I actually think for the music they should try to get Brian Tyler involved. His work on the Children of Dune mini series was amazing, and IIRC he has since moved onto movies so it's worth pursuing.
He was talking about the Fremen of which the Empire nearly knew nothing about and regarded them as unimportant savages who live a meagre life in the desert. Duke Leto mentions that the key to Atreides military power on Caladan was their air force and that the key to military power on Arrakis was the desert and the Fremen which is why he sent Idaho as an advance "ambassador" to Arrakis to gain the trust of the Fremen and learn more about them (and he succeeded). That scene alone is what ruins the movie for me when it comes to the Fremen. In just a short conversation in the books Thufir explains why the Fremen were such good fighters. The Sardaukar were Elite because they were trained in a very harsh environment on Salusa Secundus.. a prison planet where you either are at the top of the food chain or you die. So everybody who survives and thrives in that environment is a natural born killer.. train and equip them, instill the Elite creed into them and provide them with otherwise unattainable pleasures and you get the most Elite fighting force ever build. That is until they met the Fremen who grow up in even harsher conditions since they are babies and are constantly in a battle to survive. There was a scene in the book where the Sardaukar went on a mission to capture Paul (or was it his son?) and assaulted a sietch where only women and old Fremen were present and the Sardaukar suffered huge casualties and had to improvise a fighting withdrawal or they would have all died.. a first for the Sardaukar and they didn't even encounter the best of the Fremen that day. I know that movies often enough work differently... more to the principle of flashy scenes rather than dialogue so the weirding modules made more sense to explain the combat capabilitiy but it still bugged me to no end and i hope the new movies does it better and is more faithful to the book. Atreides were no slouch in the combat department either though.. there was a scene of a gladiatorial fight between Feyd Rautha and an Atreides soldier after the Harkonnen had taken back Arrakis and destroyed House Atreides. That Atreides fighter would have apparently won and perhaps killed Feyd in this fight had it not been for a secret hypnotic command implanted in him. Feyd uttered the command word as a last ditch effort which incapacitated the Atreides fighter allowing Feyd to kill him (the entire fight was staged apparently by Thufir Hawat as a possibility to kill Feyd because the Atreides was not put under drugs to lessen his capabilites as it was common in these gladiatorial matches). This is why i think such a scene would be important to show how much superior Sardaukar are even against experienced combat troops and then later on show how much better Fremen actually are (but please no magical Matrix like combat moves.. just faster, more agile and more vicious).
I think it was before the Fremen though. For it to be about the Fremen, then the Emperor would have have to turn against House Atreides after they move to Arrakis but Leto knew it was the get go plus the emperor ordered them to move from Caladan. Secondly the line from Hawat says the Duke's warmasters "Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck" - Halleck never spent time with the Fremen until after Paul found him with the smugglers a couple of years after the big attack. Thirdly the Fremen were also fairly unknown to the Atreides as well. Leto had some thoughts about them which is why he sent Duncan ahead and to embed with them but he never trained them. It was Paul who taught them the tactics and techniques that would be used to bring down the Harkonnen.
It was an Atreides unit, not the Fremen. The Fremen weren't known as a military power until Paul's guerrilla war.
It's been a few years since i read the book i'll admit but i think Leto was talking about the Fremen Considering Landsraad politics Leto was quite popular amongst the Houses, in fact so popular that he has become a threat to the Emperor's position which is why he took away Arrakis, the most precious planet in that universe, away from the Harkonnen and gave it to the Atreides knowing full well about the official feud they had going on and the Harkonnen would not roll over and be content with it. The Atreides just underestimated the extent to which the Baron was willing to go to destroy them, nearly bankrupting his house and they also didn't think the Emperor would support them much less send regiments of Sardaukar in disguise as Harkonnen troops. So they knew about the trap and were willing to spring it and for them to be able to withstand that attack they wanted to use the power of the desert which means the indigenous people aka Fremen. Gurney may have been in Arrakis but Idaho was probably the main contact for the Fremen. The Atreides may have tried to form a combined unit made of Atreides/Fremen troops, a small elite unit at first but they couldn't have known the true power the Fremen had until time ran out. If the Atreides had a year or two to gain the full trust of the Fremen and form a miltary Alliance they would have kicked the teeth in of every force that dared to assault Arrakis including the Sardaukar. The Atreides would have just made them more deadly with modern weapons and maybe a few new tactics (though i doubt the Fremen would have needed them).
