Okay, someone complained at me in the other thread about spoilers.
So here's the thing: Dune itself was published in 1965. The last novel Frank Herbert wrote in this series was published 25 years ago. The Lynch movie was in 1984. The first miniseries was in 2000. The second miniseries was in 2003. This thread is talking about movies that haven't been made yet or which might never be made.
So GMAB about spoilers. I am NOT going to use spoiler tags for stuff that falls well outside the spoiler rules for this forum. If that's not good enough warning, feel free to scroll past my posts.
My recommendation: Read the books, at least the first 3 (and I don't mean any of that crap by KJA/BH; honestly, Paul of Dune is NOT the "direct" sequel to Dune, especially when there's a bit in it that claims everything in Dune is just in-universe propaganda Paul ordered Irulan to write; that's KJA/BH telling the readers that only their books, not Frank Herbert's books, are the "real" story).
God Emperor of Dune is actually top of my personal list for a Dune movie / series.
I’d love to see it adapted!
You want to put everyone to sleep after the first 10 minutes?
Honestly, most of that novel is Leto II talking either to himself or to other people or thinking to himself. Yes, there are a few scenes where stuff happens, but there aren't many. And unless Leto II is your favorite Dune character ever (there are some odd people who prefer him over everyone else), it would be a movie where the audience would cheer the downfall of the main character.
That said... if I were tasked with making a movie of this novel (I actually did use it as a scriptwriting exercise years ago back when Script Frenzy was one of the NaNoWriMo events, and found it to be unworkable past the opening pages)... there is so much I'd cut. Like over half. Most of that book is pointless filler.
It might actually work as a TV miniseries, if the filler garbage was cut. Maybe. And whoever helms it would have a decision to make about one of the characters' attitudes, since it's not in line with modern social conventions. I guess one or two specific scenes could be eliminated to resolve that, however.
It is a pivotal novel but i think hard to film as it's 80-90% concept and dialogue, not something that usually draws in sizeable crowds. I'm also not sure if it would be feasible to condense Emperor, Heretics and Chapterhouse into a single long movie or a two parter as the latter two have much more action and could balance out the more cerebral Emperor novel.
God Emperor, Heretics, and Chapterhouse into one single movie, or even a two-parter would absolutely not make any sense. God Emperor takes place 3000 years after the events of Children of Dune. Heretics takes place 1500 years after God Emperor. There is no way God Emperor could ever make sense combined with any other part of the series, because its events are isolated in time and it's just too
weird.
Heretics and Chapterhouse are two-thirds of a planned final trilogy (FH died before finishing the final novel). They comprise an unspecified number of years, but it would have to fit the amount of time it takes for Sheeana to grow from a child to a Reverend Mother - at least a decade or more like 12-15 years. And there would need to be a new actor to play Duncan since the current one could not possibly play him as a teenager.
So... Heretics/Chapterhouse would do for a two-movie story since they're basically 2/3 of a story divided into two novels. There's no massive time jump from one to another, and not a huge influx of new characters.
Dunno what they'd do about some of the more disturbing stuff in those novels, though. I really don't think modern audiences would accept it as written, especially when it comes to the child characters, never mind the teenage characters. This is one of the reasons TPTB aged Leto and Ghanima in the Children of Dune miniseries. In the novels they're only 9 years old, and even though they were born with adult consciousness and awareness, the audience would see
children and some would not be able to accept it. This is even moreso for parts of Chapterhouse, when you have a child even younger than Leto and Ghanima were in the novel.
If they even get to CoD, that will be an achievement in and of itself. And that I think is the logical place to stop.
But if they're feeling crazy, they could do the rest, but GEoD is a non-starter as a movie. You'd have to roll parts of it into the next two books as flashbacks, either in the form of Other Memory, recordings from Leto, or the dreams of his sandworm progeny. Either way it's going to get really weird . . .
The miniseries that combined Dune Messiah and Children of Dune did a decent job of telling the story of the Atreides (Paul, Jessica, Chani, Stilgar, Gurney, etc.).
