Nice, i love that Dune occasionally crops up here and there. It shows that no matter how old the books are they do have an impact.
If the movie is good and is successful at the box office and with the general audience i fully expect memes and phrases to crop up everywhere - the Litany against Fear, Blessed be the Maker etc.
The Litany crops up all over the place. There's a guy on one of my gaming forums who normally takes a 5-week hiking/biking holiday every year or two to some exotic place. He takes many photos and videos and posts them on the forum (the current thread is about his hike to Everest Base Camp; he freely admits he's not good enough to tackle the rest of the mountain).
He's been in a few tight spots over the years when the weather went bad at the wrong time, or a piece of equipment broke... and he recites the Litany to calm himself down.
Only G? So would that me no action scenes?
Keep in mind that Quebec has a higher tolerance for nudity and swearing than English Canada does. What gets censored elsewhere is usually left in, on the French channels.
Am I the only one that's actually glad Jodorowski never got to do his version of Dune? It seems to be held in high regard by some significant quarters of the fandom (for lack of a better term) which just feels bizarre to me.
No, you're not the only one. I was relieved to learn it would never be finished, because what I've seen is stomach-turning both in visual considerations and story.
For all it's many MANY flaws at least the Lynch version had a grasp of the general plot and a few of the primary themes of the novel.
True. And Frank Herbert was at least allowed to give input here and there even if it wasn't followed (he hated the ending). Kyle MacLachlan was a genuine Dune fan and knew the story backwards and forwards, and even though
he couldn't just up and tell Lynch when he was wrong, at least he understood what it was supposed to be about.
Honestly? Kinda. I mean, I wouldn't call it a priority, but it sure would be nice to get back to the theatres and see some new movies. It feels so weird, the last time I was to a theatre was February. I think that's the longest stretch I've gone without going to the theatre in nearly a decade, if not longer.
Heh, I haven't set foot in a theatre in over 20 years (last time was December 30, 1999). I honestly don't miss it.
What i am thinking about sometimes is why some fans of the novel are so vivid about Lynch's version and what the differences that truly matter are and i can only come up with one - the ending itself where it was insinuated that Paul could make it actually rain.
Now to be fair - no movie adaptation could match any book that is the size of Dune with its multilayered themes. Much of what is nonessential to the bare plot (which i have described in this thread a while ago) was cut and i understand it even if i may not like the decision (my pet peeve are the Weirding Modules but only because they missed the big opportunity for some action scenes instead of just shooting some unique weapons).
I like Lynch's version for the most part, especially the visual design and to me it's a serviceable version of a quite complicated book when you get into the details.
What do you think?
I can't say this often enough: I highly recommend that people read
The Making of Dune, by Ed Naha. It's full of interesting interviews with cast and crew, and quite candid about what worked and didn't work, what they tried, wanted, and failed to do, and how frustrating it was to film in Mexico. It also points out that Raffaella de Laurentiis was was not only producing
Dune; she was also producing
Conan the Destroyer at the same time and had to juggle both movies.
There was so much that was filmed that didn't make it into the final cut, including the fight with Jamis. It's too bad, because for the people who didn't read the book, they had no idea why Harah and the two boys were in the movie.
One of the points I kept making on some of the Dune forums I was active on years ago is that there are some things about Dune that Lynch got exactly right, as far as the visual concepts and tangibles go. I absolutely love the sets. I'd move into Castle Caladan or the Atreides stronghold on Arrakis
thisfast because they look like places where real people live, as opposed to sets where actors stand on a mark and recite lines.
I have a love/loathe thing about the costumes. The stillsuits were ridiculous (I'll get into that later). But the Bene Gesserit robes were spot-on (not talking about the lack of hair; that's also ridiculous). And Irulan's costumes were absolutely appropriate. The guys on my Dune forum didn't get Irulan's costumes, but the fact is that the word that applies here is "Byzantine."
Irulan Corrino is a character who can wear completely impractical things that look uncomfortable and awkward, because she's of the rank and station where her function is to be an ornament to the Imperial court and a bribe to be paid to whatever man the Emperor wants to make an alliance with. So she's dressed accordingly, flaunting immense wealth, and because she has umpteen servants to do everything for her, her clothing and hairstyle don't need to be practical. She does no physical labor other than what she might have been taught by Mohiam (remember, Irulan received some Bene Gesserit training but isn't considered suitable to become a Reverend Mother).
