Dune 2018 (19,20,21...)
- Thread starter wayoung
- Start date
You know I've never been able to get much solid information on Scott's work on the project. Just that sets were being built and only one draft of the script had been done (which is a red flag, in and of itself) when Ridley jumped ship; partly it seems because he didn't like how the script departed from the source material, coupled with the fact that dealing with de Laurentiis as a producer was a bit of a headache, but mostly because of the death of his brother.
Had circumstances been different, I think we would have gotten a more faithful and coherent adaptation than Lynch's (and certainly Jodorowski's.) Whether it'd be any good or not...I honestly don't have enough to go on to form an intelligent opinion, but just going by the man's track record at that time, I believe it would have at least been *interesting*.
Of course in that scenario we'd have never gotten 'Blade Runner' and who knows whether the 'Dangerous Days' script would have ever gotten produced in any form, so I think things ultimately turned out for the best.
Still, I'd kinda like to see the timeline where things went a little differently if for no other reason to see a history of late 20th and early 21st century media without the domino effect that is 'Blade Runner's influence.
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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?
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?
my theory here is twofold a) they didn't have away to make the hand fighting look different and b) training and choreographing large scale fight scenes so they didn't look funny would have been very very expensive.
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.
A quick Google search only turned up an image of Dave Bautista as Beast Rabban. Kind of reminds me of Darth Vader without his helmet at the end of ROTJ.
After having seen a few more images, I am liking what I see.
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/
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/
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Combined covers
Combined covers
Love the not so subtle color difference - the Atreides in darker, more cold colors as outsiders while the Fremen in more warm colors, nice contrast and i still dig the stillsuits, quite close in style to the Lynch version.
https://twitter.com/DuneNews/status/1299413993627570179
Anyone read that in Thano's voice? Especially the very end?
Anyone read that in Thano's voice? Especially the very end?
That's what's making me cautiously optimistic. For many directors directing is "just" a job, they get hired to helm a project and depending on the skill of the director he/she might even make an average script interesting.
However if a director finds/gets a project they truly care about or have lobbied for it themselves and if that script/source material is top level quality amazing things can happen.
It happened with Jackson and his LotR trilogy (let's forget The Hobbit movies) and Favreau with Iron Man and The Mandalorian so why not with Villeneuve? His Blade Runner was amazing and that is a herculean feat given how beloved and cult like the original Blade Runner movie is.
The stillsuits look more comfortable than the Lynch ones but I thought the more extreme look helped to convey the functionality. Maybe it works better in the movie proper but in the still shots it just looks like rubber pieces on fabric.
No. The less I'm reminded of Thanos the better.
Actually, let's not because it proves your point. Jackson didn't want to direct the Hobbit films and ended up doing so anyway. I think in the process he lost sight of what made the Hobbit distinct from LOTR and allowed mission creep to happen.
Though, I'm one of the few people who finds some good in those films, despite the overlong and unnecessary secondary storylines.
Agreed on both counts. I do wonder how much of it was Jackson and how much it was the studio to split the film into three films, thus unnecessarily forcing the parallel to the first trilogy. I know Jackson loves his battle sequences and look no further than changing Helm's Deep from a simple incursion to a massive climatic battle (but at least it functions well on most counts). But the high percentage of the third was an obscene amount of fighting that wasn't even depicted in the boo (because Bilbo to the knock on the head early on).
I said ever since the third film came out that deeply buried in the trilogy is an excellent adaptation of the novel. I've watched a couple of fan edits and I've been proven right. It's pretty damn remarkable how much of the fat easily slides off when the focus is right. Even the unnecessary side plot with Azog disappears without any notice and I was pleasantly surprised that was true for even the "Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire" sequence that was horribly bogged down (but there's no fixing the stupid situation with the tree). The only part that's really choppy is the Beorn sequence.
So yeah, there's quite a bit of good in the trilogy but it's hard to see it clearly because of all of the excessive side stuff.
As you say finding the right fan edit can do wonders. My wife is a huge LOTR fan (writes fan fiction) and has created her own fan edit where she knows the sequences of the films she wants to watch to structure the story in a way that both makes sense and ignores the side stuff. SO, watching the films with her is rather fun because she has done that edit, just hasn't edited it all together, if that makes sense.
