Jodoworsky's such an amazing director. He'd have done something amazing, but it wouldn't have been Dune. The Lynch version isn't Dune either. Nor is this new one. Nor that other mini-series they tried to do. My wife raves all the time about how she'd do Dune like she's been obsessed with it since middle school - she has.
Part of me wishes I hadn't read Dune. Part of me wishes I'd just taken my wife's description of it and written my own version based on the amazing adventure she'd put in my head. I'd write it just for myself. Don't get me wrong - Dune, the book, is amazing - a favorite - but the Dune that preoccupied my imagination based on my wife's passionate rants? To me, that will always be the REAL Dune.
I have to claim a rare disagreement here. As a novel and act of storytelling, Dune is a fundamental failure, one that could never translate successfully to film. Two reasons why:
TL,DR: You can’t empathize with Paul Atreides because the storytelling is broken.
1. From a character standpoint, Dune is structurally incomprehensible. It ignores the lessons of storytelling best explained by Joseph Campbell and indelibly present in every great epic. For a hero’s journey to make a credible emotional impact on the audience, the hero must be a normal person drawn out of his world to struggle and fail repeatedly, before he can conquer the darkness and change the world. Without that development, the audience can’t experience empathy—the sole function and purpose of fiction. In Dune, however, the protagonist starts out as an intergalactic prince with superpowers (not exactly relatable). When he’s drawn out of his world to face his first challenge (stranded in the desert), he inexplicably and immediately acquires even MORE superpowers that make him, instantly, the most powerful being in the universe. He struggles for nothing, except in hand-wavey hindsight exposition. When he has to fight, no big deal—he’s been a magical ninja prince since, literally, the book’s opening scene. Compare this to beloved fantasy characters like Luke Skywalker, Avatar Aang, Frodo Baggins, or Miles Morales from Spider-verse, with all of whom the audience CAN’T HELP but empathize. This is the powerful, instinctual sub-language of storytelling, and why Paul Atreides never feels compelling. Which brings us to…
2. Paul’s only real struggle is to act human—hence why the romance plotline falls flat and exists only as hand-wavey exposition. A good writer can make this work: Homer, for example. Achilles in The Iliad, though a demigod, has to experience the death of Patroclus (his fault, his failure), before he can pass through truly human pain and give the audience a moment of transcendant empathy. Thus, we have history’s first “anti-hero”—a flawed demigod with whom we can still relate because we feel the same pain. Compare to Darth Vader or Prince Zuko in Avatar Airbender: the villain must become a hero himself.
Dune could have done this if the final climactic battle called for Paul to do something very human, to make some personal sacrifice or deny his magical ninja genius powers, allowing us to see our own humanity in him. But in what I believe is among most egregious insults to the audience in 20th century storytelling…Herbert doesn’t even write that scene! He skips over the climax battle entirely! It doesn’t exist! It’s just infuriating hand-wavey aftermath exposition!
Thus, despite the magnificence, beauty, and even genius of Herbert’s world-building, the story is a failure because it contains no humanity. Paul Atreides isn’t a hero, nor an anti-hero, but the villain. And nobody wants to see the villain win.
Campbell was a hack pop literature critic without the expertise or rigor to back his sweeping claims. His celebrity status rests not on any genuine accomplishment in terms of research or analysis, but on infecting his audience with a viral Dunning-Kruger Effect meme. He convinced himself and a lot of people who read him to think a scant, over-simplifying classification of familiar myths and pop culture touchstones somehow confers a type of expertise. The write-to-the formula attitude to composition that's emerged from his ideas is but one in a long tradition of bad advice that has misled aspiring authors and impoverishing literature in the name of upholding some know-it-all formalism.
It's a shame, too, because there are so many genuine scholarly contributions to the domains of myth, folklore, and narrative - James George Frazer, Vladimir Propp, Antti Aarne, Stith Thompson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tzvetan Todorov. Folklore studies alone is a vast discipline in universities across the world - and I can assure you, they don't assign the likes of Campbell.
It's fair enough to say if Star Wars, Marvel super heroes, Avatar, and other classic adventure yarns are your bread and butter, Herbert might not be your cup of tea. You might want to do yourself a favor and steer clear of Philip K. Dick, too. Sci-Fi writers of that generation weren't trying to write Shounen anime. They had a peculiar tendency to make main characters not out of people, but speculative concepts, situations, and settings in a way that sci-fi best-sellers today - generally marketing to the public's hunger for parasocial relationships - often ignore.
