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."
Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't thinking remaking the movie in 3D would make the plot any less confusing. (To someone who never read the books, that is.)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
The two attempts thus far have been failures to my mind. Lynch's movie had the "feel" of Dune, but as far as the script goes, it sucked really bad (which is strange, considering Herbert had substantial influence over the final product). The miniseries stuck more closely to the story, but the acting was bloody wooden. If you could have mixed Lynch's visuals and actors with the miniseries script, I think you would have had Dune down pat.
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.
3D, who cares (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is 3D mentioned? Who cares? I am so sick of people chasing carrots. Just make a fucking good movie and be done with it. Or at least try.
Re:3D, who cares (Score:5, Funny)
People will start to care if they made a 4D Dune movie composed of prescient visions.
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In short, I expect massive fail unless they rely on 3D as a gimmick like Avatar did.
Have you seen Avatar at all? 3D wasn't used as a gimmick there. Avatar used 3D as a TOOL.
Take a look at Final Destination 3D and My Bloody Valentine 3D or Monsters vs. Aliens - THOSE are movies that use 3D as a gimmick.
Now... if they are to apply the use of 3D as in Avatar, to "drop" the audience into the Dune world - that would look great.
For a great movie though... they would also need great actors, director, screenwriter...
As for "my mind is already set" - I've seen both Lynch and John Harrison versions
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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.
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Have you seen Avatar at all? 3D wasn't used as a gimmick there. Avatar used 3D as a TOOL.
Sure, because Avatar was hugely original and would have stood up on the strength of its story alone.
Re: (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
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
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
Good grief, this is like saying Cheeze Whiz is what defines cheese for you. I'm sorry for you.
Re:ain't broke, don't fix it (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right; you are far from perfect. To begin with, it's a (potential) spelling error, and spelling has fuck all to do with grammar. In the same breath, you also misspelled grammar. Way to go.
Here's a tip for the future: Instead of apologizing for being a grammer nazi,
just fucking skip the attempted nazi-ing all together. You'd look less like a jack ass, and save both of us some typing.
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"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:ain't broke, don't fix it (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm what you would call a Sci-Fi geek, at the Lynch movie was bad. It looked great, and, like I said, felt like Dune, but a lot of the elements, like the Weirding Modules, were so moronic that to anyone who enjoyed the book, the movie was like a sick joke.
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I watched the Lynch movie as a teenager back in the late 80s long before I read the book. Therefore I did and do not have the book snob attitude to pre-judge the movie by. I only read the book because of the captivating feel of the movie and the intriguing storyline. The made-for-TV remake was closer to the book, but far from enthralling.
I think Lynch is a lot like Kuberick. You either love his stuff or hate hate it, there is little in between.
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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 hav
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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 ha
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I'd have to disagree. First, the original Dune movie was not generally popular. (Maybe its reputation has increased over the years.) It was almost universally panned. Second (but related to the first), the original Dune had good visuals for the time, but the story was so badly mangled that it's best to just start over.
As someone who read the original book, and then saw the movie, I thought the movie h
Re:ain't broke, don't fix it (Score:4, Funny)
It's 's' unless it's American English. No, I don't mean it in the Microsoft way of dictation, but rather the international standard. Honestly, only Americans could bastardize the word bastardise.
Well what do you expect? They took the 'u' out of honour as well.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What the hell are you talking about? There's no "u" in "honor"! Can't you recognize that? ;-)
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Well what do you expect? They took the 'u' out of honour as well.
As well as "humor". Tell me, why is that letter in there to begin with? I'd be willing to bet that a few hundred years ago "bastardize" wasn't even a word (or "bastardise" either for that matter), and if it was, it was pronounced "bastard ice".
Whay aren't you people bitching about the bastardization of the word "gay"? I never could understand what was so gay about homosexuality.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Get over it (Score:4, Funny)
In Canada, we just accept both spellings and get on with our lives.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
That would be easy, just get George Lucas to do it.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
That would be easy, just get George Lucas to do it.
NO! The risk of him creating a Dune Jarjar is too great.
Call Michael Bay!
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
That would be easy, just get George Lucas to do it.
NO!
Surely you mean "Dune Not Want"?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I think he meant Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!
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Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
For me...
It was by the vision of Lynch that Dune acquired greatness, the fans acquire happieness, the fans have given warning. It is by will alone they set the movie in motion.
