[no_wizard]

A fair question I have, I think, is are these new Dune movies any good?

I always felt it would be best as a limited series so there was more time to expand on the characters / story / world and that movie runtimes - even though they're getting longer - just aren't a good medium for complex stories like this that rely on heavy background and backstory

HBO paved the way for high value high production series, seems like a more natural fit to a complex story like Dune

[tweezy]

I've found a barbell shape to the response. People either seem to really like or hate it. Not too many people I know that are in the middle.

I will say I'm one of the people that really like it. I'm a big fan of the first Dune book and I think it does a great job of being true to the story. It's visually stunning and the score is perfect. My only gripe (and it's a big one) is that the cut the dinner scene. I don't understand that choice at all, but it wasn't enough to ruin the whole movie for me.

People that I know who don't like it think it's slow and that nothing really happens. And they're right. It also just awkwardly cuts off in the middle, so it doesn't feel like a complete movie. As a fan of the book, that didn't bother me too much because I realize it's just half the story and they can't make a 6 hour movie. But it is jarring, especially if you aren't already familiar with the plot.

And you are 100% correct that this would be better suited as an HBO miniseries. There's just way too much to cram into a movie. If you haven't checked out SyFy's miniseries and the Children of Dune miniseries, they are surprising good given the low budget SyFy had for it (compared to Villeneuve's budget at least).

[arp242]

I'm "in the middle"; it's certainly not a bad movie, but it also failed to really capture me. I still prefer David Lynch's Dune – yes, it has its issues[1] but it's so much more creative and bewildering than the almost sterile "Villeneuve look". I certainly don't begrudge Villeneuve for following his own creative vision, but I wish it was more Lynch-esque, minus the problems of course.

[1]: The DVD copy of Dune I bought at the store many years ago has a cover with visible JPEG artefacts. It's a perfect cover.

[photochemsyn]

I agree the movie is really good and hits the author's main themes pretty well. I also like the dinner scene in the book, and it plays a key role in fleshing out the complex socio-political-economic world of the Imperium - but for a movie it really wouldn't be feasible. It introduces too many characters (the banker, the water-seller, the smuggler, the honeypot, etc.) and has too many side-stories and nuances - it would probably take at least half an hour of screen time to do properly, and trying to cram it down would make it meaningless.

Similarly, in the book the time period between the arrival of House Atreides on Dune and the subsequent invasion is much longer and has many other side-stories going on, all of which are eliminated in the movie. Including all that material would require a HBO Game of Thrones type approach, with each book consuming an entire season.

Deciding which material is the most important must have been a hard decision, but I think they did a very good job considering the limits of the movie format, and the overall atmospherics felt just right.

Personally I'd like to see a David Attenborough-style special on "Dune: The Ecology of the Sandworm Life-Cycle" but it's not likely.

[zoltar]

I'm with you mostly on the "really like" side. Sound all the way around is excellent. Little details like the horn blowing dust when they disembark from the ships on Arrakis are great. Salusa Secundus in the rain was great. The overall visual style is great. Casting was mostly great.

I just wish some of the sets were a bit more dense. The room for the Gom Jabbar scene, the Bene Gesserit walking back to the ship, cone of silence scene, and especially the palace fight on the stairs. Kinda gave my Sky Captain vibes.

I also don't like cutting the tension between Jessica and Thufir, although if Thufir doesn't end up under the Baron I guess I get it.

[Moissanite]

Interesting - having read the book several times I don't get the reference to the dinner scene; will have to look it up.

The parts which bothered me were the Zendaya slow-mo flash-forwards being too long and too frequent with no substance, and Lady Jessica crying far more than reasonable for the character I remember.

[throw0101a]

> Interesting - having read the book several times I don't get the reference to the dinner scene; will have to look it up.

Chapter 16:

* https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/dune/summary/...

[dmreedy]

I think the one we've seen so far had to pick and choose which pieces of the broader tangle of themes to engage with, by necessity of the constraints of the medium. But it did a very, very good job taking a movie-formattable slice out of the thing and presenting it with the honesty and scope of the source material.

> HBO paved the way for high value high production series,

HBO also paved the way to the superficialization of the stories of those series, the loss of themes and the reversion to sort of base storytelling patterns.