Yeah, the reason the Emperor destroyed House Atreides had nothing to do with the Fremen. Quite the opposite since recruiting and equipping the Fremen was their plan to counter the one they already knew to be in motion. The only reason it failed was because they didn't have enough time before the attack and the Baron threw an unprecedented and neigh ruinous amount of funds into the endeavour to land an overwhelming number of forces on all fronts. Leto planned to face five legions which seemed the limit given Guild prices but the Baron deployed ten, and that before they were even close to being ready. Plus of course Huey's betrayal gave the Harkonnens the accurate intelligence to determine where to strike and in what numbers. No the reason the Emperor feared the Atreides was a combination of the Duke's popularity with the other houses, combined with the very real possibility that the Atreides forces had been trained and equipped so that they might be able to give the Sardaukar a run for their money. The whole military balance of the Imperium was such that the Sardaukar and Emperor's levies were in equilibrium against he combined forces of the Landsraad. It's pretty much a mutual assured destruction scenario. However if one house could rally the others AND deploy a force to rival the Imperial terror troops, that would tip the balance and threaten the Corrino hold on the throne. I absolutely agree with all of this, though I don't envy the stunt choreography team charged with pulling it off convincingly. I mean it's one thing to show that one group is better than another, it's quite another to have a third *even better* group while never straying into the fantastical AND still making the initial group at least seem competent. No easy feat. This of course is all without even factoring in the Harkonnen troops, but that shouldn't be too much of an issue as they can be portrayed as pretty dumb conscripts, used as brute force lasgun fodder. I don't recall that they were ever explicitly described as such, but that's what I've always imagined them to be.
The whole point why the Atreides took the Dune fiefdom was becaue they knew it was a trap and that their enemies would be working against them, both Harkonnen and the Emperor. So, the Fremen were not in calculation for the Empeor or the Baron, since they were already moving against House Atreides by sending them to Dune. Duke Leto was aware of it, and was planning on cultivating allies, including the Fremen. If they get a group of Maori to play part of the Fremen, that would be fantastic. As for stunt work, hire the guys who did "The Raid" for some of the close quarters combat.
The Fremen were part of both the Atreus and Harkonnen plans. Both recognized the potential to turn them into an army. In fact, the Baron's plan relied on Feyd arriving as a saviour after Rabban oppressed them so in order to turn them against the Emperor and take the throne. But the troops trained by the Atreides to almost Sardauker levels were not Fremen. They were Atreides troops. Negotiations with Fremen were still very early on. There were no Fremen serving under the Atreides before / during the invasion. There were some Fremen who fought with them - the group that helped Thufir's troops (and even they had to be paid with dead bodies), the ones in Liet's base - but they were not Atreides forces.
And yet the Harkonnen controlled Arrakis for how long did nothing with the Fremen but treat them as pests? Think the baron needed better planning.
Wheels within wheels. The Harkonnens couldn't move on the throne without popular support and some serious legitimacy (remember, their ancestors were banished for cowardice at the Battle of Corrin). That was never going to happen so long as their nemesis House Atreidies was both powerful and popular. They needed a *lot* of money to pull off their defeat and that meant squeezing Arrakis for everything it was worth. Difficult to do while also trying to win over the populous. So the solution is to squeeze as hard as ever with Rabban in charge until the people are broken, then bring in Feyd as a saviour/messianic figure to rise them up out of bondage. Basically the idea was to recreate Arrakis in the image of Salusa Secundus by beating it with a blunt instrument, rather than hone, reshape and direct what was already there as the Atreidies had planned. Wait, was that a course change that came from Thufir or was it the plan all along? Some of the details and the ordering of the plot have become muddled for me over the years. I may not have articulated my point very well, but what I meant wasn't so much they the stunt team needed to be of a high standard (they do regardless but that's besides the point.) It's more that they'd need to somehow make the each of the three groups an order of magnitude more proficient than the next without the less proficient one suddenly becoming witless punchbags as soon as the more proficient ones show up. It's not as simple matter or doing impressive stunt work, it's that the stuntwork should tell a coherent story unto itself. A possible way to short-hand this could be to develop a distinctive style for each of them. Say choreograph the Atreidies to seem like modern soldiers with simple, direct but somewhat regimented CQC training. The Sardaukar would be more closer to SPECOPS, SAS types which is a little more efficient and brutally cunning. The Freman are the tricky part as they need to outclass the Sardaukar, but not to the point of making them a trivial threat. Remember the Freman were legitimately impressed that the Sardaukar were so tricky to kill. I feel like their fighting style should have more of a flow to it. Faster, as they don't have the ingrained training to slow for shield penetration, but also a willowy flexibility. As if they can bend around a thrust or slash and attack from an unexpected angle. Though I'm not sure how far any of that will go when most fights are with knives and the occasional dart gun. Like I said: tricky.
