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Comment by Slow_Hand | Hacker News Reader

What element of Dune do you think would suffer by not having an ‘R’ rating? It’s not as if the book is reliant on anything exceptionally violent or obscene. Probably the darkest element is the reference to The Baron’s rape of young people. Frankly that’s better off as something to be implied and not depicted.

I think you can get away with enough in a PG-13 to suit the tone of this story. Watching the recent trailer you can catch a glimpse of what appear to be prisoners of war strapped upside down on troughs that will collect the blood from their slit throats. That’s pretty dark. And seemingly it’s an addition by the filmakers. It’s not an element from the book.

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It’s not the R rating necessarily, it’s how they’ve sanitized the story. The whole book is rife with islamic/arabic and at least from the trailer they’ve anglicized everything, which doesn’t give me much hope. I really don’t see a reason for it.

Gotcha. I know that the first trailer substituted the word “jihad” with “crusade”. That rubbed me the wrong way as well. But as someone who has pored over every bit of available information about this movie, I’ve come across an interview with someone who saw a test screening AND was already familiar with the book. They were directly asked if the word jihad was used in the film and they said that it was.

It seems that the ommission of jihad in the film’s marketing may have been a strategy to side-step any potential negative press in the lead-up to the film’s release. That seems wise given the way that American media likes to sensationalize every last detail that can be mined for potential outrage/eyeballs.

I guess we’ll see it and find out for sure.

Well for one thing it's about drugs...

Eh, Barely. Saying Dune is about drugs is like saying Back to the Future was about plutonium. It’s more of a plot element that facilitates the novel’s themes. It’s a resource that shapes the world and gives the characters something to compete over and control.

The story revolves around spice but it’s not ABOUT spice.

In any case, it still doesn’t strike me as the kind of fictional drug that’s calling out for restrictions. It’s depiction can be mild enough to circumvent an unwanted movie rating and still not compromise the story.

Narcotics featured heavily in Batman Begins and that movie still had a PG-13. Again, I don’t see what about Dune’s story is crying out for an R rating in order to be true to the story.

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