The New Dune movie *holly &^%$ this could be good or bad*

[Grue]

1) wierding module ?!? (i.e. rather than the fremen being surprisingly and fanatically good fighters they just had a magic superweapon)

I actually prefer the wierding module given the choice. Rereading the book recently, everytime Frank goes into the Fremen combat prowess I had to put the blinders on. Unless they possessed silly wuxia level martial arts, everyone else in the Duneiverse sucked when it came to hand to hand fighting.

 

[Mallus]

Of course, opening a film with a long, talky sequence...

Dude, we're talking about Frank Herbert's Dune... would you open the film with stuff exploding? Talkiness, especially of the interior monologue variety, is one way in which the movie is being faithful to the book.

The only real problem with the added material is that it consumed time that could have been used to advance the story in some way - and when dealing with a complicated, lenghty story, you need all the screen time you can get.

Or you need to jettison story elements. You can't adapt a novel into a film thinking you're going to bring the plot across intact. Simply can't be done. So you look for ways to capture the essence of the work in another medium, which is what Lynch did, at the same time he threw in a whole bunch of his personal fixations, making it the first big-budget art house space opera (err, make that the only...).

To be honest, while I love the movie, I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call it a success. More like a really interesting failure.

Adding useless material that isn't even from the book is just ridiculous.

That useless material brought the setting alive for me, and I'd argue the milieu is a much of a main character in Dune as Paul. As is true with most popular SF/F series. The allure isn't just characters, it's thoroughly detailed otherworlds.

The true weaknesses are the changes made that make it just like other science fiction movies.

David Lynch's Dune is "just like other science fiction movies"?! Name them.

You can say a lot about Dune, but implying that its just a blandly homogeneous scifi film is nutty. Unless of course you're blind and partially deaf.

The wierding way of battle was transformed into a ray gun.

You know, I'd love to see a more kung-fu heavy version of Dune, a la The Bride with White Hair, with Ang Lee or Zhang Yimou directing. Yimou especially. After seeing Curse of the Golden Flower, I'm convinced he's perfect for crushing overproduced genre weirdness.

That said, the weirding modules were a necessary compromise, and the whole 'My name is a killing word' shtick was cool.

The navigators were no longer mysterious and unknown, but rather a bunch of guys in leather fetish gear towing what looked like giant mutated talking genitalia.

Speaking into old-timey radio announcer microphones made of wrought-iron. Pure genius.

This is fun. It's been a long time since I rhapsodized/defended Dune...

 

[Chaldfont]

For the record:

I loved the book and my wife and I both occasionally read from it, looking for cool passages, when we are between books.

The Lynch movie was terrible. Though the casting of Sting as a Harkonnen is pretty sweet.

The miniseries was slow and poorly-acted.

The first novel, Dune, is just plain awesome. It's well researched and well written. The themes of religious fanaticism (and a religious leader's responsibility for it), hunger for power and ecology are all awesome. All other authors who try to create exhaustively detailed settings are chasing either Lord of the Rings or Doom. In fact, I consider Dune to be the Lord of the Rings of Sci-Fi.

The rest of the Dune books vary from "meh" to "huh?" to "WTF!?" and I've never re-read them. I even tried to read one of the new novels by Herbert's son and that other guy but it paled in comparison to the original. I've read better D&D novels.

 

[Storm Raven]

I actually prefer the wierding module given the choice. Rereading the book recently, everytime Frank goes into the Fremen combat prowess I had to put the blinders on. Unless they possessed silly wuxia level martial arts, everyone else in the Duneiverse sucked when it came to hand to hand fighting.

Umm, if you read the book, the Fremen, after Paul has taught them the wierding way, pretty much do have wuxia level martial arts. A major component of the book is that technology has been superseded by the perfection of humans. Mentats are better than computers, people can learn to control their involuntary muscles, and perfect their physical skills to extremes (to be able to, for example, change a poison to harmless water inside their own bodies).

Basically, the Sardaukar are special forces trained in extreme conditions, and so are the Fremen. The Fremen then add special training in superior body control, making them even better as warriors.

 

[Storm Raven]

Dude, we're talking about Frank Herbert's Dune... would you open the film with stuff exploding? Talkiness, especially of the interior monologue variety, is one way in which the movie is being faithful to the book.

Actually, it isn't. After I saw the movie, I said that there were too many internal monologues and long infodumps. The person I was with said that was necessary to tell the story, since the book is that way. So I went back and reread the book looking for that.

And it just isn't true. There are surprisingly few internal monologues, and almost no infodumping that isn't part of a conversation that makes sense. You don't need the sorts of whispery internal crap that Lynch threw in. He did it because he's Lynch, and that's his stock in trade. Not because the structure of the original work required it.

Or you need to jettison story elements. You can't adapt a novel into a film thinking you're going to bring the plot across intact. Simply can't be done. So you look for ways to capture the essence of the work in another medium, which is what Lynch did, at the same time he threw in a whole bunch of his personal fixations, making it the first big-budget art house space opera (err, make that the only...).

I just don't see how "making stuff up out of whole cloth that contradicts the actual elements from the book" constitutes "capturing the essence of the work".

That useless material brought the setting alive for me, and I'd argue the milieu is a much of a main character in Dune as Paul. As is true with most popular SF/F series. The allure isn't just characters, it's thoroughly detailed otherworlds.