I'm not saying it isn't tricky. Just that the stunt team needs to be versed in a variety of combat styles, and "The Raid" team certainly has the close quarters skills. I think that having the right attitude towards it would be essential. The second facet it to it would be to have each combatant to be trained in a different martial arts style. Sardaukar are brutal and efficient, so the Special Forces type hand to hand would be appropriate. Fremen are quicker, and more agile, so a combination style would likely be appropriate, with wushu and Aikido, which is quicker and can be combined with a variety of weapons. The Atredies I tend to agree with, though perhaps incorporate more Krav Maga to distinguish them from the Harkonnen. Especially for Gurney and Duncan. Duncan would also need some serious sword training.
Then you're probably need seperate style for Paul because he'd also been trained in Bene Gesserit (weirding) techniques and then a 6th for the Fremen after he trains them that combines his, the Ateides and Fremen techniques.. Would be quite a challenge for the stunt team/fight choreographers etc) to develope styles that would be visually dis-similar so the audience could tell the diffence and then train both the cast members and the extras/stunt performers etc.
Not necessarily. It is not unusual for the main cast members (especially Paul) to get more singular treatment for combat and stunt training. Brenden Fraser received it for "The Mummy" films, Keanu Reeves received specialized weapons training for "John Wick," and on and on. Feyd-Rathu would likely receive similar training. And then you have larger scale training for the extras, which characters like Stilgar and Gurney could participate in because they would be part of a larger group. The styles all have fundamental moves and motions that can distinguish themselves under the proper instruction. Once the basics are established, then you can introduce the hybrids of Paul with the weirding way. By the way, Stargate SG-1 production team trained a guest star, not a principle cast member, in the basics of the Brazilian martial art Capoeira for one episode. If I can take six weekends out of my summer to coordinate a sword fight scene for a friend's senior project, then full time production team can accomplish this task.
I don't think anyone is suggesting it's not doable, just that it'd be quite an unprecedented accomplishment if done as we're suggesting. You can certainly cite examples of similar components of these kinds of things being done in one production or another, but to do ALL of it in one production? That's several orders of magnitude more daunting. It's the difference between conducting an orchestra and conducting FIVE simultaneously, while also having three or four solo singers, a duet and a bloke who thinks he's a Morris Dancer, all the while keeping the whole thing in harmony. I wonder if a more practical approach would be to hire several stunt teams and have them develop these styles off on their own then come back and figure out how they might interact. Sort of like how in making 'Alien', Ridley Scott hired H.R. Giger to design all of the alien aspects while Ron Cobb & Chris Foss handed the human stuff.
My argument is that it isn't as unprecedented as we think. I would have to research more, but I believe LOTR production involved several combat instructors. Starship Troopers basically created a boot camp for the extras to take them through the fundamentals of combat-so, you do that with different stunt teams. The principle cast will get their own training, as is industry standard. Stunt teams also tend to have contacts with local martial arts schools to fill out the ranks with non-speaking roles.
I don't think I'm expressing my point very well. I'm not talking about the number of players involved or how well the extras need to be trained. I'm talking about being able to adequately distinguish between *four* major fighting styles to support the storytelling. Name one movie where this exact thing was done and wasn't exclusively a martial arts movie. Remember at it's core this is still basically a socio-political thriller with an ecological message and deep religious undertones. It has a lot going on.
Not a movie and the effectiveness of the fighting styles in Dune is hierarchical rather than a directed graph, but it reminds me of Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock off TBBT for some reason.
It depends on the how the stunt teams are structured and the attitudes of the principle cast members. I think LOTR is probably the best example, because it had so many disparate styles of combat, among the main characters. I agree that Dune has a lot going on, which is why I think world building with the principle characters can lead to good collaboration between them and the stunt teams to craft unique styles. Which will often happen in such a large scale world building undertaking. This is primarily because the principle cast will bring their own touches to the characters, to combat and to stunt work, because they take the time to get in to that character and say "Ok, they might not do it this way, but react like X..." It's very much a development process, as the characters become more fleshed out and received their own specific touches from the actors, it takes on a life of its own.