For those who had not read the books yet but like the genre it was awesome. My whole town full of geeks loved it, then we read the book and it was another completely different set of greatness. Like a double gift for sci-fi geeks. I didn't happen to like the series because of the horrible acting. The original book and the movie were seperate but both great.
Lynch is a good director (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd read the book (and the National Lampoon parody Doon, which is EXCELLENT) before the movie and was annoyed that Lynch had cooked up unnecessary things, but I still loved the movie. It's beautiful and moody and the images do stick in your mind in a way that very few movies achieve.
But on the subject of the utterly unwatchable TV version, I'd like to point out a rule of film/TV analysis which is almost always correct and places blame where it should be placed: When one actor delivers a bad performance in
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Dune is a tough read. You have to slough through an entire book's worth of stuff before stuff actually starts.
Whatever other failings that the Lynch movie had, it at least managed to realize that character of the universe described in the book. The lame attempt by Sci-Fi to do a remake doesn't even come close. This is why the Lynch versions are still well regarded by some.
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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 h
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.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lynch's movie had the "feel" of Dune, but as far as the script goes, it sucked really bad (which is strange, considering Herbert had substantial influence over the final product).
Ironically, Frank Herbert seems to be one of the movie's biggest fans*. Perhaps he understood that a movie is by nature a different form of story-telling than a book and that a direct translation is not always the best solution. If you judge the 1984 version as poor as a movie, so be it. If you judge it as poor for not being a faithful adaptation of the book then you've missed the point of film.
*Citation need? Here's one stolen from Wikipedia: Rozen, Leah. "With another best-seller and an upcoming film, Dune is busting out all over for Frank Herbert." People Weekly. (25 Jun 1984) Vol. 21 pp. 129-130.
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Ironically, Frank Herbert seems to be one of the movie's biggest fans*.
*Citation need? Here's one stolen from Wikipedia: Rozen, Leah. "With another best-seller and an upcoming film, Dune is busting out all over for Frank Herbert." People Weekly. (25 Jun 1984) Vol. 21 pp. 129-130.
Excuse me, but I'm calling serious bullshit on that! That statement clearly implies that People Weekly thinks that Herbert was doing well with the Dune series because it's showing up everywhere!
Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, Herbert really didn't have much of a hand in writing the final script at all. A la Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
Excuse me, but I'm calling serious bullshit on that!
You call bullshit? Alright, I'll raise one interview with Frank Herbert & David Lynch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zw10o48NoE [youtube.com]
Give it a good listen. Fascinating stuff.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That's the article's TITLE, not Herbert's quote! The point of a citation is to tell you how to find the reference, not to reproduce the reference itself. But, so that you might easily see it with your own two eyes, here is the link to the full article: http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20088153,00.html [people.com]
And in case you're too lazy to do that, the actual quote:
It's rare to find an author who feels that a director hasn't massacred his work, but after seeing a rough cut of Dune, Herbert is pleased. "They've got it. It begins as Dune does. And I hear my dialogue all the way through. There are some interpretations and liberties, but you're gonna come out knowing you've seen Dune." His reaction to the rock singer Sting, who plays the villainous Feyd-Raucha, "Ah, he can act!" As for those infamous sandworms, created by John (Star Wars) Dykstra and Carlo (E.T.) Rambaldi, Herbert was impressed: "They're realistic and scary. These are no Japanese monsters rising out from the deep to eat Kyoto."
There you go, Herbert's words, in his own words, from the words he used himself. Wish I had thought to take the time to do that to begin
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ironically, Frank Herbert seems to be one of the movie's biggest fans*. Perhaps he understood that a movie is by nature a different form of story-telling than a book and that a direct translation is not always the best solution.
Agreed. Expecting the movie version of a book, especially one as complex as Dune, to be a faithful copy of the original is a bit like expecting the sculpture version of a symphony to be a faithful copy. A novel is not a movie script, much less a novel. And frankly, despite some excesses, Lynch's version is, as the original poster said, pretty faithful to the "feel" of the novel.
Where Lynch's version goes wrong is that it makes it seem like the story is all about Paul Atreides and that the Bene Gesserit are just some minor detail on the side, which is actually the reverse of the emphasis in the series of novels as a whole: Paul is just one of many tools of the Bene Gesserit in a series of stories that are, in the end, all about the Bene Gesserit. That said, I'm not sure how you could tell that story within the brief confines of a movie. We are, after all, talking about a novel that spends the first hundred and fifty pages just introducing the major characters and themes.