Herbert's more likely to appeal to the kind of person who reads history books, philosophical dialogues, religious scripture, or science reporting, for fun. The characters in Dune are fundamentally preoccupied with the problems of institutions, societies, and public policy because they're elites. They're serious people with serious responsibilities. What petty personal drama they have is tied up with the fate of entire nations. Paul getting with Chani is as much about dynasty and the anthropological expectations of Freemen society as it is anything personal, and those concerns are interesting in their own right. What's more, the work echoes mythology and religious hagiography even as it openly discusses the use of religious ideology as a construct and tool for controlling and ordering society. I can't think of any work that better walks the line between writing a genuine messianic figure, and an opportunistic cult leader who promulgates a myth of their own greatness in order to wield power.
So, no - Paul isn't your callow youth out for adventure architype, though that hasn't stopped plenty of commentators of cramming Dune into Campbell's monomyth along with every other popular story in existence. But compare again to Avatar - the premise rests on the nearly exhaustive genocide of one of the world's four nations. Is the seriousness of this war crime given due weight, say, by Ang, the protagonist and sole survivor of the slaughtered Wind People? He sighs about it now and then, but he's mostly angsty about his teen dating issues with Katara. It is an amusing show, but a show for children featuring the problems of children.
I disagree with lots of this, often echoing the other people who responded. But one thing I wanted to specifically focus on is the claim that experiencing empathy is the sole function and purpose of fiction. I would strongly disagree with this claim- I don't think the reader is expected to feel empathy for Humbert Humbert in Lolita, for example. The entire arc of the Godfather 1 and 2 is removing empathy for Michael Corleone as you watch him become a monster. In both cases I think you CAN feel empathy for the two main characters, but both would be really due to the work of the reader/viewer rather than what's in the text, and Paul Atriedes is a lot easier to empathize with than either of those two!
Completely agree! I’m reading the novel after having watched both movies and I was surprised to see how as soon as Paul spends the first night in the desert he becomes prescient overnight and there was little explanation for it. In the recent adaptation these scenes take place later and unfold more gradually, presumably to let the audience build empathy with Paul, whose father has been murdered and whose mother has been trying to make a supernatural human out of him. By the time we get to the end of Dune I he screams back at here that she’s made him a freak as he struggles to make sense of his visions and his destiny. We can see his carrying a heavy burden on his shoulders destiny but he is only an uprooted teenager who's lost everything he had. We can understand that anguish and then buy into how he slowly becomes more assured and believes in the role he has to fulfil and embraces completely. In the novel, however, Paul comes across as an arrogant know it all and there’s little to root for as there's no tension - we already know he'll overcome any obstacle.
"the story is a failure because it contains no humanity." Couldn't agree more. It has a lot of interesting ideas in it, but it doesn't cohere as a story.
I saw Dune 2 this last Thursday. A fun flick sorta just a war movie that greatly simplifies Herbert’s vision, and also one where Zendaya is far far far more charismatic than Timothy Chalamet. Austin Butler as Feyd is also more charismatic than Chalamet. I just don’t think Chalamet has enough presence to play a messianic figure.
I’ve enjoyed the new films overall, though Dune 2 seemed significantly and imo unfortunately more Marvel-esque than Dune 1, with its massive quotient of gratuitous kinetic violence.
Though I really enjoy the talented Chalamet otherwise, I do agree that he doesn’t deliver with quite the gravitas that the story suggests.
I loved the first one. It was maybe the best sci-fi book-to-movie ever made. They just nailed it.
But Dune 2 felt pointless. Nothing much happens. It falls prey to sci-fi’s giant religious blind spot. The genre just can’t come up with an angle that doesn’t either make prophecy concrete and thus eliminate “faith” as a thing, or it turns religious texts into a video game walkthrough. Battlestar Gallactica was the worst offender on both. Dune 2’s biggest offense is it’s dull repetition of the same conversation over and over:
Person A: prophecy is real
Person B: no it’s not
A: yes it is
B: no!