[danpalmer]

> HBO also paved the way to the superficialization of the stories of those series

Completely agree. Modern TV is excellent in many ways – I think it's great at showing complex inter-character relationships and "politics" over long running stories, telling stories that are just a bit more complex than a 2.5 hour film, and things like cinematography have become really good.

But I don't think it's good at capturing the peak of the art of film-making. Dune is a subtle story in many ways, it doesn't really need 8-10 hours for a miniseries, it needs ~4-5 hours of really considered storytelling. The cinematography in the first film, like Villenueves other films, is also a cut above modern TV.

[AmericanChopper]

Other than turning Paul into a crusader, what did they really leave out of the book? The dinner scene, and some of the more minor Leto scheming was all I could remember. Did they have the Jessica finding the conservatory scene? I can’t remember…

[Maursault]

> Other than turning Paul into a crusader

Are you referring to Paul's visions of future jihad? That is definitely in the novel. Paul takes advantage of the Fremen seeing him as their Mahdi, and uses their zeal to fight the Harkonnen, avenge his family, and win control of the Imperium, all the while having visions of a future bloody galactic-scale jihad, which he struggles with, ultimately causing him to leave The Path, and in the sequel, become The Preacher.

The 2022 screenplay is more or less identical to the 1984 screenplay, scene for scene, except for giving Duncan Idaho his due, at which the 1984 film notably failed. They did not reinvent the wheel here, and I don't blame them. It would be a daunting task.

[dmreedy]

They left out pretty much the entirety of the Butlerian Jihad and Orange Catholicism as themes motivating the world. Mentats are barely discussed even though they are present.

And yeah, no dinner scene, and no conservatory, as far as story telling beats

[AmericanChopper]

Oh yeah, I guess they did… I imagine they’ll have to expand on that a little bit more in the part 2 for the rest of Thufir’s story to make sense though. Now that I think about it they didn’t put much effort into Piter de Vries either.

[dmreedy]

Honestly I'm not even sure they're going to do more than unceremoniously kill Thufir off in the background. But it's possible that they took the first movie as a chance to explore Arrakis, and will take the second to explore the broader galaxy and its politics, players, and philosophies.

We still haven't met the Emperor or his Daughter, the Imperial Court (beyond an emissary. No dinner party means no Fenrig and Margot), the Guild (as political players) CHOAM? (I forget if it's even mentioned). All of these could be worked in (and it seems like they will be given we see casting of Irulan at the very least), but you can imagine a version of the story that is less concerned with the broader politicking than it is with the action on Arrakis.

They also fundamentally changed the nature of Kynes' death. So it is possible they are not even interested in (or, to be kinder, that they feel they don't have time for) the planetological lifecycle of the worms and the spice. That it will serve only as a mcguffin. But that's pure speculation.

[flopsamjetsam]

I missed the conservatory scene. I know it could be covered in other ways, but I love the other-worldly feel of a lush, moisture-laden room, against the harsh dry dustiness of Arrakeen.

[throw0101a]

> Did they have the Jessica finding the conservatory scene?

No.

Also: no confrontation scene between Jessica and Gurney.

[tweezy]

I might add an except for Station Eleven to that rule. It was an excellent adaptation imo.

[lubujackson]

I think it is on the LOTR level of translating the source material - the jom gabar scene is about as perfect as it could be. There is also a lot of confidence given to the audience, i.e. Paul's visions are shown but not explained, so seeing multiple possible futures is definitely confusing, but it mirrors Paul's confusion as he grapples with his ability.

[poulpy123]

I liked the first one. It was a breath of fresh air in an ocean of marvel and all remakes/reboots movies

[dylan604]

You realize that the movie being discussed is essentially a reboot/remake as well, right?

[poulpy123]

Yes I know. However it was a failure from 40 years ago, the story deserved another try in this case

[dylan604]

Failure?

[xboxnolifes]

Movies that box office for less than their budget are typically considered failures, yes.

[gurchik]

If you’ve already read the book, you might enjoy the movie. If you haven’t, I’m reminded of this article: https://www.theonion.com/dune-part-two-to-pick-up-right-wher...

[lapcat]

I've read the book, and I quickly found the movie to be unwatchable because of dumb, pointless changes to the story. Not quite as bad as David Lynch's "Dune Velvet", but still bad.

