all the other tragedies he can see. He already knows his sister is a monster, that his child will be an abomination, that his rule will be tyrannical and the rulers to follow even more so. Just...that it's better than the alternatives. That makes him a protagonist--he is more righteous than his enemies, who are treacherous and sadistic. He is more skilled and disciplined than his subjects--that makes him a target of reader identification and desire. But he himself is deeply melancholy and portentously so throughout. Maybe teenagers are so emo that they don't pick up that Paul's melancholy is way more than Harry Potter sulking because Snape is mean and his parents are dead. Paul is a prophet who knows his story ends up with him a wandering and bitter prophet in the wilderness, helpless against an immortal tyranny that is the direct consequence of Paul's own actions--but knowing it's necessary because the alternative is the extinction of all humanity.

Herbert didn't mean to celebrate Paul's journey--that was always a major theme that he insisted on in interviews, that Paul's story is both tragic for Paul and an indication of our tragic reliance on charismatic political leaders.

This guy Dune's.

Dune is one of those series of books that I pick up and binge on every 2-3 years (including the not-so-good-but-perfectly-readable prequels). There is nothing about the trailer that makes me not want to see the movie. It looks great.

TBH, I'd like to see the prequels picked up and turned into a TV series - the back history to the Harkonnen as heroes and the link to the Atreides descended from the Cymeks kept me interested, whereas when the man series got to the Honoured Matres, I lost interest.

It's certainly not a hero's journey in a conventional sense. But I don't think it strays that far, especially if you're going on the text, not the plot. It's still Paul's coming of age tale in the first book. He's still a hero in the first book. He knows it won't last. But the book ends before it follows through.

Paul is tortured, not melancholy. There's a huge difference in tone there, which is where I disagree with you. His dad is fatalistic and melancholy. Idaho is depressed. Jessica is angry. But Paul, even with the prophecy, has energy and activity. He's as excited as he is afraid, and as unsure as he is certain. Paul's "way more" is not coming across in that trailer for me. It has a petty gravity to it, not grandeur.

But this is all a lot of talk off very little.

https://twitter.com/JTramiers/status/1306718521230012417

Must have sound up.

I'm going to try to read these books again. My last effort was a long time ago and I stalled on the 3rd book I think.

https://twitter.com/JTramiers/status/1306733625405304832

Even better.

------------------------------

Do NOT try to read past the 3rd book.

Read Dune Messiah quickly, it's not very good. It's really kind of like afterword to Dune and a prologue to Children.

Children is pretty decent though.

Yeah, there's a steep drop in quality between Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune.  Children of Dune is a fun read.  God Emperor of Dune is a dour, nigh unreadable mess.

(https://media.giphy.com/media/QU4ewgcmdcsObx9CG7/giphy.gif)

Heretics of Dune is probably my second favorite behind the original (of the ones Frank wrote.)

Dune Messiah is the worst of the bunch.

God Emperor is definitely a different kind of book than the other ones, I give it 3.6 Roentgen.

God Emperor would be more enjoyable if it were shorter, I think. In some ways, it actually bears comparison with the Foundation novels--it's as if Hari Seldon lived long enough to not only face the Mule, but to deliberately create the Mule in order to free the galaxy from psychohistory. There's some satisfaction to that, but it doesn't come with the pacing and intensity that I think would really make it work--it's a very languid, talky book.

(Heretics, btw, is actually kinda decent.)

I think they're all worth reading.

Edit #3: I was mean and bitchy and retract what I said.  :heartbreak: But maybe give the book another try?

Movie now delayed until October 2021(!).    :psyduck:

There won't be any theaters for it to open in by then. The Hocus Pocus re-release was the #2 box office last week, with less than $2M.

--Dave

Unfortunately, you can expect more of that unless Hollywood decides to throw us a bone or two.   My theater has been open for about two months now.  We haven't had a new "Big Picture" style hollywood movie release since Tenant, which was like a month ago.   Even with capacity limits (Ontario has us capped at 50 people max in an auditorium), we are lucky if we see 50 people through our building on a good day during the weekdays.  To put that into perspective, a typical monday pre-covid we would expect to do 600-800 people.  On a typical Saturday, we could easily put 4000+ people through the building.   We are lucky if we put 1500 people through the building in an entire week now (which I guarantee is entirely unsustainable for a multiplex building with 16 screens.... so I really don't want to know what is going on in the boardrooms of the company at the CEO level as this drags on.)  