As Scott points out there’s a conflict between Fremen who believe in prophecy and those that don’t, but it’s the lowest stakes conflict imaginable. It isn’t even in the book- it feels like it was added here to pad the run time. But if there was anything else going on in the movie you wouldn’t even notice this “conflict”. It takes place solely in Chani’s head; she’s the only Fremen who ever rejects the idea of prophetic mumbo jumbo (she knows the Bene Gesserit planted religion on Dune; HOW she came by that knowledge is never addressed). She keeps claiming that this is part of a wider dispute between her more nationalist people and “southern” fundamentalist Fremen, but you never see it. You never even hear anyone else talk about it, and it never impacts the Fremen during the war in any way. The factions aren’t remotely opposed.
The movie also has amazing sword fighting. That’s about 90 seconds of run time. The rest is 2 hours 15 minutes of “Prophecy is real/no it’s not” discussions, wailing on the soundtrack, and Christopher Walken’s jarring appearance as the Emperor.
I was worried this was going to happen. I love the book, I’ve read it many times since I was in my teens, but once it starts talking about religion I start skipping chapters. The movie would have don better to skip it and spend more time with the emperor and his court; Lady and Count Fenrig are interesting characters in the book. But they get shortchanged in the movie, as does the emperor. All you really know about the triumvirate of Harkonens is that they murder one of their servants/slaves/soldiers every time they’re on screen in case you need to be reminded again that they’re the bad guys.
Alia and Thirfir Hawat don’t make an appearance even though both were critical in the final showdown with the Emperor in the book. The smugglers barely get a mention. Stilgar doesn’t do much other than be A to Chani’s B, though again, without any actual conflict between the two that might threaten to be interesting.
I’d give it a pass, particularly if you liked the first one.
While I have really enjoyed Dune 2 and will watch again, it does feel there could have been more tension and was slightly disappointed that Javier Bardem got a lot more screen time apparently only to tell jokes and seem gullible when he's presented to us as a great leader and fighter. I'm midway through the novel and I can see why people feel Dune should perhaps never been adapted as it's such a complex book with so many different elements that any adaptation will fall short and have to delete someone's favourite bits. It would have been interesting, for instance, to see more of what happens to Gurney and his time with the smugglers and Thufir staying with the Harkonnens as that would have added more intrigue to the film, but after all there's only so much you can cover in a film and in order for the story to make sense you need to kill many darlings.
I read the book as a teenager and revisited it before the first of the recent films came out and eventually went on to read the whole series (including the final ultimately disappointing book written by his son). It's as complete a universe as any I could imagine and the ultimate message of the series is to refute the one given in the first couple of books - to avoid deifying leaders! Unfortunately very few people seem to get past the first book and even fewer complete the initial trilogy. (It was initially planned as a pair of trilogies with a connecting book in the middle.) Unfortunately Herbert died after writing the penultimate book which ends as a cliffhanger! Still a remarkable series of books but doubtful that anything past the first one will be deemed worthy of the cinematic treatment ... Nou
Did you read the prequels? They’re terrible, not in the spirit of the originals. They’re set during the Butlerian Jihad, and largely feature fights between giant, Transformer-like robots. Yes.
And guess what the big twist is? It turns out that the beef between the Atreidies and the Harlonens dates back to that war, and you’ll never believe it: it was actually the Atreidies that was the coward! Wow! Really worth a whole book to get to that
Christmas day 1984 we watched David Lynch's "Dune." I was in my thirties. The movie raised so many questions, my husband and I bought and eagerly read the first book. My husband continued to read other books in the series and some commentaries as well. Thirty-nine years and numerous moves later the tattered/underlined/annotated paperback "Dune" was still on our shelves. I re-read it in anticipation of Villeneuve's "Dune." We watched "Jodorowsky's Dune" on TV and bought the DVD to watch again. Wish someone would get the rights to reproduce Jodorowsky's script book!
I decided to read the remaining five Dune books. Books 2 and 3 were good, but I advise others to satisfy themselves with synopses of the remaining three. Those are hours I would like to have back. Looking forward to watching the second half of Villeneuve's "Dune." Grateful for all the other work (Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, Miyazaki's Nausicca, etc., influenced by Herbert's "Dune").
“Dalí had other conditions. He refused to use a script, because his own lines would be much better. As Emperor of the galaxy, he would sit on a throne that was a toilet seat made from two intersected dolphins” I wish this film had been made only to see this 😂 A soundtrack by Pink Floyd, though, could have been interesting. Having said that, I’ve arrived to Dune only recently and after having watched both movies by Denis Villeneuve it could only be him making sense of the novel and creating a world that can attract new readers. That was certainly my case.
