“Dune” (The Movie), Annotated

A lot of people who read the book because of the upcoming movie also thought the book was boring.

I think that most people expect character-driven narrative, and so when you get a work that leans more towards ideas and concepts, people tune out.

Edit: I think is also why the movie Sicario (also by Villeneuve) threw some people off, because it didn't operate with a "normal" narrative: SPOILER {the roles of main character and protagonist were two different people}:

* https://thebarkbitesback.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/going-deep...

To be honest, I think that's a bit of a failure of the film that it doesn't stand truly on its own. It seems that they tried to be very faithful to the text in terms of what they depicted - which I'm sure was appreciated by Dune fans - but I understand the source material was quite dense, so they would have had to leave quite a lot of important details out.

And I think one of the mistakes of the film was to focus so much about Arakkis. The film opens with the struggle and exploitation of the fremen over spice extraction. But I think it's the wrong focus. The thing that makes Arakkis interesting is the fact that the entire empire hinges on the spice production there. The planet itself is just sort of a back-water. I think it would have been better to start with a vignette explaining the importance of spice, to properly set the stakes for the rest of the film.

Not just dull, but even confusing at times because it was too minimal at parts. The actual importance of spice and its qualities is only briefly touched upon, and I think the Bene Gesserit's political importance and their long-term planning and meddling was a little too underplayed. Those are pretty important elements driving the story.

I got completely downvoted for my opinion on Seveneves. This one won't fare better, I'm afraid.

But from my perspective the movie was a fantastic sensorial companion to the books. I felt it nailed everything (or maybe I was justed primed to accept this). Everyone must watch this in one of those simulator-4D screening rooms with vibrating chairs.

I left unsure about the portrayal of Jessica and Gurney though. I found Jessica from the movie overly unsure and emotional to what I imagined. And Gurney too stiff.

In that vein, it is similar to the book. The book doesn’t provide immediate context. The reader collects the puzzle pieces over hundreds of pages.

After the movie was over she said she liked it but she wasn’t sure if she could follow without my help.

I certainly buy that some people were confused, but I don't agree that means the movie was poorly made. Some things are just not for certain people. It's a work of art as much as a product — it should not be designed-by-committee to achieve maximum popularity.

I suppose the cheap cliffhanger ending is meant to sell tickets to the sequels. But it felt even cheaper than Star Wars in terms of summation and closure. I felt like after that much investment of time, the ending could have been a little bit more resolved rather than "New Beginning!" vibes. The movie isn't really notable in my mind without seeing the sequels. I surmise that once sequels come out, watching them back to back, will be a satisfying experience. But this movie, in isolation, is a bit too void of what a movie ought to contain.

The glaring omission, especially given our current zeitgeist, was the subversion of sci fi tropes, the questionable "white saviour" elements, the environmental concerns and treatment of the native people, but those come up more in the second part of the book anyway, so I'm holding on to hope that will be explored more in the second movie

The best explanation of watching the movie I've seen is a friend who felt they were reciting a litany as they watched each scene. "And now Gurney trains Paul in shield-fighting" "and now the Gom Jabbar" "and now the Shadout Mapes presents the Crysknife" "Now the Duke rescues the workers from the sandcrawler" "Now Paul and his mother face the worm", etc. I'll give the movie this, it hit pretty much all the episodes that one would expect.

In general I'm not a fan of the type of movie where everyone knows there's going to be a sequel so the emotional climax of the movie is closer to the middle and there's not too much suspense towards the end. So, overall, I just thought the ending was pretty dull.

FWIW, I have never read the book, but had seen the Lynch movie and was obsessed with the video game which doesn't really cover a lot of the plot either, but I think does a good job of setting.

Is it that Dune books seem slow-moving? Is it the concepts being difficult to visualize?

Also, are Dune and Don Quixote both cursed to never quite make satisfying films?

Watch The Godfather or an episode of The Simpsons, both examples of fitting in an enormous amount of detail without being rushed.

There was a lot of detail missing that could have been there.

Let's pause here...

When you can easily move a consciousness into different bodies, the most dangerous opponents are those that can empathize with their enemy to such a degree that they can pass as one of them seamlessly and unconsciously predict their motives and reactions.

> The idea that over thousands of years the Bene Gesserit have seeded fake prophecy and religion throughout the universe to "primitive worlds". A Bene Gesserit visiting one of these worlds is trained to fulfill these prophecies and basically weaponize the locals.

> I don't know why it blows my mind but it does. Has modern scifi used this idea anywhere?

To anyone interested in Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere but hasn't yet read the Mistborn series, be aware please that my answer contains major spoilers for the first couple of books, so stop reading this comment now if that concerns you.

