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DUNE: For Want of Little Makers


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On 7/23/2021 at 2:57 PM, Werthead said:

And I think lots more people will show up to this then Blade Runner 2049. The cast is absolutely stacked. Star power doesn't mean what it used to, but the sheer number of hot-at-the-moment actors in the film has definitely raised interest. They're also leaning on the epic visuals (lots of action, which there wasn't in BR2049). I don't discount the possibility of the film still not making the probably $1 billion+ the studio are hoping for, but I think it'll be a big beneficiary of coming out hopefully when there's more confidence in going to the cinema post-pandemic.

I hope you're right. All the positive reception from the trailer I'm seeing is encouraging. But I will not exactly be flabbergasted if upon release Jackass 3 dominates the box office and Dune sputters its brief, glorious existence away as a side curiosity. I honestly think that cinema today has primed audiences to seek out the safe and familiar. And Dune seems a bit too weird and different to draw a significant audience, whatever the cast. But it's an unpredictable thing, so maybe it will succeed.

 

On 7/25/2021 at 4:11 PM, Fury Resurrected said:

On the subject of the trailer- I’m so hyped. I don’t understand how people are complaining considering previous adaptations of Dune we have had. There is almost no way this will not be the best Dune we have had. And this cast is spectacular. I cannot wait to see Josh Brolin as Gurney. Javier Bardem as Stilgar is another beautiful choice. I can’t wait.

Seriously. I like David Lynch, but his version of Dune is awful. "My name is a killing word"?:rofl: The TV miniseries was fairly loyal, but it suffered greatly from subpar acting, directing and writing, and visuals. And it's mystifying to me why everyone worships at the alter of Jordowsky. His vision was certainly unique and creative, but I'm convinced that people haven't actually seen his released movies, which are very much an acquired taste (not one acquired by me, certainly). His popularity among fandom is also crazy considering that in these times of growing gender parity, the director (trigger warning)

Spoiler

in the 70's claimed to rape an actress in El Topo. No joke, he was bragging about it. A couple of years ago he took it back and said he was only making the claim to court controversy and drive up movie sales, but there's no way that guy is coming out of that without being a total piece of shit.

 

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I prefer Dune 2000 to the Lynch version. Yes, it was low budget with some questionable actors, but over all it was solid.

And I thought the follow-up was better. Especially the climax for Messiah. I'm not a fan of montage scenes, but that one worked. 

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Lynch’s Dune is beautiful to look at and I love most of the stylistic decisions. The casting is good and I think it hits the tone quite well.

Its a total mess otherwise though. Pretty much unwatchable as a movie, better as a curiosity.

The tv version was far less good to look at, but at the very least seemed to be able to be comprehensible. It certainly wasn’t good but at the time I just enjoyed seeing everything to do with Dune.

And yes it also managed to tell the two sequel book’s stories and maybe make them enjoyable ( seem to remember Messiah being a non fun read) and introduce James McAvoy to me with a performance of such confidence that he blew everyone else on screen away.

Plus the old PC Dune game was freaking great, I mean the weird adventure one, didn’t really play the more popular RTS version

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I've got a real soft spot for the Lynch movie; especially whichever weird cut it was that my parents rented from the local video store back in the '90s. I generally thought it was weird and interesting in the right ways, and I never had that much reverence for the books so I was fine with most of the changes. Though I agree that I probably like it more for its weirdness than for it being a cinematic experience.

I didn't like Dune 2000 at all, thought it was way too bland.

I played the hell out of the DUNE II RTS game back in the day. Almost always played as the Harkonnens though; their special tank and missile attack thing were so OP. I don't think I could ever go back to it though, it's missing so many QoL features of modern games. Plus I suck at RTS games these years.

Anyway, that new trailer looks dope as hell. 

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5 minutes ago, Fez said:

I've got a real soft spot for the Lynch movie; especially whichever weird cut it was that my parents rented from the local video store back in the '90s. I generally thought it was weird and interesting in the right ways, and I never had that much reverence for the books so I was fine with most of the changes. Though I agree that I probably like it more for its weirdness than for it being a cinematic experience.

I didn't like Dune 2000 at all, thought it was way too bland.

I played the hell out of the DUNE II RTS game back in the day. Almost always played as the Harkonnens though; their special tank and missile attack thing were so OP. I don't think I could ever go back to it though, it's missing so many QoL features of modern games. Plus I suck at RTS games these years.

Anyway, that new trailer looks dope as hell. 