I will give Lynch's version this much: prior to seeing it, I had tried on three separate occasions to get through the confusing tedium of those first hundred and fifty pages and given up. After I saw the movie, I was motivated to make a fourth attempt and ended up reading the book in its entirety that weekend, and then read the remaining books, one per day, over the next week. (I was a freshman in high school at the time -- I wish I had that kind of time to read now.) And yes, it was immediately obvious how far from the novel the movie was, but considered as a thing in itself, the movie is actually not bad at all. It's visually stunning, has some first rate actors, and has some genuinely stirring moments.
The people who bitch the loudest about Lynch's adaptation of Dune will be the ones begging for mercy when someone finally does a faithful adaptation of God Emperor of Dune. I'd love to pitch that to the studios: "It's a good six seasons worth of a human-sandworm hybrid sitting in a hole in the ground, thinking to himself, until the climactic final episode when he knowingly allows himself to be lured to the surface by a cute chick and he falls to his death from a bridge. And for a followup, we have easily another ten seasons of the spinoff series, Everyone Kills Duncan Idaho. It's television gold, I tell ya!"
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Informative)
The point of Wikipedia is the exact opposite: no one is trustworthy (apart from people you know personally), so you have to be able to judge information on its merits, not its source. This is not limited to Wikipedia.
Citations don't add credibility, they add context.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Hell, I've read all the original books (written by Frank himself) and I still don't think I could summarize the plot.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Rampaging cult overthrows galactic government.
Done, now was that so hard? :-)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, that's the gyst of it, but to really understand the details you need to know so much backstory that even after reading it 2 or 3 times I can't relate it. I'm modded funny above but I was only half joking, I understand the plot but would not be able to relate it to someone else. To approach a detailed summary, you need to have an understanding of:
-The Empire
-The CHOAM
-The Guild
-How the three above fit together
-The distribution of atomics throughout the empire
-The Bene Gesserit and all that that implies especially:
-The Missionaria Protectiva, the story doesn't make sense without it
-The Genetic Memories
-Their search for the Kwisatz Haderach and what that is
-The Fremen, especially difficult given their essentially Arabic culture, not one audiences are familiar with
-The technology, especially
-Shields
-Las Guns
-Their rather explosive interactions
-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).
Re: (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.
Let me fix that... (Score:5, Informative)
Let me fix that:
Rampaging cult overthrows galactic government with the help of hallucinogenic drug everyone eats with breakfast .
There, much better.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Rampaging cult overthrows galactic government."
That's so 1990. ...on that basis, I'm surprised the books haven't been banned.
This is 2010:
"Drug-funded religious terrorists led by charismatic, evasive leader hiding in desert caves attacks and successfully overthrows hegemonic commercially-based government."
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
True. Let us slay the infidel honorably. Draw thine knife, kafir!
MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:5, Informative)
He's referring to the sequels that were written by someone who clearly hasn't read the originals. In Children of Dune, Frank Herbert writes about the attitude of dependency being destructive not the machines themselves. In God Emperor, he writes that humanity has evolved to the point where it is no longer likely to suffer this problem. The dialogs between the Reverend Mother and the God Emperor indicate that fear of computers is irrelevant for modern humans. In Chapter House, he reintroduces this theme, showing that the Archivists lose some of their humanity when they start to think like computers and are, ultimately, a dead end.
In the prequel and sequel series, there is an evil AI with completely inexplicable motives who tortures humans for no obvious reason and is later somehow a threat to humanity.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Just wait about a decade, all the details will slip away and your entire memory of it will look something like this:
Kid goes to a different planet, some fat dude wants to kill him, he runs away and hides with crazy cave-people who drink their own piss, something about a big worm, then he comes back and kills everybody, oh and there's a huge spaceship and some lizard-looking dude who lives in a giant bong, anyway he kills the emperor and becomes the king of everything and then his little sister is creepy for awhile.
The second book I remember as follows:
Uh, there's a weapon that's kind of like a nuke except it just melts down instead of exploding and the kid gets hit by it and his eyes melt but he can see anyway, a bunch of other stuff happens too probably?
So you see, time makes summarizing anything easy!
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: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.
Nice! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Nice! (Score:5, Funny)
The difference in Dune is that only the eyes are blue.
Re:Nice! (Score:5, Informative)
Dune was a little more complicated than that. Paul Atreides didn't "rebel" against anyone; he fought against the Harkonnens (a rival clan) and their ally, the Emperor. He never betrayed his own feudal clan, the Atreides; they were betrayed by the Emperor.