Unless Hollywood is willing to throw us something to draw bodies with, you are right, there might not BE any theaters for them to release into when the time comes.

There will be theaters when there are vaccines and people feel safe to go back. Some of them just might be owned by other companies at that point which is what the big chains in particular are actually afraid of when they plead for studios to release product. Even if all the theaters were to shut down tomorrow, all those buildings with all those projectors and all those seats are going to be around because there’s nothing else viable to do with those spaces right now.

Maybe the thought of someone like Amazon or various studios buying up theaters isn’t particularly pleasant, but at the end of the day that would probably be the better option than trying to push this reopening when people clearly aren’t feeling comfortable returning.

Antitrust enforcement is so lax right now the studios are probably salivating over picking them up for some sweet, sweet vertical integration.

The studios can probably afford to lose the money by sitting on releases, rather than putting them out to theaters where absolutely no one in their right fucking mind wants to go right now. Without any sort of actual government intervention, the theater chain industry is utterly and completely fucked.

If I was a theater chain, I'd be taking out some loans to:

a) open some new (relatively cheap, quick) drive-ins
b) temporarily shut some formerly high-traffic venues to remake them in the Alamo Drafthouse model--fewer seats, some at tables, with booze and food, reserved seating, with the intention of showing older movies Mon-Wed night as 'events'.

The current evolution of the movie theater is kind of a parallel to the DUNE story.

Starts as a fuedal system (few multiplexes) with intermingled financial ties, moves into a set of vertically integrated top-down system with power in the hands of a few comeptitors, to a system where a single entity rules it all, to everything exploding out into a scattering of smaller entities fighting for scraps.  :why_so_serious:

I ain't going to Harkonnen Theater Chain, that much I'm sure of.

That is AMC. Harkonnens were part of the fuedal phase.  :drillf:

New trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g18jFHCLXk

I think it looks super promising.

All the art decoration look amazing, like the first time we are able to present the world creation visually how it should look. It looks as if they’re playing with the story and trying to make relatable hooks for non-fans, which is fucking irritating. Not because I’m a super fan (I am, hipster moment), but because the story is great enough that it doesn’t need to be brought into the future.

Oh man, my wife/gf would never understand that reference, better make sure we distill it down enough so we can get two movie ticket sales instead of just one.

I think what they're doing is focusing the story on something that was there powerfully, which is "the Fremen are oppressed, sitting on top of oil melange and here comes Lawrence of Arabia to help." I think they're super aware that if you do that in a clumsy way you end up with "Desert Avatar" where the Harkonnens are just Colonel Quaritch etc etc.--I see a lot of signs that they're going to try and deepen and complicate that part of the story.

It looks to me as if the movie breaks the story where Paul and Chani are together, he and his mother are spice-adapted, etc., which is a break point in the novel, too.

The ages of Paul and Chani look pretty much right, the ornithopters have flapping wings (though the dragonfly rate of flapping seemed a bit meh, the added sound effect I caught was nice), the clip of the baron floating looked good.

One of the unfortunate things is that they can't even take the parts of the production design of the Lynch version that really worked and use them because of how much angst there is against that movie as a whole. The navigator floating in the tank in the Lynch film was great, the stillsuits (minus not having hoods/masks) were pretty much perfect, and the sandworms while primitive as special effects go looked "correct" to me. None of that weird spiky shit from the SyFy thing.

Also, I hope they keep Irulan as narrator to tie back to the little bits of political context at the beginning of each chapter in the book.

Fingers crossed that it will be decent and make enough that they finish the rest of the sequels.

Mildly excite.

I see what they're not letting us see:

The Navigators/Guild. Maybe they shouldn't; we never really see them in the first book at all, I think?
The Bene Gesserit. Obviously we are gonna see them, but showing them starts to tip the hand towards the mysticism content of the book.
The Fremen/sandworms past the point of the Harkonnen attack (though there's one Stilgar shot and one big sandworm image, as well as a few hooks/rider images). Good, leave all that out of the preview.
I liked the only-brief glimpses of the Sardaukar, Baron Harkonnen himself. I don't think we saw Feyd-Rautha.

