Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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I HATE Villeneuve's Dune.

Villeneuve leans so heavily into "show, don't tell" that the movie becomes a long trailer. It has lots of visual exposition, but no character experiences an arc or development. So much rich lore is passed by on the wayside, and no work is done to connect the dots between the plot points. Elements as essential as character motivations are nowhere to be found.

I understand wanting to keep exposition to a minimal, but there's a way to craft and weave it into the rhythm and pace of a story.

The reason Yueh's betrayal doesn't sting is because no effort is put into developing him or his relationships. The fall of House Atreides is rather dull, action fluff. The Spice, the Spacing Guild, the Mentats, and the Bene Gesserit are passed over for more CG and more action scenes. The flash-forward dream sequences of Paul are sloppy and don't do the forthcoming plot ramifications justice. The Harkonnens are turned into cartoons, and their one act of supreme cruelty is handled entirely off-camera.

I dearly love the books, but you shouldn't have to read the books to appreciate the film. It should stand on its own legs, and Villeneuve totally misses on that shot. He delivered incoherent action dreck. It's visually appealing, but it's practically a GPU advertisement.

I can't entirely hate on Villeneuve, though. Blade Runner 2049 is a masterpiece.

I didn't find it to be incoherent at all, but I had read the book over a decade ago and had seen the previous adaptations. In some sense, maybe I was the ideal audience, because I knew the outline of the story going in but either didn't notice or didn't care when things were left out. Given the success of the film both financially and critically though, I have to imagine that a lot of people who hadn't read the book still understood and enjoyed it.

The reaction to Dune is similar to the reaction to Oppenheimer. I'm a huge fan of Christopher Nolan. A common criticism I see of him, which echoes what you are saying here, is that his characters lack motivation and are one-dimensional. I actually don't disagree. For me, film isn't primarily about character or plot like literature is. It's about creating a mood using pictures and sound. The best parts of Oppenheimer weren't the details of characters' personal lives or the Manhattan project or the senate hearings, they were the sweeping montages of beautiful images, music, and snippets of dialogue that came together to create a feeling of fear and awe appropriate for the subject matter. I feel the same way about Villeneuve's Dune. It might not be faithful to the intricate story of the book, but I think it nails the dark, vast, mystical quality that inhabiting the Dune universe ought to feel like.

You mention Blade Runner 2049. For my money, Villeneuve's true masterpiece is Arrival. It's not only great science fiction but also has a surprising amount of emotional depth, which sci-fi usually lacks.

Arrival was so good it got me to seek out all his other movies. There's no director whose movies I have rewatched more.

It does kinda feel like a movie directed by the Director of Photography and not a story teller. But we know Denis has been scouting locations for a decade or more. Makes me wonder if his director of photography enjoyed the experience or felt like puppet with someone’s hand up his backside the entire time.

> I dearly love the books, but you shouldn't have to read the books to appreciate the film. It should stand on its own legs, and Villeneuve totally misses on that shot.

This is the part I completely disagree with. I don’t think you need to read the books at all to understand or love Villeneuaves Dune. I hadn’t read the book at the time of seeing it, and I loved it. And then after I read the book I love the movie even more.

This is the thing, the people here that complain that you need to have read the book to understand the movie are dune fans. On the other hand there are people like you and my partner who I watched the movie with, who understood and loved the movie without having read the book.

I think it's usually much harder to please fans of a book, because they all will find different parts of the book important and something will be omitted, e.g. see the discussions about Tom Bombadil in LOTR.

Forget the books for a moment. The film is a brainless action film.

Most of the criticisms I made are film criticisms that could be levied against any bad or middling movie.

- The film is a vacuum for intricacy and coherence.

- The characters are one-dimensional, unchanging, and don't matter.

- The stakes might be huge, but they carry no emotional weight. Like most superhero films these days.

These are deficiencies in storytelling.

If we contrast Lynch's Dune with Villeneuve's, we might find similar analogies in contrasting "Jurassic Park" versus "Jurassic World", Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" versus Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit", or "Independence Day" versus whatever the hell "Independence Day 2" was.

Each of these latter films promised more, but they turned out to be empty and soulless. More box checking than composition, more visual spectacle than substance. The same is true of Villeneuve's Dune as a film.

I don't need a film adaptation to be faithful. I just need it to be a good movie. I'd be totally fine if the film made a wild departure from its source material, so long as it used that liberty to deliver something impressive. That would honestly mean more to me than a fully "by the books" rendition.

Villeneuve's Dune was just lazy.

I liked the new one fine, but I felt the same way. It was mostly just gawking at effects rather than story-intrigue for me, although I'm already familiar.

Spent more time thinking about the CGI than I did thinking about the plot, I think that might indicate something.

When I read the books I got a strong sense that Dune (the planet) was like a living entity.

This planet was the focal point for all political and economic machinations of the universe, yet it was a vast, mysterious and dangerous place. Humans were intruders.

Lynch's Dune had many wide shots that attempted to convey this, and when Paul was with the Fremen it felt as if he was truly removed from the rest of the human universe, and within the mysterious universe of the planet.

Villeneuve's Dune had amazing visuals yet too many scenes were tightly shot. To me this Dune felt claustrophobic, not vast. and when Paul was with the Fremen it didn't feel so removed from reach of the Empire.

I just rewatched the new Dune, and disagree with my previous assessment. I enjoyed the movie a lot more the second time around.

Perhaps I had preconceived notions the first time (I did watch Lynch's version immediately prior). Perhaps also as others have mentioned I didn't catch all the dialogue as it is quieter than the score in many sections, this time I had the subtitles on.

The cinematography is great, there are way more wide context shots than I remembered. I also felt the magic was there and there is a dreamlike quality during Paul's spice vision scenes. I'm honestly not sure why I didn't enjoy it the first time.

If you are like I was and ambivalent about the sequel, maybe give this movie another go. I've changed my mind and now looking forward to seeing part 2.

I got more frustrated with it on a second watch, about how shallow the characters and their relationships were, and about how the blandness and faded colour choices of a lot of the visuals seemed like a deliberate reaction against the richness and almost pantomime nature of the Lynch version.

I came away thinking they got the ornithopters right but little else.

That still rings true to me, the interpersonal relationships are lacking emotion.. It's as if all human relations and events are being told from a Bene Gesserit perspective, and perhaps this was intentional.

If intentional then it would be a good character arc for Paul to reject this in the second movie.. and then become dispassionate in his own way again in the third

One thing I noticed: the movie is very careful to lay out how the betrayal of House Atreides actually works. Every other time I’ve watched a version with someone I’ve ended up needing to explain who the heck the Sardukar are.

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