Moreover, in Avatar, there was no "holy war", only a war of self-preservation. The humans wanted to eliminate or displace the natives, the natives didn't want to move or be killed off, so they fought back. The motivations for the Fremen to ally with Paul Atreides were more complicated than that.
Re:Nice! (Score:5, Funny)
Pshaw! Who'd ever go to see a movie like that? That's crazy talk!
Re:Nice! (Score:5, Funny)
No...that's not crazy talk.
THIS is crazy talk:
Ostrich muffins creme-filled tires blue basket marshmallow glimmer frog Natalie fried-rice puppy barrel monkey!!!
Why not just use Herbert's screenplay? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why not just use Herbert's screenplay? (Score:4, Funny)
I keep trying to imagine Dune like Lord of the Rings but I keep needing to interrupt myself to go to the bathroom...
Unless it is as close as the SciFi one or better (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless it is as close as the SciFi one or better we can do without. 3D is a neat effect at first, but just like explosions don't make Michael Bay movies watchable neither will 3D rescue an abortion of a film.
Meh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, Hubris! (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of us LIKE that movie. Frankly, no Dune movie can succeed without Brad Dourif.
Re:Oh, Hubris! (Score:5, Insightful)
The Lynch version, as a movie, isn't that great. Though it's definitely worth watching once.
But the LOOK of it is fucking awesome. It's absolutely perfect. It's going to be hard to beat, purely from a design standpoint. Lynch's vision of decaying/dirty semi-clockwork technology and culture was absolutely spot-on. "Dune" is dirty and creepy and weird (no pun intended). It has to be.
Re:Oh, Hubris! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. And the main problem I had with the miniseries is that the look was AWFUL. It was completely wrong. Too clean, too sparse, too pretty. Just completely wrong in every way it's possible to be wrong.
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Why do people worry about the description of hair color being right? Or Peter Parker being bitten by a genetically engineered spider instead of a radioactive one? Or that the Prince of Persia is wearing the Warrior Within outfit during the Sands of Time setting? Or a thousand other details that mean smeg all to the overall outline of the setting and plot of any adaptation of anything?
Also, why do I spend so much of my time complaining about people complaining on the Internet?
Still gonna suck. (Score:5, Insightful)
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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?
Re:Still gonna suck. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because when Hollywood adapts William Gibson, they create Johnny Mneumonic. Need I say more?
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Fuck Ring World. Want to make a Niven novel into a visual feast for the senses, go for the Integral Trees!
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I used to think that about the Lord of the Rings though, and somehow that managed to become one of the most successful set of movies ever. It's not that I don't agree with you, just that I for one have been proven wrong before. The sheer weight of the massive backstory and unusual technology, combined with the basis in Arabic and other non-western cultures make it hard to make a mainstream version of Dune that is at all true to the books.
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Re:Still gonna suck. (Score:5, Funny)
Battlefield Earth all but proved that great sci-fi books are often unfilmable.
Re:Still gonna suck. (Score:5, Interesting)
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At least a movie adaptation of Ender's Shadow might cut out all the yammering Card felt he had to stuff into the novel. Ender's Shadow fell into the trap of the novice author: show, don't tell. Ender's Game showed the story, the way novels are supposed to be written. Shadow didn't. But because Card is a mega-seller, his editor is a spineless worm who will publish anything with his name on it. An editor worthy of the name would have sent it back with a rejection letter.
Could it have been a really good r
How many remakes have their been? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:How many remakes have their been? (Score:5, Funny)
no, but you can get atrophy.
Cults (Score:2, Interesting)
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: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.
Dune Nukem Forever? (Score:3, Insightful)
David Lynch movie was innaccurate but was ART (Score:5, Insightful)
The David Lynch interpretation was brilliant. It was artistic, it looked great, had excellent sets and cinematography. The literal stage play, I mean the SciFi production, was flat, dull lacking in emotion and life as it tried to accurately portray the novel. Nerds! Stop it! Movies are cinematic interpretations of a novel or another body of work, for it to work in the movie format, many things must change. The David Lynch version had a great score, had actually emotional scenes, the Baron was excellent, Sting brilliant. Yes you hate it because it wasn't accurate, fine but you don't respect excellent cinema either.
I hope this version pisses you particular nerds off by being cinematic, beautiful and daring in the liberties it takes with Herbert's fine novel. Really now it can't be any worse than what his son has managed to accomplish.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem, my dear anonymous coward, is that we want entertainment, not art. If we get art along the entertainment, great!
