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by carapace 1142 days ago
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.

3 comments

> 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.

> 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.

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)
Anime does it just fine. E.g. half of an Inuyasha episode is internal monologue, eh?
Weren't those internal monologues one of the weaknesses of the Lynch movie?
Nitpick - the "Feyd-Ruatha/Raban" is just Raban, Feyd-Ruatha doesn't appear until part 2.
Ah, cheers!