The design work looks fantastic--they do a great job with the shield belt/knife fighting.

I'm in for this. I can't imagine it being actively bad; I can only imagine it falling short of possibility.

Navigators are mentioned in the first book but don't actually show up until Dune Messiah.  Holding them back makes sense to me because if they get around to a third film Edric would definitely be in it.

Yeah, this looks like it should be good.  I'm a fan of Villeneuve and a big part of getting Dune right is art direction.  They've definitely done that.  After Blade Runner 2049 I was sure he'd nail that part.

I really didn't think that Momoa was a good choice for Duncan. Having just watched the recent trailer, I'm starting to think that he is a great choice. I'm prepared to give it a go.

I have a habit of binging the books every couple of years, even the ones written by his son which are readable, fill in some blanks, but not great.

Not to digress, but art direction was totally not the problem with Blade Runner 2049. It was gorgeous. Everything wrong with that movie came from having to be a sequel to Blade Runner (and Jared Leto). Make it a story about a slowly disintegrating clone cop and his virtual girlfriend and you have a movie for the ages.

He's one of the few directors I'd bet on to make Dune a hit. It's not just a hard book to film because it's so sprawling and massive, and there are lots of dangerous locations to have to work with. It's also hard because the characters are fairly flat for the most part. I said in Discord the other night that I thought Dune was a great concept that is impossible to execute as a story, and that's mostly due to the fact that it has to try to stretch human thought into a very inhuman thought process time frame. Seeing humans as chess pieces across millennia is just not something even the best writer can put down on paper.

I'm pretty sure that closer to launch we're going to get a Bene Gesserit/Kwisatz Haderach-ish mystical-heavy trailer. I don't think that element is going to get ignored in favor of explosions. If the first two movies are a success, it's what takes you into some kind of adaptation of Dune Messiah, e.g., Paul condemning the entire idea of a messianic hero/white savior.

Yeah, I can see this being something of an issue, as one of the core themes of Dune was the time-span of their history.   The millennia long Bene Gesserit breeding program.  The equally long planetary migrations, oppression and flight from oppression that produced the Fremen.  And most important of all, Paul's semi-prescient knowledge that a form of manifest-destiny-as-human-nature is literally attempting to steer his every action towards igniting a universe spanning Jihad of chaos and change.   If they really want to properly capture Dune, they need to somehow capture at least some of that feeling where Paul is constantly struggling to actually remain at the wheel of his own life, rather than being a passenger as universal destiny pushes him around.

Imagine being someone with Paul's powers, including his persuasive abilities and his access to potentially overwhelming military assets in 1924. You can see where fossil fuels are going to take humanity--they're already driving British and French colonialism in the Middle East, already driving the creation of vast fortunes in the US and elsewhere, but you can see what at that moment no one else can, that even as they've come to seem utterly indispensible, they're going to fuel a runaway global catastrophe by the mid-21st Century. You can see only three paths forward: a global war against industrialization fought by a worldwide movement of religious and cultural fanatics, maneuvering to create a global empire through controlling one major nation-state and then imposing tight controls on fossil fuels while pushing renewables, or just letting shit happen the way it's going to. I think we could all understand now why that person would be in a terrible situation.

They showed the test to be human in the first trailer they released. I bitched about the gom jabbar looking like a fucking cross pen. Pretty sure it also talked about the "shortening of the way", etc in that first trailer.

Yeah, I don't see Villeneuve just chucking all that for a colonialism-is-bad-white-saviorism movie full of explosions. The backend mysticism is the only thing that keeps it from being "Avatar except on a desert planet". Doesn't matter if Dune came before Avatar, if it's just Paul saving Fremen out of the goodness of his scrawny heart, it's going to be as watched once-and-forgotten as Avatar was.

Good trailer.

Doesn't feel like Dune to me still but I enjoyed Blade Runner 2049 and this should be better than that.