What, with John Rhys-Davies as the Atreides mentat? For the Duke!!! I played hours and hours of it. I played a little bit of Dune II, but it was on someone else's PC, so never really got around to play much. Dune 2000 was the first RTS I owned. Emperor: Battle for Dune was the more bland one, though it had the nice features of shielded vehicles, and the effects of what happened when Sardukar with lasguns shot them.

And to not confuse the game with the SyFy miniseries, the miniseries is called Frank Herbert's Dune. (FHD)

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54 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

What, with John Rhys-Davies as the Atreides mentat? For the Duke!!! I played hours and hours of it. I played a little bit of Dune II, but it was on someone else's PC, so never really got around to play much. Dune 2000 was the first RTS I owned. Emperor: Battle for Dune was the more bland one, though it had the nice features of shielded vehicles, and the effects of what happened when Sardukar with lasguns shot them.

And to not confuse the game with the SyFy miniseries, the miniseries is called Frank Herbert's Dune. (FHD)

Whoops. Yeah, I meant the SyFy miniseries. I never played the Dune 2000 RTS, it came out during an interim period where I didn't have a PC capable of playing anything.

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I hated Lynch’s Dune so much it made me unable to forgive or like David Lynch (though I also consider him someone who tries too hard to be weird instead of actually being weird). Just seeing his hair makes me mad. The only good thing about it was Patrick Stewart.

The SyFy channel miniseries was at least an attempt to cover the book, it suffered from being low budget but it had a decent script and some very nice costumes. I do think that adding scenes for Irulan was stupid, though I liked the narration.

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16 minutes ago, Fez said:

Whoops. Yeah, I meant the SyFy miniseries. I never played the Dune 2000 RTS, it came out during an interim period where I didn't have a PC capable of playing anything.

It's basically Command & Conquer in the Dune universe, with actors for the cut scenes like other Westwood Studios games.

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15 minutes ago, Fury Resurrected said:

I hated Lynch’s Dune so much it made me unable to forgive or like David Lynch (though I also consider him someone who tries too hard to be weird instead of actually being weird). Just seeing his hair makes me mad. The only good thing about it was Patrick Stewart.

He's not '60s/'70s era John Waters-levels of weird, but I think David Lynch is still a pretty weird guy. Not a lot of filmmakers could or would make something like Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive.

Also, what about Sting?

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:lol: 

I can't for some young actor to meet Patrick Stewart in a few years and find out he was in Star Trek. "Oh, what was it like working with Chris Pine and Zach Quinto?"

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I found the SyFy mini series very satisfying, which I got from Netflix three times before their dvds got too damaged, and Netflix never replaced them.  I don't understand why people seemed for the most part to hate them so much.

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6 hours ago, IFR said:

I hope you're right. All the positive reception from the trailer I'm seeing is encouraging. But I will not exactly be flabbergasted if upon release Jackass 3 dominates the box office and Dune sputters its brief, glorious existence away as a side curiosity. I honestly think that cinema today has primed audiences to seek out the safe and familiar. And Dune seems a bit too weird and different to draw a significant audience, whatever the cast. But it's an unpredictable thing, so maybe it will succeed.

 

I think we're good. It's a rough baseline, but Blade Runner 2049 has accumulated 32 million hits of its first trailer since 2017, and 14 million of its second.

Dune has accumulated well over 35 million hits of its first trailer in ten months and 11 million of its second in five days. In fact, way more than that since HBO Max and Legendary Pictures and a couple of dozen movie sites have re-posted the trailer, a few of them with hits in the millions as well (BR2049 didn't have as many channels doing that). I think that shows a much healthier degree of interest in Dune pre-release.

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Everyone has seen Blade Runner in one or more of its many incarnations, thanks to tv and streaming -- people who would watch that sort of thing that is, like myself. So if they liked the previous film, we'd want to watch the sequel, probably.

Most people who saw Lynch's Dune hated it. Few people who saw the SyFy Dune seemed to like it. So people are waiting for a good screen adaption still, maybe?

It's going to be shown out of competition at the Venice Film Festival.  And it will have a simul theatrical and HBO release, which is the right move after so many covid mandated postponed release dates. By September people will probably have to mask again in theaters -- and many, many others won't go into them at all, whether or not masking is required.

What I want from this film is a lot of Jessica; I fear that's not happening, in favor of focus on Paul and Chani's yong lurve, and that is going to spoil one of the many elements that made Dune memorable and so agreeably different a work, with so many layers of "historical" backstory and characterization. Going back to the Paul and Chani thing -- in the novel there really isn't that much Chani, particularly as she conveniently dies, allowing Paul to become whatever he becomes. There's far more of Jessica and even Alia of the Knife, young as she is, and before Dune Messiah and Children of Dune; they have more agency and effect in the narrative than Chani. (Any of the others were impossible and I didn't / don't care about them -- and the second and third titles were not anywhere close to the quality of Dune.)