The useless material completely contradicted most of the material in the book. That isn't bringing the setting alive. It's making up a new setting instead.

David Lynch's Dune is "just like other science fiction movies"?! Name them.

I already named a bunch of them. Ray guns. Stormtroopers. Hovercraft. Basically, it is little different than, say, the Flash Gordon movie, except that the Flash Gordon movie was much, much better (and more faithful to the source material).

The setting of David Lynch's Dune was basically little more than Buck Rodgers, or Flash Gordon, or even Star Wars in poorly lit drag.

You can say a lot about Dune, but implying that its just a blandly homogeneous scifi film is nutty. Unless of course you're blind and partially deaf.

Because generic stormtroopers and ray guns make a movie very original. If it is made in 1923.

In the 1980's, not so much.

 

[Mallus]

Umm, if you read the book, the Fremen, after Paul has taught them the wierding way, pretty much do have wuxia level martial arts.

Sure, but the problem is depicting that on screen. We could do it today, but the resulting film would probably be mistaken for a Matrix CGI/wire-fu rip-off.

A major component of the book is that technology has been superseded by the perfection of humans.

Again, how do you show this sort of thing to the audience? This is what I was talking about when I called the weirding modules a compromise.

Mentats are better than computers

Nit-pick: Mentats are legal-er than computers. The creation and use of artificial thinking machines is a capital offense in the Imperium.

 

[Storm Raven]

Dude, we're talking about Frank Herbert's Dune... would you open the film with stuff exploding?

Possibly. One option for making a movie would be to skip forward to the artillery bombardment on Arrakis as the Harkonnens invade and displace the Atredies, putting Paul and Jessica on the run. The necessary prior material to tell the story could probably be told as flashbacks, or otherwise related in conversations.

Alternatively, start with the gom jabbar sequence, which at least has some dramatic tension. Show the plans in action in much the same way that Herbert did - by showing the machinations at work, and the occassional (brief) explanations to Paul by Hawatt and Leto. Starting with a bunch of talking heads babbling for ten minutes is atrocious. A movie is a visual medium - show me the plans in action, don't have bad actors rattle on as your opening.

 

[Storm Raven]

Sure, but the problem is depicting that on screen. We could do it today, but the resulting film would probably be mistaken for a Matrix CGI/wire-fu rip-off.

There are a number of ways to show martial arts skill that is not like wuxia. The Matrix did it, one could have done something similar (although less sophisticated) when Lynch made the movie.

Again, how do you show this sort of thing to the audience? This is what I was talking about when I called the weirding modules a compromise.

And that just makes the movie into a ray gun fight. Which makes it little more than a Flash Gordon imitation. You could show this to the audience in the way that the miniseries did, using a far more limited budget. Yes, the miniseries had problems (a limited budget, some wooden acting and so on), but it somehow managed to convey this sort of thing much more ably than Lynch did.

Nit-pick: Mentats are legal-er than computers. The creation and use of artificial thinking machines is a capital offense in the Imperium.

They are legal-er, but they are also supposed to be better too. In the book Hawatt explicitly states that mentats are better than computers - he even states that with his limited training, Paul is better at this sort of thing that the "thinking machines" ever were.

 

[Mallus]

Alternatively, start with the gom jabbar sequence...

I'll get back to completely disagreeing with you in a minute... that's a very good place to begin a Dune movie.

 

[Steel_Wind]

Shaddam IV and a Guild Navigator was not a bad place to start, per se. The problem was that a Guild Navigator who spoke to Shaddam IV like that would have been killed on the spot by the Emperor. Fro mthe start Lynch made Shaddam to be a wimp. And he was NOT a wimp. Not at all.

As for the Fremen... they lived on a brutal world. The entire point of the technology of the Dune universe was that personal shields had made firearms essentially useless, such that training in blades was the entire point of a military and made it very difficult to supplant an armed and trained political powerbase. To use a laser near a shield meant that a nuclear explosion was quite likely. And if the other houses thought you had used a nuke against your enemies - you might well be bombed into the Stone Age by the other Houses.

Dune is a product of the times in which it was written. It was a cold war detente book conceived of in the days of a hot Arab-Israeli war and a proxy war in Vietnam.

The political structure in Dune was a bizarre amalgam of nationalism, corporate hierarchy, and fascism, a tinge of democracy in the UN sense (General Assembly, Security Council and otherwise) - all with a nobility layered on top. Above all, there was this great religious fervor against computers. It was bizarre - but it had a compelling logic to it, once you accepted the premise.

As for the Fremen - they were better at knife fighting than anyone else. Without Bene Gesserit training, they still kicked the Sardaukar's ass. Moreover, the Fremen barely bled if cut. Their wounds coagulated very fast.

Add to that the fact that they were so fanatical in their beliefs that they were borderline insane, and had lifespans many times longer than most humans because of melange (the ones who did not otherwise die from the unforgiving nature of Arrakis, that is) and you had the makings of a superarmy to rival Shaddam's. Which. of course, was the point.

You don't need Wuxia to show the Fremen. They were lithe, wiry, fast and utterly merciless. They were fanatics. Messianic fanaticism and the desert was, ultimately, the entire point to the novel.

As for their being some "need" to have rain from the sky at the end of Lynch's Dune...this is heresy. Paul was not God. Paul was a man playing at God who was not equal to the task and never could be. That was the entire point of the book Herbert wrote.

*sigh*

The mini-series is just fine. Let it be.