One thing that really bothered me is that the movie had Gurney Hallack warn Paul not to sit with his back to the door rather than Thufir Hawat. In the book, this was an important early scene because it's a setup for Thufir's death scene at the end, when he says, "The universe is full of doors." Of course Thufir's death hasn't been shown yet in the movies, but they already degraded it somewhat.

There were other changes that bothered me too. IIRC there was something crucial missing from the gom jabbar scene that left out a big part of the motivation for it. I don't remember all the details now. (Edit: Now I remember. The Reverend Mother explained that an animal would gnaw off its own leg to escape the trap. In the book, she explains that a human would fake death and kill the trapper to eliminate a threat to its kind. Whereas in the movie, she just says "What will you do?" WTF?!?) I stopped the movie after a half hour or so. I didn't see the point, when the book is so much better.

[flopsamjetsam]

I loved the build-up of the pain in Lynch's version ("Dune Velvet", I'll have to remember that one :). Somehow it seemed more suspenseful than the new version.

[Maursault]

It won 6 Oscars, deservedly, though all technical, but should have won Best Picture, which went to CODA. CODA had a budget of $10M and a box office take of $1.9M, while Dune had a budget of $165M and a box office take of $402M, if that tells you anything. Chalamet should have won Best Actor, he did quite well, but he is too young. He'll get one later when he's older, undoubtedly. Best Actor went to Will Smith for King Richard, and Smith is certainly talented, but Chalemet is in a class by himself. Smith probably should have forfeit his Oscar for his violent outburst at the ceremonies.

The acting in Dune is simply excellent. Everyone brought their A-game. The cinematography, special effects and soundtrack are all excellent. The screenplay is surprisingly very similar to the 1984 film.

[arethuza]

"but he is too young"

He is currently 27 - which is a lot older than Paul is supposed to be?

[Maursault]

Academy convention is to award older, more accomplished actors for previous work that was not awarded. Chalemet's age compared to Paul's is irrelevant. IRL, Chalemet is too young (compared to his competition in 2022) to be awarded an Oscar. Not technically, but in practice, Oscars are more like lifetime achievement awards. For example, Jamie Lee Curtis did not give an Oscar winning performance in Everything Everywhere All at Once, but they had to give it to her for her lifetime achievement and the fact that they awarded Oscars to two other actors in the film. That movie was terrible, but Michelle Yeoh deserves an Oscar for lifetime achievement. Ke Huy Kuan, 51, was certainly adequate, but the roll was nothing special. Hong Chau, 41, should have gotten his Oscar for her work in The Whale, which was a notably amazing performance. Kuan got it because of his age, even if his lifetime achievement is limited. Someone decided Everything Everywhere would sweep the Oscars, and it had everything to do with Michelle Yeoh's and Jamie Lee Curtis' lifetime achievements. The Whale was a far better film with more difficult acting that was nailed. It was just too controversial. Frasier got the Oscar even though his supporting actor Chau out-acted him, and pretty much everyone in all other movies. Her performance there was one of the best I have ever seen, and I had never heard of her. She'll be back.

[mercutio2]

You and I are out here screaming in the wilderness that EEAAO was just a terrible unwatchable movie. Represent!

My wife and all my friends loved it.

[Maursault]

I tried to watch it three times and failed. I don't have a problem with audiences liking it. But awarding it the Oscar for Best Picture was tragic for The Whale. At least it is SciFi, but Star Wars or E.T. it was not.

[arethuza]

Apologies - I missed that you were talking about being too young to win an Oscar.

[_ph_]

I would strongly say: yes. I was very skeptic, I am a big fan of the book and actually liked the first movie. All newer productions ever failed to excite me - until the new movie. That in my eyes is really well made. Looking forward to the second part!

[viraptor]

That comment seems like 3 independent thoughts. In my opinion: yes the first part was great, yes it could cover more details as a series, yes a HBO style high value production would be cool to see.

The possibility of having something better does not make this movie bad.

If you can go into it accepting that: not everything will be covered, the book has lots of internal thoughts and little action which doesn't work well on a screen, the politics part was not skipped but wasn't given lots of time either - I think you'll have a good time.

Edit: Visually - it's amazing.

[stevenwoo]

HBO started production on a prequel, Dune: the Sisterhood, based on the Brian Hebert books, I haven't read them, only read the first six by Frank Hebert, but just based on the twist in book five, the origin story of the Bene Gesserit could be bonkers.

