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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. |
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.