Live data from Hacker News

Dune: Part Two – First Look

vanityfair.com

61–70 of 86 posts

Re: Dune: Part Two – First Look

#61
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found a barbell shape to the response. People either seem to really like or hate it. Not too many people I know that are in the middle. I will say I'm one of the people that really like it. I'm a big fan of the first Dune book and I think it does a great job of being true to the story. It's visually stunning and the score is perfect. My only gripe (and it's a big one) is that the cut the dinner scene. I don't un…

Interesting - having read the book several times I don't get the reference to the dinner scene; will have to look it up. The parts which bothered me were the Zendaya slow-mo flash-forwards being too long and too frequent with no substance, and Lady Jessica crying far more than reasonable for the character I remember.

> Interesting - having read the book several times I don't get the reference to the dinner scene; will have to look it up.

Chapter 16:

* https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/dune/summary/...

Re: Dune: Part Two – First Look

#63
post #11

A fair question I have, I think, is are these new Dune movies any good? I always felt it would be best as a limited series so there was more time to expand on the characters / story / world and that movie runtimes - even though they're getting longer - just aren't a good medium for complex stories like this that rely on heavy background and backstory HBO paved the way for high value high production series, seems like…

I've found a barbell shape to the response. People either seem to really like or hate it. Not too many people I know that are in the middle. I will say I'm one of the people that really like it. I'm a big fan of the first Dune book and I think it does a great job of being true to the story. It's visually stunning and the score is perfect. My only gripe (and it's a big one) is that the cut the dinner scene. I don't un…

I agree the movie is really good and hits the author's main themes pretty well. I also like the dinner scene in the book, and it plays a key role in fleshing out the complex socio-political-economic world of the Imperium - but for a movie it really wouldn't be feasible. It introduces too many characters (the banker, the water-seller, the smuggler, the honeypot, etc.) and has too many side-stories and nuances - it would probably take at least half an hour of screen time to do properly, and trying to cram it down would make it meaningless.

Similarly, in the book the time period between the arrival of House Atreides on Dune and the subsequent invasion is much longer and has many other side-stories going on, all of which are eliminated in the movie. Including all that material would require a HBO Game of Thrones type approach, with each book consuming an entire season.

Deciding which material is the most important must have been a hard decision, but I think they did a very good job considering the limits of the movie format, and the overall atmospherics felt just right.

Personally I'd like to see a David Attenborough-style special on "Dune: The Ecology of the Sandworm Life-Cycle" but it's not likely.

Re: Dune: Part Two – First Look

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that movie runtimes - even though they're getting longer - just aren't a good medium for complex stories like this that rely on heavy background and backstory Peter Jackson would disagree. If you can't get it done in a single "getting longer" movie runtime, just make it into 3. Harry Potter did it in 2, Twilight did it in 2, etc. So the precedent of using multiple movies is there.

> Peter Jackson would disagree. If you can't get it done in a single "getting longer" movie runtime, just make it into 3. That's how we got The Hobbit series, which were getting a bit too thin/stretched IMHO. LoTR as three worked, maybe Hobbit as two could have been better (was a love triangle really needed?)

"...thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread."

Re: Dune: Part Two – First Look

#65
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HBO started production on a prequel, Dune: the Sisterhood, based on the Brian Hebert books, I haven't read them, only read the first six by Frank Hebert, but just based on the twist in book five, the origin story of the Bene Gesserit could be bonkers.

The problem is that Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson have turned out 20ish volumes of bad fanfic. (I have nothing against good fanfic.)

Brian Herbert has done more violence to the Dune universe than I ever would’ve thought possible.

Kevin Anderson is a mediocre sci-fi writer, but those books are so much worse than his worse non-Dune books.

Re: Dune: Part Two – First Look

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but he is too young" He is currently 27 - which is a lot older than Paul is supposed to be?

Academy convention is to award older, more accomplished actors for previous work that was not awarded. Chalemet's age compared to Paul's is irrelevant. IRL, Chalemet is too young (compared to his competition in 2022) to be awarded an Oscar. Not technically, but in practice, Oscars are more like lifetime achievement awards. For example, Jamie Lee Curtis did not give an Oscar winning performance in Everything Everywher…

You and I are out here screaming in the wilderness that EEAAO was just a terrible unwatchable movie. Represent!

