Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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> unspoken "show-don't-tell" internal logic

This is another axis separate or orthogonal to worldbuilding.

Recent Marvel and Disney films, the Jurassic Park and Star Wars sequels, and most Godzilla / Kong slop doesn't build believable worlds. The writers don't spend any time writing the universe that the story takes place in.

Lord of the Rings (the theatrical film trilogy), Game of Thrones (save for the last seasons), and Jurassic Park (1993) all build vast and credible worlds. Intricately detailed, living and breathing universes. Backstories, histories, technologies, warring factions, you name it. They then create believable characters that occupy those worlds and give them real character arcs within which they suffer, rise to prominence, grow, and die. Multiple heroes with multiple journeys. You're fully immersed in the fictional world, watching characters you care about occupying it. It's masterful storytelling.

Villeneuve's Dune has the same vast world and literature to draw upon as many of the other great epics, but he makes the rare mistake of not communicating anything to you about it. If you haven't read the books, much of the story is easily lost. He doesn't spend time on character arcs or even as much as dropping hints to what the subtitles of the world are. It's a super rare misstep, because most bad storytelling is from under baking the fictional world.

Then there's the mistake of sequels that try to expand on the mystery of the original world. The Matrix films and countless others have over-illuminated the mystery of their stories in trying to build universes. In doing so, the magic has been lost.

> [Dune] makes the mistake of not communicating anything to you about it. If you haven't read the books, much of the story is easily lost.

Counterpoint: my wife. I took her into Dune knowing nothing at all about it, besides how excited I was to see it, and she got everything. Like, seriously, everything. She's a super intelligent and intuitive person, and Villeneuve is one of her favorite directors so she's maybe the ideal audience member.

It might be fair say that the exposition is too subtle for a general audience to pick up, but it's certainly there. I refuse to hold that against the film, though. The usual state of Hollywood movies is to browbeat an audience with heavy-handed explanations, so I love it that Villeneuve makes you pay attention and think and remember and put together clues to understand everything that's going on. It's sophisticated filmmaking, dammit, and there's not enough of that around - especially in big-budget / sci-fi / franchise films.

In my opinion that's what makes Villeneuve's so great. For example, I think almost any other director would have had an info dump about what Mentat's are in the Dune universe, motivations and they they are important. Instead in Villeneuve's version, you simply see the results. For those watching the film without the context you simply chalk it up to a weird and wonderful way that the universe works. For those that have read the book, you get to do the information dump about Mentat's on your poor unexpecting wife who's watching the film with you.

This embodies show don't tell and it works amazingly.

> This embodies show don't tell and it works amazingly.

That's not "show, don't tell". That's "you need the companion book".

A masterclass in "Show, don't tell" is the intro to Pixar's "Up". If you haven't seen it, you absolutely must.

"Show, don't tell" isn't stuff that is lost on the uninitiated. It's stuff that is masterfully communicated without the need for corny expository dialogue.

Villeneuve's mentats are like an adult joke in a kid film.

> It's stuff that is masterfully communicated without the need for corny expository dialogue

This is the scene I'm thinking of: https://youtu.be/70FLqFWJMNk?si=0faCWRS9aNpVTil4&t=68

You don't need to know that the character is a mentat. The story works perfectly well without that knowledge. But if you do then it adds a second layer to the scene. Much like watching something like the early Simpson's is even better if you have a grounding in the novels and movies that they're parodying but isn't required to get the show.

> A masterclass in "Show, don't tell" is the intro to Pixar's "Up". If you haven't seen it, you absolutely must.

I have seen it quite some time ago, please point out some clips where you feel the show don't tell is executed well.

I'd say the entire expository section about the protagonist's romantic life prior to the film is apt.

Barely any words spoken, even. Conveys everything.

The films don't really give themselves a need to explain the mentats beyond "they're good at maths".

I do think they could have done better at showing that mentats are capable of huge feats of computation and planning and take the place of advanced computers, and that wouldn't need exposition. The "answer a numerical question with unnecessary decimal places" trope was worn when Commander Data did it for the millionth time. Moreover, it was something that seemed like a simple multiplication: something normal humans who are good at mental arithmetic can do. Having Thufir do the eye thing to deduce the exact location of the hunter-killer agent based on a huge stream of data would have been a good way to do it, for example. That would have made it clearer that Thufir (and by extension Piter via the lip tattoo) was more than a uniformed wedding planner and is actually a powerful, indispensable and dangerously skilled superhuman.

Likewise having someone lament that, say, an ornithopter or carryall could use an autopilot and someone reply "ha, yes, and get the planet nuked from orbit by the Great Families for harbouring a thinking machine, not a good plan" would have shown the approximate limits on technology leading to the need for mentats.

Not showing that didn't really affect the story they did choose tell (i.e. one that, for example, doesn't ever mention or allude to the Butlerian Jihad), but I think they could have added just a little more useful depth without it just being superfluous book details added for the book fans to notice.

One wonders if they left out the war on thinking machines as being at risk of breaking the suspension of disbelief for being too (pre-!)derivative of the Matrix and being overly close to current zeitgeist with LLMs dominating every conversation.

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