Dune Remake Could Mean 3D Sandworms 589
bowman9991 writes "The new Dune remake is becoming as epic as Frank Herbert's Dune series itself. Now that director Peter Berg has been ousted, new director Pierre Morel has decided to throw out Peter Berg's script entirely, starting afresh with his own ideas and vision. 'We're starting from scratch,' said Morel. 'Peter had an approach which was not mine at all, and we're starting over again.' Morel also reveals that 'It's the kind of movie that has the scope to be 3D.' He's also keen on sticking to the original material and recognizes that he must try to delete the images associated with David Lynch's 1984 version of Dune from the public's consciousness."
Why not just use Herbert's screenplay? (Score:5, Interesting)
Cults (Score:2, Interesting)
Make it Long (Score:3, Interesting)
If the directors aren't allowed a LotR-level timescale, the best they can hope for is remaking the Lynch version. 6 hours, minimum, and yes, you will still have to cut stuff out at that length.
Also, Alec Newman should be run straight out of Hollywood. If his whiny, young Luke Skywalkerish version of Paul didn't convince you, his appearance on Enterprise should have.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it was my age when I saw it, but to me I don't care what's in the books - the Lynch movie is what the Dune universe is to me, complete with the TOTO soundtrack, sting, the floating fat man, and all the stuff not in the book.
He'll never be able to erase that, and might as well not even try.
Just do the right thing and make it a long movie, anything shorter than 2.5 hours won't even scratch the surface - it will be like "a day in the life of Yoda" vs. the original Star Wars trilogy. And they better over-shoot, planning to cut a lot so we have a balance between character development, setting, and plot. None of this 10-minute introduction crap which establishes everything you need to know to understand the characters' motivations.
In short, I expect massive fail unless they rely on 3D as a gimmick like Avatar did. Impressive it will be, but forgotten like Dune 2000 it will also be.
Please prove me wrong, two generations of Dune fans deserve it.
Re:Cults (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't read any Harry Potter and I have found all the HP films to be very enjoyable, personally.
Re:Still gonna suck. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Dune" is probably the greatest 20th-century science fiction novel. It is, for better or worse, unfilmable.
Yes I think they should at least try to film a different unfilmable novel. How about Neuromancer or Ringworld?
that's a matter of opinion (Score:5, Interesting)
"Dune" is probably the greatest 20th-century science fiction novel. It is, for better or worse, unfilmable.
No. It's a difficult adaptation but not impossible. LOTR was thought to be impossible. I think Peter Jackson did a bang-up job. Your mileage may vary.
The mini-series adaptations were noble in effort if flawed in execution. The problem with something like Dune is that it really demands to be made into a full season. Take the first three novels since they were meant to be the original story. Season 1, season 2, season 3. 13 episodes a piece. That's more than enough time to tell the story. As it stands, the miniseries would probably be incomprehensible to anyone not already familiar with the story. And trying to do it in a single movie? Impossible. Madness.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:1, Interesting)
None of this 10-minute introduction crap which establishes everything you need to know to understand the characters' motivations.
So basically you just want a lot of explosions (or whatever the Dune equivalent would be) and no story?
Lynch's Dune -- Like a movie made by aliens (Score:5, Interesting)
First off pick up the book again some time and read the dialog aloud and tell me
Herbert's writing doesn't define wooden.
That's OK, maybe the Bible has more in common with this book then say,
the slangy chatty "Avatar".
That Lynch pulled in stuff from a different dimension was well and good. I personally
think "milking a cat", Gurney attacking with one hand on a gun and the other holding
a pug, heart plugs and the tubes going into the brains of the Guild are more poignant
than anything in the book.
Lynch's "Dune" sent me to a different dimension. "Avatar" sent me to bed
with a headache.
Animate it!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Do we need another (Score:4, Interesting)
Do we really need another attempt to re-make 'Dune'? Yes, David Lynch's 1984 film version was really, really bad. Unwatchable, even. But I thought the healing process was complete with SciFi's Dune [imdb.com] (2000) miniseries.
I watched the miniseries (but not the followup, Children of Dune [imdb.com] (2003)) and thought it was great. They did an amazing job with the story. With a 3-part miniseries, you can take your time with the story, so it doesn't feel so rushed. Sure, it had William Hurt in it (I find him boring) but was good nonetheless! :-)
I'm not convinced we need another re-make of this.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought the final book really sealed it off. It was a vision of true panspermia intentionally designed to insure the survival of their civilization.
When I first read it, I thought that just and excellent, but looking back, I think the point may have been to ask what exactly we are trying to preserve when we say we want to insure our survival as a race? Backstabbing and intrigue? The strong overpowering the weak?
I really don't think that it was as incoherent as it's often made out to be. Herbert was not just a hack churning out books.
Re:Need a full series, not another movie (Score:3, Interesting)
Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson never wrote a single word in the Dune universe.