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I also think a lot of people are treating this as a new property, with little interest in watching the 1984 film version because it's so old (almost forty years!) and probably don't even know the mini-series exists.

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9 hours ago, IFR said:

And it's mystifying to me why everyone worships at the alter of Jordowsky. His vision was certainly unique and creative, but I'm convinced that people haven't actually seen his released movies, which are very much an acquired taste (not one acquired by me, certainly). His popularity among fandom is also crazy considering that in these times of growing gender parity, the director (trigger warning)

  Reveal hidden contents

in the 70's claimed to rape an actress in El Topo. No joke, he was bragging about it. A couple of years ago he took it back and said he was only making the claim to court controversy and drive up movie sales, but there's no way that guy is coming out of that without being a total piece of shit.

 

I agree. There seems to be a cottage industry of nostalgia for what might have been. I don't care what anyone says, Burton's Superman Lives would have been dogshit.

While Jodorowski's take on it would certainly have been inventive and cool, a sure fire way to piss off sci-fi & fantasy fans is to take excessive liberties with the source material. He doesn't strike me as someone who puts fidelity to the text high on his list priorities.

And there's the question of the production values. Someone once described a fantasy film as working on a jigsaw puzzle where every third piece doesn't exist. The fantasy elements are that 3rd piece. If you get that right, you get Star Wars. If you don't, you get something else.

He refused to work with Douglas Trumbull because he wasn't his "spiritual warrior" and hired Dan O'Bannon as VFX supervisor. Um, OK.

7 hours ago, Fury Resurrected said:

I hated Lynch’s Dune so much it made me unable to forgive or like David Lynch (though I also consider him someone who tries too hard to be weird instead of actually being weird). Just seeing his hair makes me mad. The only good thing about it was Patrick Stewart.

The SyFy channel miniseries was at least an attempt to cover the book, it suffered from being low budget but it had a decent script and some very nice costumes. I do think that adding scenes for Irulan was stupid, though I liked the narration.

The sci-fi series is good but it suffered from very '90's "televisual" cinematography; and not even a particularly good example of it. Also very crude computer generated visual effects.

As I see it, there are two eras in Sci-Fi / Fantasy TV: Before Battlestar Galactica and after. There may be an earlier example but BSG seemed to be a significant shift toward more cinematic looking TV. SciFi's Dune was definitely "before". 

Production problems aside, Lynch's Dune is a textbook example of how not to use voiceover in a film. Also, they so went-out-of-their-way to show how terrible and cruel House Harkonnen was that they became a parody of House Harkonnen. That sippie cup with the built-in press to crush some cute little critter so Rabban could drink its juices still makes me cringe. Everyone knows Rabban drinks Johnny Walker Black.

The heart plugs were kind of cool though. As were the weirding modules. They had a few good ideas in that movie.

1 hour ago, Kaligator said:

I also think that Blade Runner, despite its geek cred, isn't actually that popular in mainstream circles. 

It could also be 2049 got swamped by the MCU mania. But sadly, you might be right. 

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1 hour ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

While Jodorowski's take on it would certainly have been inventive and cool, a sure fire way to piss off sci-fi & fantasy fans is to take excessive liberties with the source material. He doesn't strike me as someone who puts fidelity to the text high on his list priorities.

I was surprised to learn in the documentary that he hadn’t even read the book…

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3 hours ago, Kaligator said:

I also think that Blade Runner, despite its geek cred, isn't actually that popular in mainstream circles. 

It's not, as far as I can tell. It's very popular among film students, but its general appeal isn't that strong even if its influence is all over the place.

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10 hours ago, Fez said:

He's not '60s/'70s era John Waters-levels of weird, but I think David Lynch is still a pretty weird guy. Not a lot of filmmakers could or would make something like Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive.

Also, what about Sting?

I saw Mulholland drive and also hated that. I found it to be misogynist garbage with one of the worst cases of male gaze I’ve ever seen. But what I mean is that David Lynch tries SO HARD to be arty and unusual. John Waters just is that. I have also seen and hated Lynch’s attempts at visual art. David Lynch wants to be Stanley Kubrick so bad he’s gotta torture us all and ruin a masterpiece with it. And that was before I saw Dune so it was not tainted by my hatred there.

Sting is a terrible actor and his presence is cheap stunt casting. 

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