Little known fact. Herbert's book was originally planned to be filmed as a musical, written by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The project fell through due to lack of funding and the doubt that anyone would actually sit through a six hour musical about boy meets worm. The composers did however save one of the songs, using it in Carousel - "Dune is bustin' out all over." :)
I want Dune to be made into a great film. I really do. But it can't be. Too big, too profound, too epic - even more so than The Lord Of The Rings. Like trying to make "Ulysses" into a film. (Well, that's a stretch, but you know what I mean.)
I love Lynch's quirky attempt, but the entire film was so "small" compared to the novel. Small sets, small closeups, small battles. Sting looked cool, but made a terrible Feyd Rautha. The Mentats just didn't work. The dialogue (especially the unspoken inner bits) is among the cringiest in film history. And Paul - I just wanted to punch him in the face. What a dick. I still remember a theater full of people laughing when the Shadout Mapes said "I am the Shadout Mapes... The housekeeper!!".
The latest reboot got closer. The atmosphere, the sheer scale of the cinematography, the decision to capture only half of the novel, and (most of) the casting were all good. And CGI (mostly) in service of the story, not as the main character in a piece of shit Michael Bey "film".
Yet it still didn't get there. And there were things Lynch's version did better. His intimate, visceral, and repulsive portrayals of the Baron's debauchery and the horrifically spice-transformed Pilot (complete with pissing on the floor before departing the Emperor's company) were more impactful than anything in Dune V2.
Jodoworsky's such an amazing director. He'd have done something amazing, but it wouldn't have been Dune. The Lynch version isn't Dune either. Nor is this new one. Nor that other mini-series they tried to do. My wife raves all the time about how she'd do Dune like she's been obsessed with it since middle school - she has.
Part of me wishes I hadn't read Dune. Part of me wishes I'd just taken my wife's description of it and written my own version based on the amazing adventure she'd put in my head. I'd write it just for myself. Don't get me wrong - Dune, the book, is amazing - a favorite - but the Dune that preoccupied my imagination based on my wife's passionate rants? To me, that will always be the REAL Dune.
Your wife's version of Dune as recounted to you is the real Dune. Canon is overrated.
I have to claim a rare disagreement here. As a novel and act of storytelling, Dune is a fundamental failure, one that could never translate successfully to film. Two reasons why:
TL,DR: You can’t empathize with Paul Atreides because the storytelling is broken.
1. From a character standpoint, Dune is structurally incomprehensible. It ignores the lessons of storytelling best explained by Joseph Campbell and indelibly present in every great epic. For a hero’s journey to make a credible emotional impact on the audience, the hero must be a normal person drawn out of his world to struggle and fail repeatedly, before he can conquer the darkness and change the world. Without that development, the audience can’t experience empathy—the sole function and purpose of fiction. In Dune, however, the protagonist starts out as an intergalactic prince with superpowers (not exactly relatable). When he’s drawn out of his world to face his first challenge (stranded in the desert), he inexplicably and immediately acquires even MORE superpowers that make him, instantly, the most powerful being in the universe. He struggles for nothing, except in hand-wavey hindsight exposition. When he has to fight, no big deal—he’s been a magical ninja prince since, literally, the book’s opening scene. Compare this to beloved fantasy characters like Luke Skywalker, Avatar Aang, Frodo Baggins, or Miles Morales from Spider-verse, with all of whom the audience CAN’T HELP but empathize. This is the powerful, instinctual sub-language of storytelling, and why Paul Atreides never feels compelling. Which brings us to…
2. Paul’s only real struggle is to act human—hence why the romance plotline falls flat and exists only as hand-wavey exposition. A good writer can make this work: Homer, for example. Achilles in The Iliad, though a demigod, has to experience the death of Patroclus (his fault, his failure), before he can pass through truly human pain and give the audience a moment of transcendant empathy. Thus, we have history’s first “anti-hero”—a flawed demigod with whom we can still relate because we feel the same pain. Compare to Darth Vader or Prince Zuko in Avatar Airbender: the villain must become a hero himself.
Dune could have done this if the final climactic battle called for Paul to do something very human, to make some personal sacrifice or deny his magical ninja genius powers, allowing us to see our own humanity in him. But in what I believe is among most egregious insults to the audience in 20th century storytelling…Herbert doesn’t even write that scene! He skips over the climax battle entirely! It doesn’t exist! It’s just infuriating hand-wavey aftermath exposition!