Navigators were in the throne room in the last few pages. Its mentioned of them looking at Paul as they hit the block in the future sight that he had been seeing, becasue they could only see a few minutes into the future whereas he could see far further, so they didn't notice the point after whicj you could not see the future till it was nearly there.

I didnt really like Dune. The character I actually found most interesting was actually the Baron, as he seemed the most Human with real motivations and you could understand where he came from. Paul I thought had an inner voice like a Robot but when they revealed he was being trained as a Mentat that made sense. I kinda liked the universe as well but after finishing I had no desire to read it again. I just put it as "ok" but I couldn't see what the fuss was about. Not my bag, I suppose. Never read any of the others.

I thought the film was a lot of fun and visually stunning, but I couldn't understand what the eff was going on through most of it. One of the reason I read the book was to try and figure out the film.

Review sounds gooooood (https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/dune-review-b1913870.html?amp)

Sounds like the author is so in love with the idea of dune that anything would have sufficed. I didn't get much more than waffle from that review.

As I mentioned on Discord, my main takeaway from these reviews is to really go in expecting "Dune: Part 1" and with the understanding that "Dune: Part 2" not currently in production or even greenlit yet.


From Rotten Tomatoes (https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/dune-first-reviews-the-breathtaking-adaptation-fans-have-been-waiting-for/).

Please don't flop. Please don't flop.

(fully expecting it to flop)

Going to be hard to determine flop status because of the HBO Max release.

This is getting released on HBO Max at the same time as theatres.  The Suicide Squad didn't perform well under similar circumstances...sadly, I don't have high hopes.

“If what you love most about Marvel is the quips, you might not like Dune very much…it is deadly serious…a relief I hadn’t realized I needed.” – Catherine Bray, Film of the Week

I'm sold. This movie is for me.

It didn't "perform well" by the metric of box office numbers alone -- but the studio obviously knows that releasing on HBO is going to cut into the box office, and they must have done some math that shows that they come out ahead financially regardless.  Hard to tell whether their math was right since as far as I can tell they don't report how much money they made on streams the same way they report the box office take.

Point being, if Dune has "disappointing" box office numbers due to the streaming release, that doesn't necessarily imply that it lost the studio money or that they won't make another one.

I hate going to see movies in the theater and giving the big studios money. I have a stupidly nice TV and already have an HBO Max sub so I will be watching this at home. Especially because I don't want to be in a room for 2.5 hours with a bunch of covidiots.

But I am thinking I might buy a ticket online for the movie and then not go to the theater :D

Or maybe I will do the whole "rent a theater" thing with a small group of friends if this is available for that kind of showing.

God damnit if you are going to release a movie without ending you better be filming the sequels all at the same time, this bullshit is lame.

Yeah, I'm kind of surprised they didn't do the "filmed both movies at the same time" thing.

this movie is too dry for my tastes bam gottem with the Arrakis joke

It's good. They had better fucking make Part II.

I think it oddly enough moves a bit too quickly and actually needs one or two bits of additional exposition. The place where you can see this problem  I think Villeneuve was so worried about someone saying that it had a problem with being too slow, talking and languid that he moved too hard in the other direction (though with a lot of very beautifully shot exteriors and interiors).

But it's good.

The wife fell asleep about a third of the way through, thought it was too slow. I liked it, but I can see her point. And the fact that it took as long as the Lynch film did just to get Paul and Jessica jumped in to the Fremen doesn't help with that perception.

Overall, I really liked it. The visuals were stunning and the action, where it did happen hit the right chords. Especially the Duncan Idaho/Sardaukar fight.

The cinematography and costume design were simply stunning.

But agreed: now I have to wait fucking two years for part 2, which hasn't even been approved yet?

In a post-covid environment where box office is shit, and streaming isn't making up for it :( Hope it happens regardless.

I wanted to go see this at my local Drafthouse, and tickets were sold out for weeks, including weekday matinees.  This is with reduced capacity mind you, and it's just one theater, but there seems to be some level of enthusiasm.  I've also seen a few people saying that they subbed to HBO Max specifically to watch Dune, and I'm pretty sure stuff like that gets factored into the decision to make another one even if it's not part of the standard box office numbers.