Lynch stuck to the novel in not giving Irulan much to do; people mock the opening where she goes into her "Know then that it is the year 10,191..." speech, but the fact is that Irulan is a historian and her voiceovers are part of the histories she writes.
Lynch's Irulan is competently presented, and congruent with the character FH created in the first book. But it took the miniseries to make me actually like her. An early version of
Dune Messiah had Irulan being killed by Fremen fanatics while visiting Mohiam's prison cell, and I'm glad he changed his mind. Otherwise, we wouldn't have had Julie Cox's terrific version in the Children of Dune miniseries.
I will say that the Water of Life scene really annoyed me. Come on - out in the desert, not moving without rhythm, gasping and panting into the open air and losing all that moisture with every breath? The miniseries got that part right. Lynch blew it.
Casting... as the nursery rhyme goes (slightly modified): When it was good it was very, very good, and when it was bad, it was horrid.
Jurgen Prochnow IS Duke Leto. I don't think there's another actor on the planet who could have done as well.
I was initially pleased when I read that Richard Jordan was going to play Duncan Idaho, as I remembered him from Logan's Run and thought that yes, he had the right look for Duncan. But what a difference 8 years made. Richard Jordan was too old and not right for Duncan. It's not that he wasn't a good actor, he just wasn't
Duncan. The miniseries used two different actors to play Duncan, and both did a credible job.
I could go on and on, so I'll just say that if they could take the best of the miniseries and the best of the Lynch movie, combine them and tweak them into place, they could have had the perfect Dune film - or rather series of films, as it's too much for just one movie. A TV miniseries stretched over 6-10 episodes or so would have been about right, to really get into the whole experience.
And hopefully in doing this, somebody would have figured out that you don't need the Bene Gesserit to either be bald or wear funny hats or have superduper powers. Nobody really got the Bene Gesserit right, which is a shame.
Pretty sure I've gone into this before somewhere up thread, back in the mists of time; but my general notion regarding the weirding modules was that they simply didn't know how to make the weirding way seem special enough as to give a major advantage over what's supposed to be the universe's most elite of elite warriors. So "special sound weapon" is just much easier to portray cinematically.
Pretty much the same applies to the ending too. The book ending (I'm Emperor! Now my Mum and girlfriend will negotiate the particulars...ROLL CREDITS!) would be decidedly anticlimactic for a movie that's been building up Paul as the universe's super-being and messiah for going on three hours. So Paul actually achieving substantive cosmic powers beyond some weird prophetic dreams, in the form of ULTIMATE KILLING VOICE POWER and miraculously generating rainfall adds at least *some* sense of conclusion.
I'm not saying I *like* this solution, but I understand why it exists.
I guess it's for the benefit of the audience who didn't read the novel and need some "happily ever after" ending.
Images of merchandise is starting to leak online. Like the trailer images, I won't be posting them to avoid the mods having to deal with takedowns. But if you're interested, give it a Google.
Here's the first look at Shai-Hulud, along with two alternate Oct 2020 Empire covers:
https://www.empireonline.com/movies/news/empire-dune-world-exclusive-covers-revealed/
Huh. Lynch-style stillsuits with miniseries-style robes over top.
In
The Making of Dune, the actors reveal just how awful those stillsuit costumes were to wear. They were not in the least bit comfortable, and rather hellish to have to wear while filming action scenes in a desert. In RL practical terms, they did the opposite of what a stillsuit is supposed to do. Some actors nearly passed out from the heat and water loss. Not to mention the in-story explanation for how they worked was opposite to the novel. The excuse was that "we can't have filters covering the actors' faces" so they said the actors were supposed to breathe in through the mouth and out through the nose... totally opposite to how we saw the actors breathe all through the movie.
) and even with the bad quality i was still excited to finally see the first scenes in motion - it was great and now i am stoked for the full trailer (hopefully we'll see some kickass Fremen or Muad'Dib fight moves 
)