Thus, despite the magnificence, beauty, and even genius of Herbert’s world-building, the story is a failure because it contains no humanity. Paul Atreides isn’t a hero, nor an anti-hero, but the villain. And nobody wants to see the villain win.
(I’m still a fan though.)
Campbell was a hack pop literature critic without the expertise or rigor to back his sweeping claims. His celebrity status rests not on any genuine accomplishment in terms of research or analysis, but on infecting his audience with a viral Dunning-Kruger Effect meme. He convinced himself and a lot of people who read him to think a scant, over-simplifying classification of familiar myths and pop culture touchstones somehow confers a type of expertise. The write-to-the formula attitude to composition that's emerged from his ideas is but one in a long tradition of bad advice that has misled aspiring authors and impoverishing literature in the name of upholding some know-it-all formalism.
It's a shame, too, because there are so many genuine scholarly contributions to the domains of myth, folklore, and narrative - James George Frazer, Vladimir Propp, Antti Aarne, Stith Thompson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tzvetan Todorov. Folklore studies alone is a vast discipline in universities across the world - and I can assure you, they don't assign the likes of Campbell.
It's fair enough to say if Star Wars, Marvel super heroes, Avatar, and other classic adventure yarns are your bread and butter, Herbert might not be your cup of tea. You might want to do yourself a favor and steer clear of Philip K. Dick, too. Sci-Fi writers of that generation weren't trying to write Shounen anime. They had a peculiar tendency to make main characters not out of people, but speculative concepts, situations, and settings in a way that sci-fi best-sellers today - generally marketing to the public's hunger for parasocial relationships - often ignore.
Herbert's more likely to appeal to the kind of person who reads history books, philosophical dialogues, religious scripture, or science reporting, for fun. The characters in Dune are fundamentally preoccupied with the problems of institutions, societies, and public policy because they're elites. They're serious people with serious responsibilities. What petty personal drama they have is tied up with the fate of entire nations. Paul getting with Chani is as much about dynasty and the anthropological expectations of Freemen society as it is anything personal, and those concerns are interesting in their own right. What's more, the work echoes mythology and religious hagiography even as it openly discusses the use of religious ideology as a construct and tool for controlling and ordering society. I can't think of any work that better walks the line between writing a genuine messianic figure, and an opportunistic cult leader who promulgates a myth of their own greatness in order to wield power.
So, no - Paul isn't your callow youth out for adventure architype, though that hasn't stopped plenty of commentators of cramming Dune into Campbell's monomyth along with every other popular story in existence. But compare again to Avatar - the premise rests on the nearly exhaustive genocide of one of the world's four nations. Is the seriousness of this war crime given due weight, say, by Ang, the protagonist and sole survivor of the slaughtered Wind People? He sighs about it now and then, but he's mostly angsty about his teen dating issues with Katara. It is an amusing show, but a show for children featuring the problems of children.
Yes one always must follow a strict set of rules in art or else it is a failure.
I disagree with lots of this, often echoing the other people who responded. But one thing I wanted to specifically focus on is the claim that experiencing empathy is the sole function and purpose of fiction. I would strongly disagree with this claim- I don't think the reader is expected to feel empathy for Humbert Humbert in Lolita, for example. The entire arc of the Godfather 1 and 2 is removing empathy for Michael Corleone as you watch him become a monster. In both cases I think you CAN feel empathy for the two main characters, but both would be really due to the work of the reader/viewer rather than what's in the text, and Paul Atriedes is a lot easier to empathize with than either of those two!
Completely agree! I’m reading the novel after having watched both movies and I was surprised to see how as soon as Paul spends the first night in the desert he becomes prescient overnight and there was little explanation for it. In the recent adaptation these scenes take place later and unfold more gradually, presumably to let the audience build empathy with Paul, whose father has been murdered and whose mother has been trying to make a supernatural human out of him. By the time we get to the end of Dune I he screams back at here that she’s made him a freak as he struggles to make sense of his visions and his destiny. We can see his carrying a heavy burden on his shoulders destiny but he is only an uprooted teenager who's lost everything he had. We can understand that anguish and then buy into how he slowly becomes more assured and believes in the role he has to fulfil and embraces completely. In the novel, however, Paul comes across as an arrogant know it all and there’s little to root for as there's no tension - we already know he'll overcome any obstacle.
