This is not a TheBookWasBetter post. No. And sorry it's so long, which means probably nobody will read it. That's fine. These films were so long that most streamers would have fast forwarded through them.
Dune is a very silly book. Not even the author, Frank Herbert, pretended otherwise.
It is High Fantasy, set in space, it was written in 1965 when that was still highly original, and there is very little science-fiction in it.
Dune, as a novel, is a very dense work and it has atmosphere you can cut with a knife.
The plot is basically just feudal nonsense and back-stabbing, and actually upon close analysis doesn't completely make strategic or logical sense. But it's enough to carry the main arc, which in turn carries all the little arcs.
And that's what makes Dune. All the little arcs. All the little details.
You come away from reading it with this absolute, visceral sense of the place. You can almost smell the incense and hear the wind over the dunes. The people are not always completely three-dimensional, but they are colourful and individual.
The fabulous Bruce Pennington 70s/80s book covers, for me, sum up the entire atmosphere and get it right. That irridescent, shiny, blue and green, mother-of-pearl. Yes!
And the books are blockbuster thick. The second one, Dune Messiah (my personal favourite part of the tale), is the only normal sized one.
So - you could just about get away with a long, heavy TV series. HBO before they collapsed in upon themselves probably could have handled it as a project, so long as those two clowns (you know who) weren't around.
The 2000 and 2003 TV series had a fair try, for low budget affairs, but they were hopelessly underfinished. They were only able to just touch the core of the Dune 'thing', but still, they deserve credit.
But a movie?
Forget it. No way. No chance.
All you could do in a movie is cover a small part of the story, and do it in isolation. And this, of course, would be completely pointless. It's the realm of Vimeo/Youtube shorts, but not theatre or BigStreaming material. An isolated chapter as a movie would make sense if Dune were a historical epic, but as a work of fiction it doesn't get the privelege of being divisible.
But if you were really determined, and really wanted to cover the whole entire first book?
Say ... over two movies?
All you have room for is the Spectacle. The big stuff blowing up. The epic battles.
And you have to throw away all that magical, dripping atmosphere.
But then the thing is, what does that leave you with?
An epically boring, epically silly mess of unfocussed desert and rambling nonsensical conversations, and hey guess what Villeneuve delivered?
You end up with swords against force-fields and, while the novel manages to bury this under sweaty urgency and really up close in-your-face fights, the film has to just hand wave away how goofy it looks when every time there is a battle OUT come ... blades?? Villeneuve even gave up and threw laser beams and suspensor mines in to try and save the action.
You end up with endless rah-rah speeches in desert caves, because you haven't been able to follow the bubbling up of Paul's qandry, and the growing situation the Bene Gesserit have placed him and his mother in. Forget 'The Force', which was a pale imitation of Dune's holy-power conceit, the view from inside Paul's head is crucially important as he goes from arrogant little twerp to realising the horrible responsibility that is coming his way like it or not. You can't carry all that in a movie, there is no time.
You end up with no real explanation of Melange, the Spice, unless you go into a full detail about the Spacing Guild, and that's almost a book unto itself. Villeneuve just skipped the Spacing Guild altogether. We just have the inter-dimensional doughnut gates with no explanation.
You end up at the end with an SNL sketch.
You end up ... I've run out of energy. Basically you end up with Villeneuve's incredibly boring, beige mess, and lots of characters introduced, doing not very much, and then being sidelined or killed. With epic amounts of desert.
Oh, and additionally, there were some very strange decisions made.
Like, why make the worms look like everyone was using desert travelators? That was the point where my interest in the first film died. I thought "No, he can't be serious." He was.
Gotta give David Lynch some credit
The acting and script in Lynch's 1984 effort were truly abysmal. But he got a little tiny fraction of the atmosphere across, and managed to have epic battles that felt epic (despite still having silly sword fights), some really disturbing and bloody scenes, decor that was just amazing and perfect, and mind blowing depictions of the Spacing Guild.
Final note:
Villeneuve is on the nose with me. He's on probation as far as I'm concerned.
It took me a while to realise that some of his swings were bad misses, with some notable exceptions:
ARRIVAL is amazing. BR2049 is amazing, despite the rampant misogyny - I still can't believe he pulled that film off.
ENEMY is a personal favourite (I'm a huge Slipstream fan) - however it's easily written off as a hallucination and therefore not that hard to film. Anyone could have made it, but he did make it so we have to give him that.
But then we have PRISONERS which is a close-but-not-there borefest, and SICARIO which is just dreadful, and now ...
DUNE parts 1 & 2 and my god were they boring.