[dsr_]

The problem is that Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson have turned out 20ish volumes of bad fanfic.

(I have nothing against good fanfic.)

[mercutio2]

Brian Herbert has done more violence to the Dune universe than I ever would’ve thought possible.

Kevin Anderson is a mediocre sci-fi writer, but those books are so much worse than his worse non-Dune books.

[throw0101a]

> HBO started production on a prequel, Dune: the Sisterhood, based on the Brian Hebert books

I read the first Brian Herbert book when it came out. Didn't bother with any since (life is too short).

[MikusR]

No it is not. There was Sci-Fi channel miniseries Dune and Children of Dune. Those, despite the lower budget, are much better than than the movie.

[antisthenes]

I agree. I think these are the best interpretations of the book that I've seen.

However I've also done a complete 180 on the book itself. I think there are just too many holes in the logistics of the Dune world for me to keep up the suspension of disbelief as an adult.

Given that, I'm pretty neutral towards the movies as the book adaptations. I hope they don't take the source material too seriously actually, because the source is honestly not as captivating to me as an adult as it used to be as a teenager.

[carapace]

This seems as good an opening as any...

No. (the first one, haven't seen the second)

This "Dune" is not good. It's pretty, but stupid.

For one thing, just one little thing, what's the Baron's guy's name? Not the Feyd-Ruatha/Raban amalgam. The mentat.

No one says Piter's name!? If you haven't read the book you wouldn't know WhoTF that character is.

- - - -

I could go on and on, but what I really want to say, what I want future filmmakers to hear, is just this:

Just film the book.

Don't change the dialog, don't change the characters, don't add scenes and for fuck's sake don't delete any! Just film the book. Don't second guess Frank Herbert. He lucked out, made a masterpiece, and a whole Universe so real you can taste it. (the rest of the series not so much, but "Dune" itself is a window onto an alternate Universe.) You wouldn't hack up Shakespeare, you're not going to improve on Dune. Just film the book.

Whew! That was bottled up for a while.

[thebooktocome]

> Just film the book.

This is an impossible request. Movies are fundamentally different from books, they have different languages and cadences, different historical developments, different audiences, different expectations and traditions and tropes.

If you want to read the book, read the book. The film adapted from that book might not be for you and that’s okay.

> You wouldn’t hack up Shakespeare. . .

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of the greatest comedies of the modern era, and it gave us The Lion King 1 1/2, one of the greatest animated films made after the Disney Renaissance.

[viraptor]

> Don't change the dialog

That would be one weird movie given how much the characters in Dune think about things rather than talk about them. There are important conversations of course, but... there would be a lot of "Paul thinking about the future" voiceover.

[yamtaddle]

Exactly, Dune is practically unfilmable without heavy adaptation. There's a bunch of that inner-thought voiceover stuff in David Lynch's Dune, but still only a tiny fraction as much as is in the book, and it's frankly really damn goofy (full disclosure: I'm waiting to see how Part II turns out before I decide whether this version, or the Alan Smithee cut of 1984 Dune, is the one I'd be more excited about if someone proposed a re-watch—I love that glorious mess)

[carapace]

Anime does it just fine. E.g. half of an Inuyasha episode is internal monologue, eh?

[arethuza]

Weren't those internal monologues one of the weaknesses of the Lynch movie?

[arethuza]

Nitpick - the "Feyd-Ruatha/Raban" is just Raban, Feyd-Ruatha doesn't appear until part 2.

[carapace]

Ah, cheers!

[dylan604]

>that movie runtimes - even though they're getting longer - just aren't a good medium for complex stories like this that rely on heavy background and backstory

Peter Jackson would disagree. If you can't get it done in a single "getting longer" movie runtime, just make it into 3. Harry Potter did it in 2, Twilight did it in 2, etc. So the precedent of using multiple movies is there.

[throw0101a]

> Peter Jackson would disagree. If you can't get it done in a single "getting longer" movie runtime, just make it into 3.

That's how we got The Hobbit series, which were getting a bit too thin/stretched IMHO. LoTR as three worked, maybe Hobbit as two could have been better (was a love triangle really needed?)

[arethuza]

"...thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread."

[dylan604]

Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett?

[jemmyw]

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3875-i-feel-thin-sort-of-st... Tolkien apparently, although I definitely remember a similar Pratchett quote.

