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Comment by boppo1 | Hacker News Reader

The first was okay. I was disappointed, I really like villenueve's other work. But it was just kinda stale.

Well, Dune is kinda stale. It's certainly not for everyone, but I thought he did an amazing job of brining the books to life.

I disagree, I loved Dune. Messiah was a little hard to follow, but Dune was ace. It felt like part one sanded off all the interesting bits and gave us a really generic brutalist aesthetic scifi.

> sanded off

Good one!

> Well, Dune is kinda stale.

Yeah, I have to concur with that take. When I read Dune, I just didn't find it that interesting.

It rarely felt like the characters had agency--a lot of plot tokens were collected and redeemed to move the story forward (whoops, story needs to move--time for a new, previously unmentioned superpower). And quite often the characters were just cartoonishly dumb or smart or good or evil.

As you said, it's certainly not for everyone. I suspect it's more a "product of its time".

I really wanted to like it, and the visuals were fantastic. But, I had no emotional reaction to the characters and feel like the plot was just flowing along without a reason for me to care. I gave it 30 minutes.

It suffers partially from contrived exposition. It seems whenever a Dune film is made, the filmmakers tend to try to include as much of the lore as tolerably possible. They could've just started off the first film with Paul entering a room to encounter Gaius Helen Mohiam and the audience being introduced to the box.

That's too early -- we'd have no reason to care about him by then. But that would work as the second scene potentially.

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