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Dune Spoiler Thread


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1 hour ago, sologdin said:

isn't rama the most dull novel to win the hugo? i can't see anything worth a movie in it.

I'm not sure it's the "most dull", but it's definitely very thin on character and heavy on exposition. It's a Big Dumb Object story, and is very thought-out in that respect, but honestly to me Rendevous with Rama would probably work better as like a 6 or 8 episode series where you take substantial liberty to flesh out characters and puzzle through the Rama step by step. Just doing it as a movie... I guess he'll be channeling 2001 vibes and trying to make that work. I'm dubious.

For my money, the most cinematically-suitable of the Hugo nominated novels that year would be Larry Niven's Protector

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3 hours ago, sologdin said:

isn't rama the most dull novel to win the hugo? i can't see anything worth a movie in it.

 

 

I think there's a movie in there, because the spectacle of Rama on screen will be something else, but it involves fleshing out the characters and stuff so much that he might as well just adapt Alastair Reynolds' Pushing Ice, since 'Rama with characters and a political plot' is what that book was (basically felt like Reynolds took it upon himself to write what he thought the Rama sequels should have been). 

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22 hours ago, sologdin said:

isn't rama the most dull novel to win the hugo? i can't see anything worth a movie in it.

In Clarke's defence, he was always primarily an innovative hard science SF author. His ideas were endlessly reused by later authors and so seem trite now (for example, space elevators are now common), but they were fresh and new when he published them.

Have to agree that only a major rewrite would make it any sort of film though.

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Yeah, Rendezvous with Rama is about the sheer mind-boggling size and spectacle of Rama itself. The book is thin on characterisation. The sequels do a lot better in that regard, but also turn into weird incest soap operas at times.

Lord of Light is way too gonzoid insane and I suspect Hollywood will regard it with suspicion about being possibly offensive to Indians (I don't know what Indian SF fans make of it).

A Canticle for Leibowitz inspired an episode of Babylon 5 and I think would make an interesting film, but the post-apocalyptic space feels a bit overused at the moment.

Childhood's End probably isn't any better or worse than Rama (and I'd comfortably rate both as superior to Fountains of Paradise, which has a nifty central idea that he proceeds to do fuck all with, and has been done way better by numerous authors since), and it was already adapted as an underwhelming SyFy mini-series a couple of years ago.

I suspect if we seen another Heinlein adapted, it'll be a more faithful version of Starship Troopers long before they get to Moon. A lot of Heinlein hasn't aged well and his central scientific ideas are less groundbreaking than Clarke or Asimov, though he has much greater facility with actual characters.

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I totally think Canticle could work as a short TV series. Get Paolo Sorrentino on it, set it up with HBO, and away you go.

Lord of Light could be a an international production helmed by a great Indian director who has free rein to make something gonzo and remarkable of it. Call up Tarsem Singh.

Of unadapted Clarke novels... yeah, Fountains of Paradise. Or The City and the Stars with some liberal reworking.

Of Heinlein's work, people may think I'm mad, but the screwball action-comedy that is The Cat Who Walks Through Walls could be quite fun, provided you figure out how to handle the Lazarus Long portion of it.

 

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42 minutes ago, Ran said:

I totally think Canticle could work as a short TV series. Get Paolo Sorrentino on it, set it up with HBO, and away you go.

Lord of Light could be a an international production helmed by a great Indian director who has free rein to make something gonzo and remarkable of it. Call up Tarsem Singh.

Of unadapted Clarke novels... yeah, Fountains of Paradise. Or The City and the Stars with some liberal reworking.

Of Heinlein's work, people may think I'm mad, but the screwball action-comedy that is The Cat Who Walks Through Walls could be quite fun, provided you figure out how to handle the Lazarus Long portion of it.

 

HBO should just go full True Blood on Heinlein and adapt the 'everyone's fucking everyone all the time' later stuff like Number of the Beast. 

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22 minutes ago, Kalsandra said:

HBO should just go full True Blood on Heinlein and adapt the 'everyone's fucking everyone all the time' later stuff like Number of the Beast. 

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls works for this, too, since the you just don't trim the Long stuff but embrace it! And from that you can explore Time Enough for LoveStranger in a Strange LandThe Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Number of the BeastGlory Road, etc. which are all part of the Lazarus Long Polyamorous Incest Cinematic Universe (LLPICU).

(Though my other crazy opinion about The Number of the Beast is that it's deeply misunderstood. Doesn't necessarily make it not tedious to read, even if you understand what Heinlein was doing with it, but still.) 

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3 hours ago, Ran said:

I totally think Canticle could work as a short TV series. Get Paolo Sorrentino on it, set it up with HBO, and away you go.

HBO is doing the whole post-apocalyptic thing with Station Eleven. I don't think they'll look at another work in the same genre for a long time.

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On 10/25/2021 at 6:11 PM, Iskaral Pust said:

I liked it but it didn’t blow me away.  Now I’m just nervous whether it’ll be successful enough to get the sequel greenlit.  The visual spectacle and ornithopters were the strongest points, and the acting was quite good all around, and the score suited the the tone and visual style.

As others have said, adapting the book to duology movie length required some trade-offs that diminish secondary characters and remove key tension points.  It’s twenty years or more since I last read the book, so it’s not like I have a precise memory that I was expecting to have fulfilled, but even so I felt the lack.

As a standalone movie it was a bit dull — lots of foreboding angst without sufficiently establishing why or why the audience should care.  And I’m on the fence about Chalamet as Paul — I’ll be impressed if he can really command the role in the next film as Paul develops.

If I watched that without reading the books I would wonder why we have yet another case of advanced civilizations bizarrely relying on stab weapons in open melee (although Marvel is still the worst for this), and possibly wonder if the Harkonnen’s were the bad guys from Chronicles Of Riddick.  But I’d mostly wonder why I just watched half a movie.

edit: biggest negative was the HBO Max stream.  We started the movie on Saturday, but there were random blips in the audio stream that increased in frequency.  It got too annoying, so we watched the last hour on Sunday instead and thankfully the stream had no problems then.  The HBO Max app has had plenty of problems before and they really need to improve it. 

 I very much enjoyed the new Dune movie; but I have reservations about how well Chalamet will do in Part II.  He can play the brooding adolescent/young man quite well, but he will have to portray a rising and charismatic leader in the second movie; and I'm not sure he can credibly do so.  

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37 minutes ago, Raksha 2014 said:

 I very much enjoyed the new Dune movie; but I have reservations about how well Chalamet will do in Part II.  He can play the brooding adolescent/young man quite well, but he will have to portray a rising and charismatic leader in the second movie; and I'm not sure he can credibly do so.  

Chalamet did a good job in such a role in The King. The movie itself was not great as a work of historical fiction, but as fantasy was quite enjoyable and largely due to Chalamet.

--

I personally would have liked to see Villeneuve's take on Lucifer's Hammer. I'm reading Rendezvous with Rama right now and really enjoying it, but it does seem like a challenging one to adapt into a movie.

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 12/18/2021 at 12:07 AM, Quijote Light said:

They have The Last of Us in production now too. 

And hopefully that will be much better than the dreadful Station 11 snorefest.

I do expect it to be.

 

On topic: this movie kicked ass. I saw it twice in the cinema.

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9 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:


Station Eleven is a great book.

That's what I've heard. And by most accounts, a great TV show, especially if one liked The Leftovers. Now that I'm done with The Witcher and The Expanse, it's next on my list to catch up on.

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