[xwdv]

I love the movie, but I didn’t go in expecting a complete work. I expected something that would cut off abruptly at some point. There’s just too much to fit in. So perhaps with that framing in mind, I enjoyed what I watched and would have gladly sat hours to watch more. Very immersive world.

[mikequinlan]

A limited series could be good, or it could be like the Foundation series where the creators decided the book(s) were too hard and are using the series to tell their own story instead (which isn't a bad story, but also isn't the story Asimov told in his books).

[Supermancho]

> A fair question I have, I think, is are these new Dune movies any good?

This particular iteration is trying to be far smarter than necessary or useful. If you watch the some Youtube breakdowns (not sure why you would - eg Why Dune's Editing Feels Different), you'll see that there are attempts to artfully inform the audience about things from the book through indirect means. Does it work? No. As a movie, it's pretty at times, but middling as an adaptation.

[pdntspa]

I watched it baked off my tits and it was fucking AWESOME

Fantastic stoner movie

[m3kw9]

It was good, not great but between good and great

[MilStdJunkie]

You're asking a movie question in a forum that's probably very resistant or even actively hostile to visual storytelling[0]. Weight answers accordingly.

For my $.02, it's a great film. I loved it; we have a cheap IMAX in our city and I must have seen it there a dozen times, and then a few times at home later. Greig Fraser was a fine stand in for Deakins, which was a relief. I love the look of the Lynch film, expected to remember it better than the DenVil designs, but then the new movie surprised me by topping even Tony Masters' fantastic Lynchian fever dream.

As the film tells a story, however, it has some weaknesses[1] that it inherits from the text, and doesn't really completely dig itself out from those. Which is bad - that's an adaptation's only job - and it might explain the sort of empty feeling the movie leaves you with. The worst of this is the choice of ending point: probably the vision in the tent would have been the latest possible moment to do a solid ending, IMO. That single change would have made the movie 10-20% better, and is the lowest hanging fruit. It still baffles me, because Dennis is no idiot, and I wonder if the payoff is next movie.

Another is the character count from the books. I'm going to say some bad things now, so get ready: the characters of Gurney and Duncan should probably have been amalgamated into a Duncan Halleck. There's zillions of other places to do things like this, because Dune is littered with characters who don't appreciably advance the story and disappear after Book 1; Shadout Mapes and Chani could, I think, be realistically amalgamated, and it would be a kick in the pants when you learn the housekeeper is daughter of Liet. Yeah, the book fans are gonna be pissed, but they were going to be pissed no matter what you did, because unlike LotR the novel is a young adult / coming of age story and people get weird about those. I've had friends screaming about the "missing dinner scene" for a year now.

Something more abstract, too, is the lack of an object - metaphorical or physical - that the danger revolves around. Lynch's film dealt with this via several devices: the signet ring, the weirding modules. Dennis' film does not. Now, disclaimer. Dune as a giant metaphor rejects, in its own way, narrative as a generic concept, or at least the heroic narrative, so you have to bite your lip and wonder if this lack is intentional, and Dennis chose to push that absence forward as a metaphor. But metaphor tricks in storytelling only work if they leave the movie's skeleton to function; push them too hard (like, IMO, The Lobster did, critic tonguebaths notwithstanding) and a film can fall apart, like a sloppy abstraction.

[0] This is "Hacker News", after all, and if there's one thing that's core to the word "hacker" it's "text".

[1] "Weaknesses" from a movie perspective, where time is the most critical resource. Vs a book or video game, which can - and does! - stay engaging even when the main character is going to the bathroom, or climbing a mountain, or chopping garlic.

[mercutio2]

Well said, all!

I particularly appreciate hearing someone other than me point out that Dune is very much not the hero’s journey. The first book sure rhymes with it, with some odd dissonant notes if that’s all you’re expecting. I loved the Lynch movie, but it basically leaned into the hero’s journey on acid, so it worked (for my adolescent self) as a movie, but was clearly not something hewing to the point of the series.

I feel like this new take is much more likely to capture the ambiguity of operating at the scale of galactic civilization rapture and stasis. We’ll have to see the next film to know!

I am shocked every time I hear people be surprised that the dinner scene was removed. There’s no way to translate that scene to film in a way viewers could understand, and I don’t get why people feel it was so load bearing to the novel.