The theater I saw it in last weekend was practically empty, but I read that the streaming numbers were exceptional and there's some movement on greenlighting the sequel now.  There's hope!

HBO got a sub out of me for it at least.

Greenlit: https://deadline.com/2021/10/dune-sequel-greenlit-by-legendary-warner-bros-theatrical-release-1234862383/

Scheduled for October 20, 2023 theatrical (only) release.

We're back to full capacity at the 16 theater multiplex I work at, and demand has been, well, interesting.   Regular screens (we have 2) and 3D (1) have been moderate to low for attendance, but our IMAX (non 3D unfortunately) is doing really well.

Leads me to believe that most of the people coming to watch this are people who are likely fans of some form, and REALLY want to get the full visual experience for it, even if that means paying the premium for IMAX image quality.  Either that or they know that our IMAX content tends to only last about 2 weeks before something new pushes it out, so FOMO is pushing them to hit the IMAX early.  

I really loved this.

The look and feel of the movie were amazing. Tone and pacing were great too. I didn't think it was too slow either but I get why people would say it. When it felt slow, it was so damn amazing to just look at that I didn't mind taking a few seconds and smell the roses of the scenery.

I haven't read the books in two decades so I don't remember the details of the story but it hit all the high notes for me.

My entire family loved this. My wife, who really isn't into scifi stuff, and my son, who found the book to be a little too dense (he's 12), both had a great time watching this and adored the visuals. I thought it was great and if the sequel didn't end up getting greenlit, it would have been right up there with Firefly getting cancelled in terms of disappointment. Watched it twice already, and might go see it in theatres as well, provided it's still there when I get some time off.

From their reactions, another big part of the appeal was the originality and the fact that it wasn't another Disney-fied IP. 

Oddly enough, some of it actually seemed rushed to me.  Especially the lack of much sense of time passing between them arriving on Arakis and the Harkonnen assualt.  Really leaves the impression that they were barely there for like, a week or so, before everything came apart.

Also makes me wonder why Villeneuve didn't include the political / social party scene that takes place shortly after they arrive.  Would have been fairly easy to fit in, I would think, and would have been an amazingly easy way to do exposition on the politics, intrigue, fremen society, Dr Yueh, crazy importance of water and the like.   Seems like a huge missed opportunity.

I absolutely loved it. But I did think that if someone hadn't read the book or at least seen the David Lynch version then they'd be pretty baffled by a lot of what was going on.

But then I don't really care about those sorts of people, so that's OK.

Edit: visually it was astonishing, and the scale of the navigator ships was incredible (and very well done by being hinted at and existing in their own shadow) but I thought that the convenient Fremen dude surfing past, hanging ten on his gnarly worm looked a teensy bit comical.

When I read the book it gave me the same impression, to be honest.

My wife had read the book so long ago that she didn't remember anything at all, and she's not a sci-fi person, and she was able to follow along fine.  For reference, we just went to see No Time To Die and she was constantly asking me questions about what was happening.

Dune, it's less complicated than James Bond?

Good, can't call it great as there is no payoff but visually, atmosphere, music, all very cool. Casting all seemed on point.

Fingers crossed & covid-willing in 2 years I'll be re-watching Part I on IMAX right before part II comes out.

In the book it's longer than a week, but it's not a long time--when Leto, Jessica and Paul arrive, some of the Atreides forces have been there for maybe a month? I don't think the book ever makes it 100% concrete but it's clearly no more than a month or two before the attack begins. Jessica's pregnancy sets the outer limits of time--she's not showing to anyone by the time she and Paul are taken in by Stilgar after they escape the attack, and she's pregnant by the time they arrive on Arrakis, so all within the first trimester.

The time frame from the end of this movie to the big conclusion of the novel (and presumably Part II of the film) is more concrete--about three, maybe four, years? I think Paul may even say as much, but there are a lot of other markers of the passage of time.

He cut out a fair amount of weirdness so it will be interesting to see how he handles Alia.

I thought the only part that felt really rushed was the fight with Jamis at the end, but I've only read the books once and it was years ago, so that may not be out of line with the book. I actually felt this version's handling of time passing between the Atreides arrival and the Harokken attack was better than the Lynch version, but both seemed to happen almost instantly.