I've read all of them, just once, I've never dressed up as Paul, I don't know how to pronounce Bene Gesserit, and I still know more about Dune than they do.
Re:ain't broke, don't fix it (Score:3, Interesting)
"Popular"? Lynch distanced himself from the film, the critics hated it, and it was a box office failure. It was a 6 hour movie compressed into 2 hours, and had "weirding modules" in a clumsy and unnecessary attempt to put technology in the place of the more mystical aspects of the story. It went too deep without explanation for those who didn't read the books, and was too shallow for those who had.
I think you're vastly overstating the popularity of that version. It's completely forgettable.
Re:Do we need another (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought children was better than the first mini series, I didn't like the way paul was portrayed in the first one, but for some reason he didn't bother me in the second even though its the same actor.
The second one was a lot less theatrical as well, presumably because they had a bigger budget.
Re:Still gonna suck. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought the final book really sealed it off. It was a vision of true panspermia intentionally designed to insure the survival of their civilization.
Not the right word. Herbert called it an exodus iirc and I think that's more accurate.
Paul foresaw several problems. And by Paul we can also say by extension Herbert because Dune is a huge allegory for the 20th century.
1. Even having gone to the stars, all of humanity remained within the control of a relatively small number of grasping assholes. Same on earth as it is in the heavens.
2. This level of control threatens staticism and decline leading to eventual collapse of civilization. While it's possible to see the risk of Earth falling to this, I'm not quite sure I agree that a 10,000 world Imperium could suffer a similar fate. But it's Herbert's story and according to him it could happen.
3. Even without prescience, staticism threatens humanity. Prescience just makes it all the worse. Presumably this prescience is what cements the likelihood of everything turning to shit even across an inhabited galaxy.
4. The Golden Path to keep humanity alive is to become the ultimate tyrant and put society under so much pressure that when things burst pieces will be flung so far apart they'll never come back together again. There will always be far-flung pieces of humanity to survive even if all the rest fail. And just like nobody wants to see another Hitler, Leto II planned on being such a bastard that nobody would want to see another god emperor.
5. A secondary goal of all this is to breed humans impervious to prescience. That negates the power of a tyrant such as the god-emperor.
When I first read it, I thought that just and excellent, but looking back, I think the point may have been to ask what exactly we are trying to preserve when we say we want to insure our survival as a race? Backstabbing and intrigue? The strong overpowering the weak?
I'd say that's not the part of humanity to be preserved, rather a symptom of the weakness Paul/Herbert saw that would doom us all without implementation of the Golden Path.
I really don't think that it was as incoherent as it's often made out to be. Herbert was not just a hack churning out books.
I like the idea of exploring the rise and fall of a messiah and how his life and teachings become twisted by his followers. I'm sure this sort of tale has been told before but Dune is the first time I encountered it. The story was also retold quite well in The Man From Earth. If you have not seen it, read nothing more but just rent it and watch it cold. You will thank me later.
As I said in another post, I didn't like where the story went with the whole god emperor bit. And after that Herbert lost his muse and was just churning out books for the paycheck, just like Clarke in his later years. Awful, awful Space Odyssey sequels, Rama sequels, and Gentry Lee bullshit.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
The spice and how the worms fit in with it (which may not have even been related in the first book come to think of it).
IIRC, there is an appendix in "Dune" by Pardot Kynes discussing the triangle of worms, little makers and pre-spice mass that explains everything.
Re:Cults (Score:4, Interesting)
Some of the Harry Potter movies (Order of the Phoenix being the worst offender) are so off it's funny
I thought that film was one of the best. The book had about 300 pages that a half-decent editor would have cut. Nothing of interest happened; no plot, not character development. The film only covered the events in the other 400 pages.
In contrast, The Half Blood Prince felt like they'd pulled all of the pages out of the book, thrown two thirds of them away, and then filmed the rest verbatim in a random order.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
The Dune series was the biggest test for my "if I start a series, I finish it" rule.
Clearly you never read Mission Earth [wikipedia.org]
I think I've only ever met 1 person stubborn enough to finish them all. I gave up after 4 books.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
Jackson:
* Dune (1965)
* Dune Messiah (1969)
Warchowski brothers:
* Children of Dune (1976)
* God Emperor of Dune (1981)
Zack Snyder:
* Heretics of Dune (1984)
* Chapterhouse Dune (1985)
filmed simultaneously as 2 or three movies of 150 min each for each book as needed. Different actors for each director (age appropriate, eases the logistics of concurrent filming). Draconian scriptwriter editor for continuity of theme.
That should be a total of 15 movies each 2.5 hours. I think I would be in nirvana.
Honestly, not Dune specifically, but I *wish so hard* that just once a studio would grow the balls to do one of the great sci-fi stories in that level of detail, even if it was one book (Friday comes to mind for a single book).