"the story is a failure because it contains no humanity." Couldn't agree more. It has a lot of interesting ideas in it, but it doesn't cohere as a story.
My favorite is the Beatles wanted to adapt the lord of the rings with Kubrick directing https://variety.com/2021/film/news/lord-of-the-rings-beatles-stanley-kubrick-1235123614/amp/
I see a different issue here. Not every book is suited to film. Dune is one of those.
I saw Dune 2 this last Thursday. A fun flick sorta just a war movie that greatly simplifies Herbert’s vision, and also one where Zendaya is far far far more charismatic than Timothy Chalamet. Austin Butler as Feyd is also more charismatic than Chalamet. I just don’t think Chalamet has enough presence to play a messianic figure.
I’ve enjoyed the new films overall, though Dune 2 seemed significantly and imo unfortunately more Marvel-esque than Dune 1, with its massive quotient of gratuitous kinetic violence.
Though I really enjoy the talented Chalamet otherwise, I do agree that he doesn’t deliver with quite the gravitas that the story suggests.
Yes, you're right that Dune 2 is Marvel-esque.
Jodorowsky also approached Christian Vander’s Magma to write Dune’s music, which would have been perfect.
I saw Dune 2 last night. Really, really bad.
I loved the first one. It was maybe the best sci-fi book-to-movie ever made. They just nailed it.
But Dune 2 felt pointless. Nothing much happens. It falls prey to sci-fi’s giant religious blind spot. The genre just can’t come up with an angle that doesn’t either make prophecy concrete and thus eliminate “faith” as a thing, or it turns religious texts into a video game walkthrough. Battlestar Gallactica was the worst offender on both. Dune 2’s biggest offense is it’s dull repetition of the same conversation over and over:
Person A: prophecy is real
Person B: no it’s not
A: yes it is
B: no!
As Scott points out there’s a conflict between Fremen who believe in prophecy and those that don’t, but it’s the lowest stakes conflict imaginable. It isn’t even in the book- it feels like it was added here to pad the run time. But if there was anything else going on in the movie you wouldn’t even notice this “conflict”. It takes place solely in Chani’s head; she’s the only Fremen who ever rejects the idea of prophetic mumbo jumbo (she knows the Bene Gesserit planted religion on Dune; HOW she came by that knowledge is never addressed). She keeps claiming that this is part of a wider dispute between her more nationalist people and “southern” fundamentalist Fremen, but you never see it. You never even hear anyone else talk about it, and it never impacts the Fremen during the war in any way. The factions aren’t remotely opposed.
The movie also has amazing sword fighting. That’s about 90 seconds of run time. The rest is 2 hours 15 minutes of “Prophecy is real/no it’s not” discussions, wailing on the soundtrack, and Christopher Walken’s jarring appearance as the Emperor.
I was worried this was going to happen. I love the book, I’ve read it many times since I was in my teens, but once it starts talking about religion I start skipping chapters. The movie would have don better to skip it and spend more time with the emperor and his court; Lady and Count Fenrig are interesting characters in the book. But they get shortchanged in the movie, as does the emperor. All you really know about the triumvirate of Harkonens is that they murder one of their servants/slaves/soldiers every time they’re on screen in case you need to be reminded again that they’re the bad guys.
Alia and Thirfir Hawat don’t make an appearance even though both were critical in the final showdown with the Emperor in the book. The smugglers barely get a mention. Stilgar doesn’t do much other than be A to Chani’s B, though again, without any actual conflict between the two that might threaten to be interesting.
I’d give it a pass, particularly if you liked the first one.
While I have really enjoyed Dune 2 and will watch again, it does feel there could have been more tension and was slightly disappointed that Javier Bardem got a lot more screen time apparently only to tell jokes and seem gullible when he's presented to us as a great leader and fighter. I'm midway through the novel and I can see why people feel Dune should perhaps never been adapted as it's such a complex book with so many different elements that any adaptation will fall short and have to delete someone's favourite bits. It would have been interesting, for instance, to see more of what happens to Gurney and his time with the smugglers and Thufir staying with the Harkonnens as that would have added more intrigue to the film, but after all there's only so much you can cover in a film and in order for the story to make sense you need to kill many darlings.
Some books really ought to stay inside the movie theater in your skull.
What was Welles’s favorite Parisian restaurant?