In the Mistborn series, there are two deities for this one specific planet- for reasons I won't go into, they created the planet and its humans together but one deity trapped the other in a metaphysical prison. To escape this prison, this second one uses the tiny amount of influence it still has to pervert the prophecies and teachings of the dominant religion over thousands of years to weaponize the local population, engineer rebellions, and cause a lot of people to believe they're some "chosen hero" who will defeat a fake threat manufactured by this 2nd deity, which all eventually causes the release of the 2nd diety from this metaphysical prison.

Not quite the same I guess, but they share some similar threads.

The first third of the book reads like an encyclopedia article with a slow moving plot tacked onto the side, and since most of the information and the intrigue is laid out so plainly, the reader is left in a state of passive consumption. The last two thirds are entirely okay. The narrative is interesting in the abstract, but it won't keep you on the edge of your seat when you're reading it. This is where most people break off.

Dune is difficult not because the text is complex or challenging, but because it's a slog. Like reading a history textbook conveyed through character's internal monologues, and passable pros. It's an exceptional piece of world-building, and a SciFi landmark. But it doesn't challenge you to guess what's next, and tension in the book is diffused by the book's tone.

When someone goes to read Dune, I'm rarely surprised to find that they've either given up, or realized in retrospect that they would have been better served spending an evening perusing the series' wiki.

But I'm going to read the book now. Normally having a visual to put to the words helps me get through that stuff.

The being said, I really enjoyed the movie.

They get frustrated with its jargon and made up words. They don't find the story captivating. And they find the writing style pretentious, antiquated, hard to read.

I'm also in the camp of having liked it. Maybe because I saw it young, but I'll still watch it today. There's a ton of memorable scenes and quotable lines.

Later on the books get heavy into bio-engineering. Some really strange stuff in the books w/ clones (and multiples/generations of the same clones) etc. The film sorta hinted at it a bit with the spider creature thing (which is not in the original book) but...one of the distinct things about the Dune universe is anything "alien" is really just weird Human bio-engineering.

https://www.theonion.com/sci-fi-writer-attributes-everything...

Taking a deep book and turning it into a single movie seems to not work. Enders game: I'm looking at you.

I agree that it is great, but I can also imagine others having the complete opposite opinion. It's certainly a direction you don't expect the series to take, just from the first one or two :-)

Its all made worse by the fact that, in an effort to rid the book of stilted exposition, the meanings of the words are explained once or twice in passing mentions, and seem to be replacements for real words fairly arbitrarily (you try to remember one word only to find its never mentioned again, another it turns out is vital to the plot).

Though I guess that is to be expected of anything which has has such a vast influence on a genre, no book is perfect.

Saw it in Dolby Cinema which, I think, is an IMAX competitor.

I watched it first on a smaller theater screen, and found I was much more able to focus on small details and contrasts. I enjoyed the IMAX version a lot less: sure, you are immersed in the movie, the soundtrack is terrific (and sounds less out-of-place sometimes). But I found it hard to focus on the movie, being reduced to a passive viewer.

I just caught a lot more details in my non-IMAX screening, that I completely missed the second time. When I recall scenes, I think those are from my first screening. I admit I don't know if my opinion were reversed had I seen it on IMAX first, but overall I'm not sold. Plus the ticket was more than twice the price (which I gladly give to fund the second movie -- I wish that made "pirating" legal for me).

i'm seeing a lot of bad reviews from people who obviously watched it at home on a mediocre TV set in a living room. this movie deserves better.

So in this respect he did exactly the same thing as his father - turned his back to the bull while performing for his people. And like a generation earlier, the bull turned out to be closer than expected.

Harkonnen could conceivably have the etymology you’re describing, but the allusion with the statue is much more direct.

That part is very interesting, I wonder why it wasn't ever mentioned. It explains SO MANY things.

Do you mean Kwisatz Haderach and gom jabbar?

I mean the very first page has:

Paul lay awake wondering: What’s a gom jabbar?

And on the next page:

He mouthed her strange words: Gom jabbar … Kwisatz Haderach.

So, it's not like the book expects you to know what they mean. The protagonist himself doesn't know what they mean!

I totally appreciate differences in taste but giving up after two pages when the prose itself acknowledges that these are storage words seems a bit odd.

Herbert goes the opposite way. He simply starts using terminology and referencing entities and histories as though you already know them. You pick it up by osmosis (and newer editions of the book, like the one I read, have a large glossary in the back to simplify matters), but never really get a thorough explanation of the world we are in. I think this is one of the reasons that the Dune Encyclopedia was so popular early on.

It's telling that Tolkien never really worked on the Middle Earth guidebooks, but Herbert did.

The Chronicles of Amber flat-out rocked.

For me, this movie is one of the few book-based movies that is significantly better than the book.