My wife and all my friends loved it.

Re: Dune: Part Two – First Look

#67

A fair question I have, I think, is are these new Dune movies any good? I always felt it would be best as a limited series so there was more time to expand on the characters / story / world and that movie runtimes - even though they're getting longer - just aren't a good medium for complex stories like this that rely on heavy background and backstory HBO paved the way for high value high production series, seems like…

You're asking a movie question in a forum that's probably very resistant or even actively hostile to visual storytelling[0]. Weight answers accordingly.

For my $.02, it's a great film. I loved it; we have a cheap IMAX in our city and I must have seen it there a dozen times, and then a few times at home later. Greig Fraser was a fine stand in for Deakins, which was a relief. I love the look of the Lynch film, expected to remember it better than the DenVil designs, but then the new movie surprised me by topping even Tony Masters' fantastic Lynchian fever dream.

As the film tells a story, however, it has some weaknesses[1] that it inherits from the text, and doesn't really completely dig itself out from those. Which is bad - that's an adaptation's only job - and it might explain the sort of empty feeling the movie leaves you with. The worst of this is the choice of ending point: probably the vision in the tent would have been the latest possible moment to do a solid ending, IMO. That single change would have made the movie 10-20% better, and is the lowest hanging fruit. It still baffles me, because Dennis is no idiot, and I wonder if the payoff is next movie.

Another is the character count from the books. I'm going to say some bad things now, so get ready: the characters of Gurney and Duncan should probably have been amalgamated into a Duncan Halleck. There's zillions of other places to do things like this, because Dune is littered with characters who don't appreciably advance the story and disappear after Book 1; Shadout Mapes and Chani could, I think, be realistically amalgamated, and it would be a kick in the pants when you learn the housekeeper is daughter of Liet. Yeah, the book fans are gonna be pissed, but they were going to be pissed no matter what you did, because unlike LotR the novel is a young adult / coming of age story and people get weird about those. I've had friends screaming about the "missing dinner scene" for a year now.

Something more abstract, too, is the lack of an object - metaphorical or physical - that the danger revolves around. Lynch's film dealt with this via several devices: the signet ring, the weirding modules. Dennis' film does not. Now, disclaimer. Dune as a giant metaphor rejects, in its own way, narrative as a generic concept, or at least the heroic narrative, so you have to bite your lip and wonder if this lack is intentional, and Dennis chose to push that absence forward as a metaphor. But metaphor tricks in storytelling only work if they leave the movie's skeleton to function; push them too hard (like, IMO, The Lobster did, critic tonguebaths notwithstanding) and a film can fall apart, like a sloppy abstraction.

[0] This is "Hacker News", after all, and if there's one thing that's core to the word "hacker" it's "text".

[1] "Weaknesses" from a movie perspective, where time is the most critical resource. Vs a book or video game, which can - and does! - stay engaging even when the main character is going to the bathroom, or climbing a mountain, or chopping garlic.

Re: Dune: Part Two – First Look

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academy convention is to award older, more accomplished actors for previous work that was not awarded. Chalemet's age compared to Paul's is irrelevant. IRL, Chalemet is too young (compared to his competition in 2022) to be awarded an Oscar. Not technically, but in practice, Oscars are more like lifetime achievement awards. For example, Jamie Lee Curtis did not give an Oscar winning performance in Everything Everywher…

You and I are out here screaming in the wilderness that EEAAO was just a terrible unwatchable movie. Represent! My wife and all my friends loved it.

I tried to watch it three times and failed. I don't have a problem with audiences liking it. But awarding it the Oscar for Best Picture was tragic for The Whale. At least it is SciFi, but Star Wars or E.T. it was not.

Re: Dune: Part Two – First Look

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that the movie being discussed is essentially a reboot/remake as well, right?

Yes I know. However it was a failure from 40 years ago, the story deserved another try in this case

Failure?

Re: Dune: Part Two – First Look

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Peter Jackson would disagree. If you can't get it done in a single "getting longer" movie runtime, just make it into 3. That's how we got The Hobbit series, which were getting a bit too thin/stretched IMHO. LoTR as three worked, maybe Hobbit as two could have been better (was a love triangle really needed?)

"...thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread."

Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett?
Post reply on HN