But we don't expect to go to a scifi movie and have what might as well be 2 hours of David Lynch jerking off in front of the audience (an opinion that movie snobs might hate but in my mind that's pretty much all he does in his movies).
I don't claim to enjoy or even understand David Lynch's "art", but I can recognize when a movie based on a very awesome book is "crap".
Public's Consciousness? (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Wasn't the SciFi network mini-series good enough? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Wasn't the SciFi network mini-series good enough?
Good enough to do what:
- to ensure no further remakes are made out of shame?
- to strengthen the eye muscles of anyone who'd read the book by either rolling their eyes or attempting to close them after they've already been shut?
- to harvest a few gigawatts of electricity from the wild dynamo of Frank Herbert rolling in his grave?
Before they made that movie they should've considered whether they needed to add any more disgrace to the Herbert estate. Hasn't Brian Herbert done enough damage already?
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:that's a matter of opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
If your books are about half imagery and half story, when the movies end up having about an hours worth of plot and the rest as battle scenes and aforementioned imagery then I guess you have done a bang-up job. But Dune is a bit of a bigger undertaking. It's like trying to create a movie around The Foundation Saga. It's just not as easy as massive battle scenes full of cut and paste soldiers.
Gonna start a nerd holy war on that one. :) Lord of the Rings, both the movie and the book, was about more than just battles and imagery. Dune really is more of a psychological story than Lord of the Rings which was meant to be epic myth-making on an epic scale. Dune has a lot of character-driven conflict that could just as easily be played out on an empty stage. Lots of eye-candy and worldbuilding will be icing on the cake but there's nothing about the book that says the story has to remain in the book. The hard part, of course, is handling exposition in a fashion that is not an infodump but remains interesting and engaging.
The part I'm not entirely satisfied with in Dune is Leto II's interpretation of the Golden Path and the whole transformation into the god emperor. That was the point where the story felt like it slid off the rails and the following books cemented that feeling. The whole Honored Matres thing felt tacked on.
The other part that really bothered me was the whole other memory thing. The Dune universe is presented as materialistic and godless, at least with no more proof of God's existence or lack thereof than in our own world here and now. But there's evidence of supernatural things such as the other memories awakened within the bene gesserit by the spice. The baron's own personality lived on within Alia and consumed her. How is this so? Is there some sort of junian universal subconscious, a collective soul we're all connected to? Or is all of that memory supposed to preexist within the eggs of the female line? But then the male reverend mother they sought would have access to the male side of the memories as well so this means they're passed through sperm, too? Or is it really an external thing? And if there is such a thing, could it may as well be God for all intents and purposes? A god made manifest by the shared minds of humanity. And clones presumably only need the source DNA. But Herbert never explains it and the whole mystical side seems out of place given the otherwise hard scifi setting. I can buy superb mental conditioning and powerful developments of the human mind in the post-AI age. I can buy abilities that lie within the extremes of the physically possible. But the mystic stuff presupposes a mechanism to explain it and that raises a whole host of new questions. If I see a vampire, I now wonder if there are werewolves. If I see inexplicable psychic powers, now I wonder what else could be possible.
Re:that's a matter of opinion (Score:5, Informative)
The "memory" thing as you call it was RNA-encoded memory (it was kind of a pop-sci pseudotheory that floated around for a while in the 1960s and 1970s, Larry Niven used it for a story as well). You'll notice if you read the books that none of those ancestral individuals were there until death, basically they're identities got stuck in the RNA of a Bene Gesserit when they contributed their bit at conception. The only exception was the Duncan Idaho golah (clone) that shows up in the last two novels, who was cloned from all sorts of previous Duncan Idaho golahs, including what were obviously scrapings of Duncan Idaho's killed by Leto II (hence that Duncan Idaho did have memories of his death). The whole point of the Kwisatz Haderach was that it would be a male that could both go into the Bene Gesserit spice trance and could also access male racial memories/identities (apparently women could only see female ancestors).
As to prescience, while Herbert never really went into it, it's clear that it was a naturalistic phenomenon in his universe. It isn't magic, but what appears to be a way for a prescient individual to collapse the wave function, which is why prescience ended being so bad, even before Muad-dib came on the scene (the Guild had been using it for thousands of years since the destruction of the AIs), because it essentially locked humanity into a single future.