Then comes a massive time jump of 3000 years, and there are only two characters with whom the audience has any familiarity.
I actually think the reverse. Have Children of Dune be the flashback with God Emperor as a framing story. The script would just need to omit details of the God Emperor's identity, which would be easy enough to do, until the end of the movie(s).
While everyone in the audience who's read the books sits back and yawns because they know what the Big Secret is.
This honestly would not work. There are only three candidates who could be the God Emperor, and we know that one is eliminated because he dies, and another is female.
By the time of God Emperor, nobody cares about the events of Children of Dune, other than once upon a time there was a pre-Born named Leto Atreides whose family are anathema and hated by the people of that 3000-years-later society because they made the current situation possible.
That's not a terribly practical approach since you'd have to obscure the identity of Leto so much that the pay-off would either feel hollow, or heavy handed.
Also, with storytelling one must always consider the perspective of such a framing device. In the original book the perspective was technically Irulan's. We never really see her in context until the later books, but the general idea is that this is a history of events she's pieced together after the fact and that she didn't live them.
The new movie takes a more interesting tack by having Chani be that perspective, giving a voice to the Fremen and their role in this deliberately typical foreign saviour narrative.
What perspective would Leto II really provide the audience with? Yes, he's a neigh omnipotent living god and knows all of what transpired through the inherited memories of his genetic progenitors. But that's not a very useful prism for Dune. It's too remote, too clinical, and in a lot of ways, too male.
In DM & CoD these are mostly character that the audience is already familiar with. They know who Paul, Chani, and Stilgar are, they know Jessica and they know Duncan, so it'd be strange to have them effectively re-introduced by an as yet unknown character.
I think for this stretch of the narrative they should give the framing narration back to Irulan since unlike in the first book, she's actually present for all of these events and is still there at the end, and she's ostensibly the newcomer to the group, at least for the audience. I also think it's important to keep it a female voice, not a male one as that was a pretty consistent feature of the novels.
As such I wouldn't give the narration of the post CoD events to Leto II either. I'd probably give it to Sheeana, who like Chani and Irulan is someone closely tied and witness to the larger events, but also something of an outsider. A follower swept up in the tide of history, not the one guiding it, as the Atredies line invariably do. She'd also provide the audience a wider context of how much the world has changed across the millennia, from Dune to Rakis, and back again to Dune.
The way I'd incorporate the GEoD material is through context rather than exposition. The actual plot of GEoD doesn't really matter. It's the themes and the ideas that are important, and that's what should be taken on board. It'd be a more interesting choice to go from the dawn of a new age at the end of CoD to the cold opening of HoD of an arachnological lecture examining the ruins of that age, long after it's all gone to dust.
Hell, the only event of note that's worth a damn is already built into the later novels in the form of Darwi reliving Leto II's "death" on the bridge and his prescient hidden message to her across the millennia.
Interesting idea about having Sheeana as a narrator once they get around to doing Heretics. However, we meet her as a child experiencing one of the greatest traumas a child can experience, and she's not in any position to be any sort of narrator except for her own personal experiences. She knows nothing of the greater picture until she is taught.
The only narrator that would make sense by this point would be Darwi Odrade. And I realize that some references to God Emperor would have to be made, to explain why the Imperium isn't around anymore and the Bene Gesserit and the Tleilaxu are running everything. Obviously there would need to be some reference to the Scattering, to explain both this and the Honored Matres.
https://collider.com/dune-2-script-imax-footage-denis-villeneuve-comments/
Script is basically done and the crew is prepping for the movie for the October 2023 release.
Following the links in this article led me to this:
article said:
The eldest daughter of Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV, the character did not appear in the latest adaptation, but was mentioned by name, and was portrayed by José Ferrer in the 1984 David Lynch film.
Somebody needs to hire a proofreader to fix the grammar. In the Lynch movie, Princess Irulan was NOT played by Jose Ferrer. She was played by Virginia Madsen.