DV - get it together. Don't become another Ridley.
More ARRIVAL's please, and no more PRISONERS!
Dune is a very silly book. Not even the author, Frank Herbert, pretended otherwise.
It is High Fantasy, set in space, it was written in 1965 when that was still highly original, and there is very little science-fiction in it.
Dune, as a novel, is a very dense work and it has atmosphere you can cut with a knife.
The plot is basically just feudal nonsense and back-stabbing, and actually upon close analysis doesn't completely make strategic or logical sense. But it's enough to carry the main arc, which in turn carries all the little arcs.
And that's what makes Dune. All the little arcs. All the little details.
You come away from reading it with this absolute, visceral sense of the place. You can almost smell the incense and hear the wind over the dunes. The people are not always completely three-dimensional, but they are colourful and individual.
The fabulous Bruce Pennington 70s/80s book covers, for me, sum up the entire atmosphere and get it right. That irridescent, shiny, blue and green, mother-of-pearl. Yes!
And the books are blockbuster thick. The second one, Dune Messiah (my personal favourite part of the tale), is the only normal sized one.
So - you could just about get away with a long, heavy TV series. HBO before they collapsed in upon themselves probably could have handled it as a project, so long as those two clowns (you know who) weren't around.
The 2000 and 2003 TV series had a fair try, for low budget affairs, but they were hopelessly underfinished. They were only able to just touch the core of the Dune 'thing', but still, they deserve credit.
But a movie?
Forget it. No way. No chance.
All you could do in a movie is cover a small part of the story, and do it in isolation. And this, of course, would be completely pointless. It's the realm of Vimeo/Youtube shorts, but not theatre or BigStreaming material. An isolated chapter as a movie would make sense if Dune were a historical epic, but as a work of fiction it doesn't get the privelege of being divisible.
But if you were really determined, and really wanted to cover the whole entire first book?
Say ... over two movies?
All you have room for is the Spectacle. The big stuff blowing up. The epic battles.
And you have to throw away all that magical, dripping atmosphere.
But then the thing is, what does that leave you with?
An epically boring, epically silly mess of unfocussed desert and rambling nonsensical conversations, and hey guess what Villeneuve delivered?
You end up with swords against force-fields and, while the novel manages to bury this under sweaty urgency and really up close in-your-face fights, the film has to just hand wave away how goofy it looks when every time there is a battle OUT come ... blades?? Villeneuve even gave up and threw laser beams and suspensor mines in to try and save the action.
You end up with endless rah-rah speeches in desert caves, because you haven't been able to follow the bubbling up of Paul's qandry, and the growing situation the Bene Gesserit have placed him and his mother in. Forget 'The Force', which was a pale imitation of Dune's holy-power conceit, the view from inside Paul's head is crucially important as he goes from arrogant little twerp to realising the horrible responsibility that is coming his way like it or not. You can't carry all that in a movie, there is no time.
You end up with no real explanation of Melange, the Spice, unless you go into a full detail about the Spacing Guild, and that's almost a book unto itself. Villeneuve just skipped the Spacing Guild altogether. We just have the inter-dimensional doughnut gates with no explanation.
You end up at the end with an SNL sketch.
You end up ... I've run out of energy. Basically you end up with Villeneuve's incredibly boring, beige mess, and lots of characters introduced, doing not very much, and then being sidelined or killed. With epic amounts of desert.
Oh, and additionally, there were some very strange decisions made.
Like, why make the worms look like everyone was using desert travelators? That was the point where my interest in the first film died. I thought "No, he can't be serious." He was.
Gotta give David Lynch some credit
The acting and script in Lynch's 1984 effort were truly abysmal. But he got a little tiny fraction of the atmosphere across, and managed to have epic battles that felt epic (despite still having silly sword fights), some really disturbing and bloody scenes, decor that was just amazing and perfect, and mind blowing depictions of the Spacing Guild.
Final note:
Villeneuve is on the nose with me. He's on probation as far as I'm concerned.
It took me a while to realise that some of his swings were bad misses, with some notable exceptions:
ARRIVAL is amazing. BR2049 is amazing, despite the rampant misogyny - I still can't believe he pulled that film off.
ENEMY is a personal favourite (I'm a huge Slipstream fan) - however it's easily written off as a hallucination and therefore not that hard to film. Anyone could have made it, but he did make it so we have to give him that.
But then we have PRISONERS which is a close-but-not-there borefest, and SICARIO which is just dreadful, and now ...
DUNE parts 1 & 2 and my god were they boring.
DV - get it together. Don't become another Ridley.
More ARRIVAL's please, and no more PRISONERS!
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