The fight with Jamis wasn't really rushed.  They just rolled it and the initial meeting with the fremen into one scene.  If I remember the book right, after the initial encounter they move off to a temporary refuge / cave shelter to set up temporary camp, which is where Jamis makes the challenge and the fight occurs.   They also altered it a little bit, because I am pretty sure that in the book, since they were in a "sealed" environment in the shelter, they stripped off the stillsuits and basically fought in loincloths or close to it.

That sounds more like what I was expecting - it's been so long since I read the books, I couldn't remember that scene. Kind of odd that it would be rushed like that, since the movie is already 2+ hours long, adding another minute of them trekking to a cave as exposition wouldn't have hurt. That was a very minor quibble though, in an otherwise pretty good adaptation. Chalomet did better as a young Paul to me than either Machlachlan or the actor they had in the SyFy series, because he really does look young. It helped make his growth into a more certain, leadership role towards the end more believable.

Jamis calls him out after they have settled into a cave shelter.

Yeah, I have no problem with the challenge being immediate.

It felt rushed to me, but it also felt like it was supposed to be rushed. It feels like chaos rushing in and you only realize what really happened when it's too late. A lot like the plot, really.

I loved it. I just wanted more.

In the movie?  Nah.  Jamis calls out Jessica (or Stilgar depending on how you look at it) out literally the moment after they have "resolved" the initial encounter when Stilgar suggests they should get moving because dawn will be approaching soon.

He's referring to the novel.

Which was what I initially said.  Which is why I was trying to figure out what the context of his comment was.

Did they cut Feyd Harkonnen?  No one will ever beat Stings "I WILL KILL HIM" but I don't recall anything in this version.

He was never presented, but considering that he wasn't really important until the second half of the book, I don't see why they wouldn't just directly introduce him in the second movie.

He did not appear in this. From just finishing the books, you easily cut the character all together or just as easily bring him in. He would have had only a single scene here.

He is pretty important from the story perspective as part of the Baron's plan as a "benevolent" alternative to the brutality of Rabban as well as the Bene Gesserit breeding thing. But this movie pretty much nixed most of the Baron's motivations and the breeding program thing probably isn't going to be important in with the way they re-worked Jessica's storyline already.

But they could easily introduce him in the second installment so he is present for the most important reason he exists: the duel at the end of the book that seals things onto the path.

This was finally out here, so I watched it. Wasn't expecting much, but it started well and I got my hopes up. Sadly.

It's not bad, it's just a long way from being good.

The soundtrack and the tone are terrible. So boring and overused. So much stuff played for the single dramatic moment, rather than in service to connect everything together. The desaturation of the colours just bad. The CGI of Arrakeen is lame.

The casting, the general decisions the made with what to show and what to cut.. all actually excellent. Almost perfect. I thought I would hate the Idaho casting and it was actually pretty good. Jessica was a bit weak, but that was not the actor but the scenes and direction they gave her.

It's just a shame that they didn't take all that work and make a tighter movie with a bit more life and movement, and instead played it out like they thought every moment was going to give me an orgasm or something. Get rid of the repetitive noise and actually let the characters do some acting. You've picked the right bits, but you need to let them do work, not think just showing a still with a loud BRURRRNGG is going to get it done.

Ultimately I was bored. With about an hour to go and yet another loud drawn out soundtrack moment I was just over it and contemplated leaving.


A friend linked this review, and I agree with it pretty much: https://amp.smh.com.au/culture/movies/it-s-big-loud-and-full-of-action-but-dune-is-a-desert-of-mediocrity-20211201-p59drr.html

There are criticisms of Dune to be made - some of them mentioned in this thread - but Zimmer's soundtrack is not one of them.

If you found the soundtrack repetitive and infuriating I'd just love to read your review of Dunkirk.

Not seen Dunkirk, but complaints about the soundtrack for Dune aren't rare. Nor are people liking it rare. Eh, we don't agree, that's ok.

I disagree with him on everything but the soundtrack. It was silly loud. I hear fine, I don't 6000 decibels blasted directly at my drums, thanks.

I watched it at home, so the volume levels were just right for me  :awesome_for_real: