Dune by Frank Herbert

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Originally Posted by Jayjami

Apparently the only purpose of making Dune 2 was so they could make Dune 3 (and more money of course). The whole movie was filler. Dune 1 was pretty good though.

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Curious to see how it plays at home, first one still hit after seeing it in IMAX but 2 was much more visual set piece dependent.

Like both adaptations and think Villenueve mostly threads the needle but both came and went for me.

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Originally Posted by Jayjami

Apparently the only purpose of making Dune 2 was so they could make Dune 3 (and more money of course). The whole movie was filler. Dune 1 was pretty good though.

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which is also completely fucking bonkers because none of this makes any fucking sense at all until book 5.

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Originally Posted by sonatine

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Originally Posted by Daly

The reason why star wars works is because its so simple. Space magic. Cool.

This book in movie form is just shoving one space magic concept after the next with no real foreshadowing. Its not nearly as complicated as it pretends to be but it comes off as one Deus ex machina after the next.

Ok the emperor stabbed them in the back

Ok the mom is space wizard with voice powers, oh and so is the son

Ok we have sand people

Now the sane people have 95% of their warrior population hiding in tbe other side of the plannet

Ok he is him.

Cool now we drink snake juice and we are now half brothers to all tbe bad guys

The list can and does just go on and on and on here

Im 99% sure it makes a lot more sense in the book. People talk about the story with such reverence Im perfectly willing to believe it. I just think it made for a shitty movie adaptation

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one of the charms of the book is that you really get a feel for the 'great houses', all these ancient bloodlines and cultures that are constantly engaged in this violent but civilized dance with each other.

also the stakes are higher because spice actually increases lifespans. like humans with steady access to spice can live for hundreds of years.

further more there are weird corners of the dune universe like the Bene Tleilax and the Ixians who are in this constant arms race with everyone and everything that isnt them, who become very important when paul (moreso his son) rise to power.

so in a very real way, the story of dune was never meant to be character driven but a story of ascending and descending powers driven by this one substance on this one planet that fueled it all / made it all possible.

eventually the story becomes about the survival of the known universe through all this chaos and potential ruin, and the sacrifices made to affect it.

and the movies are lovely but at no point did that sense of scale creep in for me. and it should have started to by now. maybe we get into it in dune messiah but to your point; how do we accomplish that in under 3 hours without feeling like we are just lifting plot points out of a hat and slapping them onto a storyboard?

by the by theres a BBC scifi series that captures this all pretty well so the notion that no ones come close to doing it (which i see bandied about a lot) is kinda ill informed.

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As you said the movie had a lot of scale….. it had little creep at all.

I don't think this story ever gets told properly in a movie format. This should have been the next game of thrones. I would of cared about the space witches if they weren't a side show and we had some background….. plus could of pulled on the heartstrings of the little guy breaking away from religious zealotry/control over time.

I would have bet money the Bautista character got messed up so bad his brother was never in the books, but they had to add him because they wrote Bautista as a bumbling idiot for 3/4 of the runtime and the ending never works without a showdown vs a made nigga that he could no longer be.

Oh cool….. we just found a nuclear cache….. in the middle of a desert….. that they just left there……. For absolutely no reason.

Anyway Im not mad for me, I never read the books. I would have been mad for LOTR fans if that got screwed up because people speak about those books with the same reverence (I did read 2 of the 3….. I couldn't man up and read the third).

Im “mad” because this seems botched in general and there is no do over on this for 40 years.

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Originally Posted by Daly

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Originally Posted by sonatine

one of the charms of the book is that you really get a feel for the 'great houses', all these ancient bloodlines and cultures that are constantly engaged in this violent but civilized dance with each other.

also the stakes are higher because spice actually increases lifespans. like humans with steady access to spice can live for hundreds of years.

further more there are weird corners of the dune universe like the Bene Tleilax and the Ixians who are in this constant arms race with everyone and everything that isnt them, who become very important when paul (moreso his son) rise to power.

so in a very real way, the story of dune was never meant to be character driven but a story of ascending and descending powers driven by this one substance on this one planet that fueled it all / made it all possible.

eventually the story becomes about the survival of the known universe through all this chaos and potential ruin, and the sacrifices made to affect it.

and the movies are lovely but at no point did that sense of scale creep in for me. and it should have started to by now. maybe we get into it in dune messiah but to your point; how do we accomplish that in under 3 hours without feeling like we are just lifting plot points out of a hat and slapping them onto a storyboard?

by the by theres a BBC scifi series that captures this all pretty well so the notion that no ones come close to doing it (which i see bandied about a lot) is kinda ill informed.

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As you said the movie had a lot of scale….. it had little creep at all.

I don't think this story ever gets told properly in a movie format. This should have been the next game of thrones. I would of cared about the space witches if they weren't a side show and we had some background….. plus could of pulled on the heartstrings of the little guy breaking away from religious zealotry/control over time.

I would have bet money the Bautista character got messed up so bad his brother was never in the books, but they had to add him because they wrote Bautista as a bumbling idiot for 3/4 of the runtime and the ending never works without a showdown vs a made nigga that he could no longer be.

Oh cool….. we just found a nuclear cache….. in the middle of a desert….. that they just left there……. For absolutely no reason.

Anyway Im not mad for me, I never read the books. I would have been mad for LOTR fans if that got screwed up because people speak about those books with the same reverence (I did read 2 of the 3….. I couldn't man up and read the third).

Im “mad” because this seems botched in general and there is no do over on this for 40 years.

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so theres actually an HBO series currently filming about the space witches and their history airing sometime this year with no less than travis motherfucking fimmel taking part which should be worth a watch, if only because it has that sort of potential.

also within a decade, tops, people will be able to produce whole ass movies on their local GPUs so dont lose faith.

Also just so theres no confusion I was calling tine frank nerdbert like 4 years ago I was way out in front on this

https://x.com/jaredskolnick/status/1826331388808658983