The mini-series was too _small_, IMO (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem I had with the Lynch movie was simply that it was too compressed and you got jerked from event to event, sweeping past so much of the story. The actual look and feel I really enjoyed. (At the time - I haven't seen it recently, so maybe I would feel differently now.) The mini-series had so much more time to tell the story, so I was hoping for better.
But a huge problem with the miniseries was the size: the portrayals were so small. Dune the book was big, the deserts were vast, the halls were immense. In the miniseries even in the desert there was no sense of scale - the frame was always filled with the characters. There is a banquet scene set in a big hall, but we're treated to a tight shot with a few characters that looks like it could have been filmed on a soundstage the size of a nice office.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
In the Children of Dune miniseries Jessica, Idaho, and Stilgar were played by different actors. The first miniseries would have been better with the later actors in my opinion.
Re:ain't broke, don't fix it (Score:3, Interesting)
Films and books are very different. I find my perception is always very tainted by the order in which I see/read them: if the book comes first, I'll have a hard time appreciating the film because I'll be looking in it for my preconceptions and much more content than a film can convey; if I see the film first, my understanding, visualization, and expectations of the books will be very conditioned.
All in all, I think book first, film afterwards is better. It lets me create my own vision, even though I then have to try and suspend it while trying to get into the film.
That said, I think Dune was a good not great film. Nice visuals, but felt a bit empty. I'm guessing the new film will feel the same: there's just no time to convey the overall social situation, the politics, the technology, the metaphysical aspects, the sense of wonder... in 2-3 hrs.
There's 2 films I find at least as good as their books: 1984 and Blade Runner. I'm interested in suggestions for more. LOTR fails because the books were so great, but the films are OK.
Re:Still gonna suck. (Score:2, Interesting)
Not every culture shares the American belief that nudity is sexual. I have a Swedish friend who regularly goes on beach holidays with her parents, brother, and sister. On these holidays they spend entire days together at the beach, completely nude. As an American, I can't imagine anything more uncomfortable and terrifying than an all nude family beach day. To her it's perfectly natural and normal.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
I kid - sort of.
The thing about Dune and the rest of the series is that it gives you an absolutely huge, intricate universe on a silver platter. It's not just huge in a spatial sense - it's huge in a temporal sense. There are actions that happened thousands of years in the past in the series that are still relevant in the "present" and affect the timeline thousands of years into the future. The spatial universe occupies the better part of the galaxy, yet everything revolves around a single planet. Consequently, there are more than enough wrinkles in the universe to get lost in, which a lot of people find incredible and fascinating. Of course, character development takes a bit of a back seat as a result, and is frequently only expressable through the universe's backstory (go ahead, explain Lady Jessica without describing the Bene Gesserit), but there's more than enough there there to keep you distracted from the worst of that.
With all that said, though, I have to admit - I made it through God Emperor of Dune, then forced my way through Heretics of Dune. By that point, I was done. It just didn't feel like Dune anymore. I mean, yeah, I understood that Heretics took place thousands of years in the future and was meant to explain off what Leto's Golden Path meant to humanity, why it was really necessary, and some of the consequences (both positive and negative) after his plan came to fruition ("Woo! Humanity isn't reliant on spice anymore! It's expanding and growing and not anywhere near as stagnant! There are ladies that control people with sex now! There are no "central plans" anymore that can control all of humanity! Yeehaw!"), but I just didn't care. I think that was the point for me when the universe just got a little too big.
Re:ain't broke, don't fix it (Score:3, Interesting)
Ridley Scott hated the theatrical release of Blade Runner, but I loved it. What the filmmaker thinks of his films has little to do with how much I like them. I thought the Dune movie was pretty awesome when I saw it first, but it didn't age well. But, like other readers, that's the Dune universe I knew. I didn't mind the Weirding modules. They reminded me in some ways of Spider-Man's web shooters. Not needed, but a cool part of the mythos that says something interesting about their inventors.
Still haven't read the book though, but I didn't have to read Phillip K Dick to appreciate Blade Runer either.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
For me, I really liked the epic feel to it. Yes, it's a word that gets overused. And yet Dune is set in a distant future, and somehow manages to make you _believe_ that's so - that there are organizations that have been scheming for millenia to set all the pieces in place for something, and that there could have been a rise and fall of the technology.
Actually, the thing I really like is it's complete lack of computers - not a single one - the book was written at about a point where computers were starting to become something that was 'known', and yet Herbert came up with the notion that a 'machine mind' was an abomination, and there was the 'butlerian jihad' which threw it all out.
But you've also got a lot of religion in there - The Fremen, for example are Zen Sunni - in which there's been an extrapolation of Sunni Muslim, and Zen Buddhism, and that's gone to underpin their culture and their outlook.
All through the book, the you see the reflection of the sheer depth of the setting that Herbert created, and something that's consistent and actually makes you feel that that's how a distant future of humanity _could_ look.
And the idea of a Mentat is still one I really like.
I'd say a lot of the current Sci Fi and Fantasy genres owe rather a lot to Dune.