So while Herbert's Dune universe seems to have some supernatural aspects, that's only because, to some extent, the players treat them that way. The Bene Gesserit and the Guild, in particular, surround their powers in a thick layer of metaphysical mumbo jumbo, but underneath, those powers are rationally explainable (within the context of the universe Herbert creatd).
Animate it!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
delete the images??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell, erase the memories of a fantastic adaptation by a fantastic director and replace it by a freaking 3D toystory?
kind of movie that has the scope to be 3D
Has the scope? Geez, the world is 3D, genius, and everything in it has the scope to be 3D.
I've had my fair share of avatar movies for this decade thankyouverymuch.
Anyway, it seems we just should rest this "movie" thing for a few decades, since it seems they either just make movies that are crap or they think creating new ideas is uncool and just keep remaking worse and worse versions of previous movies.
It is an industry alright. So we should treat it as such: pay, watch, and if it doesn't deliver what was promised take it back and demand the money. Or do you keep a mower if it doesn't cut the freaking grass?
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: (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.
hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
The "images" were actually quite well-done. Lynch's Dune suffered from several problems, but the visual effects and costumes weren't one of them. And the Brian Eno score was really good (I even liked the end Toto instrumental).
Is anyone else sick to the back teeth... (Score:3, Insightful)
Is anyone else sick to the back teeth of "IN 3D"!!!!!1!!!!!?
It seems to be that they think no one will go see any film unless it has IN 3D writ large at the end of the trailer and on every poster, and they the film makers think that some 3D element will somehow make their film great whether it is or not without being IN 3D.
I know such singleton action is meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but I for one will make an effort to get through 2010 without seeing any film that shouts the IN 3D gimick in its pitch.
Please tell me I'm not the only one. Please tell me the average cinema goer isn't a Bay fan wanting nothing more than EXPLOSIONS IN 3D who is going to be suckered into thinking this new gimmick is what makes films great...
Re:Needs a sidekick (Score:5, Funny)
Mesa think isa great idea.
And, you know what? I know we're trying to be more faithful to the original work, but this whole "butlerian jihad" bit really seems a minor point... How about we add some robots, huh?
Re: (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:"Dune" is militarily obsolete (Score:4, Insightful)
The basic problem with "Dune" today is that it predates the Gulf War. We know what "desert power" looks like now - M1A2 Abrams tanks and A10 Warthogs. There were worries back in 1991 that mechanized armies couldn't operate in the desert.
Wrong. You go through more air filters. Some spare parts get used up. The tanks keep rolling.
Remember those Iraqi solders in the first Gulf War who were all dug in, armed, and ready to fight? THe US sent in a line of tanks equipped with bulldozer blades, rolled over them, and buried them alive in sand. Being out in the open desert against a modern army is death. I don't care how good your knife fighters are.
And a giant sandworm with a big open mouth looks like a good RPG target.
There are insurgency tactics that work, but they depend on having a friendly population to hide in. They also require an opposition that doesn't consider extermination of the entire population in the area an option.
Actually if you read the books it isn't an issue. The whole shield technology they developed made even a simple shielded human into a portable nuclear bomb. The shields rendered conventional ballistics useless but energy weapons hitting it made the shield go "giga-boom". Unlike desert storm Arrakis is pure sandy nothingness. Not bed-rock or compressed earth. Even an Abrams tank in that situation could litterally bury itself in the sand (Think sahara not the badlands. Dunes and sandbases that are at least as deep as a sand worm is tall.)
The worms themselves are pretty durable apparently and conventional ballistics had been long abandoned due to shield technology. What is left are energy weapons and the skin of the worms might be able to endure quite a bit of heat energy and with all that silica acting as refractory sufraces radiation may not be an issue.
The political aspect wasn't lost on Herbert. The Fremen were in control of Arrakis in reality with leverage against the Spacing Guild. The Emperor or any would-be house would suddenly find it hard to transport a real full army to Arrakis to wipe out the Fremen. Only after Paul rallied the Fremen did it appear that the Spacing Guild would allow a real full contingent of troops to arrive.
The books were more about politics rather then military or traditional SciFi.
Paul is a fictional icon that the BG held in reserve to "whip out" when needed. Paul was an abberation that fit the messiah template. Paul and his mother exploited it and the BG lost control of that cultural element. With access to the inner oracle (genetic memory) Paul with the messiah template was nearly unstoppable from a political standpoint due to the religious leverage he held.
That is the brilliance of the story is the complexity of the political, social, and religious interplay. Something Lynch completely ignored.