I read the book as a teenager and revisited it before the first of the recent films came out and eventually went on to read the whole series (including the final ultimately disappointing book written by his son). It's as complete a universe as any I could imagine and the ultimate message of the series is to refute the one given in the first couple of books - to avoid deifying leaders! Unfortunately very few people seem to get past the first book and even fewer complete the initial trilogy. (It was initially planned as a pair of trilogies with a connecting book in the middle.) Unfortunately Herbert died after writing the penultimate book which ends as a cliffhanger! Still a remarkable series of books but doubtful that anything past the first one will be deemed worthy of the cinematic treatment ... Nou
Oof those books by his son were bad.
Did you read the prequels? They’re terrible, not in the spirit of the originals. They’re set during the Butlerian Jihad, and largely feature fights between giant, Transformer-like robots. Yes.
And guess what the big twist is? It turns out that the beef between the Atreidies and the Harlonens dates back to that war, and you’ll never believe it: it was actually the Atreidies that was the coward! Wow! Really worth a whole book to get to that
Great column!
Christmas day 1984 we watched David Lynch's "Dune." I was in my thirties. The movie raised so many questions, my husband and I bought and eagerly read the first book. My husband continued to read other books in the series and some commentaries as well. Thirty-nine years and numerous moves later the tattered/underlined/annotated paperback "Dune" was still on our shelves. I re-read it in anticipation of Villeneuve's "Dune." We watched "Jodorowsky's Dune" on TV and bought the DVD to watch again. Wish someone would get the rights to reproduce Jodorowsky's script book!
I decided to read the remaining five Dune books. Books 2 and 3 were good, but I advise others to satisfy themselves with synopses of the remaining three. Those are hours I would like to have back. Looking forward to watching the second half of Villeneuve's "Dune." Grateful for all the other work (Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, Miyazaki's Nausicca, etc., influenced by Herbert's "Dune").
“Dalí had other conditions. He refused to use a script, because his own lines would be much better. As Emperor of the galaxy, he would sit on a throne that was a toilet seat made from two intersected dolphins” I wish this film had been made only to see this 😂 A soundtrack by Pink Floyd, though, could have been interesting. Having said that, I’ve arrived to Dune only recently and after having watched both movies by Denis Villeneuve it could only be him making sense of the novel and creating a world that can attract new readers. That was certainly my case.
I saw El Topo and was looking forward to his Dune interpretation. I had read the first 3 Dune books and believed I enjoyed them but that was long ago:
Dune (1965)
Dune Messiah (1969)
Children of Dune (1976)
According to Wikipedia, there are now 14 separate Dune books! Talk about a franchise. Whew.
I've seen one of the Dune movies but haven't' seen the current version yet. Have been waiting until Part 2 was released.
Jodorowsky also hired Magma to do another soundtrack, Floyd would to the "Atreides" soundtrack, and Magma would do the "Harkonnen" soundtrack bits
Little known fact. Herbert's book was originally planned to be filmed as a musical, written by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The project fell through due to lack of funding and the doubt that anyone would actually sit through a six hour musical about boy meets worm. The composers did however save one of the songs, using it in Carousel - "Dune is bustin' out all over." :)
I want Dune to be made into a great film. I really do. But it can't be. Too big, too profound, too epic - even more so than The Lord Of The Rings. Like trying to make "Ulysses" into a film. (Well, that's a stretch, but you know what I mean.)
I love Lynch's quirky attempt, but the entire film was so "small" compared to the novel. Small sets, small closeups, small battles. Sting looked cool, but made a terrible Feyd Rautha. The Mentats just didn't work. The dialogue (especially the unspoken inner bits) is among the cringiest in film history. And Paul - I just wanted to punch him in the face. What a dick. I still remember a theater full of people laughing when the Shadout Mapes said "I am the Shadout Mapes... The housekeeper!!".
The latest reboot got closer. The atmosphere, the sheer scale of the cinematography, the decision to capture only half of the novel, and (most of) the casting were all good. And CGI (mostly) in service of the story, not as the main character in a piece of shit Michael Bey "film".
Yet it still didn't get there. And there were things Lynch's version did better. His intimate, visceral, and repulsive portrayals of the Baron's debauchery and the horrifically spice-transformed Pilot (complete with pissing on the floor before departing the Emperor's company) were more impactful than anything in Dune V2.
Some things are better left unfilmed.