After I saw the Cowboy Bebop trailer (...), I thought fans of old and respected sci-fi staples could use a bit of good news: they didn't do our boy Franky H half-bad this time, if you ask me.
This is prolly gonna be long, so thanks in advance for bearing with me.
TL;DR for total newcomers: Dune has never been an easy franchise to get into. If you try to start with the book, you get a huge Tolkien-style index of in-universe vocab that you have to constantly consult to understand what the hell is going on.
If you start with one of the many cuts of Lynch's movie adaptation, you most likely get an awkward 15-minute expository prologue, either from some random narrator dude or from some princess that doesn't really figure into the story of the first book at all, and it still leaves plenty of holes. It's great for fans, but not so much for newcomers.
Up till now, that left the TV mini-series, which we generally don't talk about, valiant an effort as it was.
All that to say to anyone here who is curious about Dune: IMO this new film adaptation is your best bet at investing a couple hours to dip your toes in. You'll come away with an honest impression of what all the fuss has been about these past 55 years.
If I was gonna try to sell you on the thing itself rather than its popularity, I'd direct your attention to what's happened to Star Wars, which incidentally never really gave a proper nod to all the inspiration it took from Dune IMO (not to mention Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress...and those bad BG bitches are the OG Jedi amirite lads?). If your heart is broken over the woke-brokening of SW, take comfort...there is another (epic space opera as yet unbenighted by the SJW menace).
I score the new film on some "woke categories" below (spoilers).
TL;DR for fans: My honest opinion is that it at least doesn't take a shit on the franchise.
The elephant in the room is the gender/race swap on Kynes. An obnoxious move, yes, and it messes with Chani's lore a bit. But the way her character plays out is no where near Paul Feig Ghostbusters/Leslie Jones level of racial/feminist lampshading. See "woke scores" here for the deets:
Propaganda?
2/10 Woke: Yes the "diversity" is there, but I couldn't find a single lampshade moment where a characters skin color was even hinted at. Yea it gets the two points for swapping Kynes, but she does her job, respects her superiors, and there's absolutely zero snaps fingers "Oh no you di'int" clowning. Same thing for all other "diverse" characters. Sure, the exploration of "colonial themes" is still a central theme, but everyone behaves in a believable fashion according to their faction rather than their skin color. 2 points for the Kynes swap tho.
2/10 Feminist: One point for the Kynes swap, one point for Villeneuve going around sucking the SJW dildo on the interview circuit simping about "centering women" or whatever. Refreshingly, in the film itself every character behaves appropriately to their station in the hierarchy. The Reverend Mother casts an imposing presence and really stresses Lady Jessica out. But Jessica deals with her subordinates aptly. Shadout Mapes in turn fears her. Chani is never like "Grrrll power," and grants Paul respect after he duels his way into her tribe. No infestation of "pronouns" or "gender identity," etc...
1/10 Degenerate: We'll have to see what they do with the Fremen orgies if and when there's a sequel, but zero degeneracy this time. In fact, the one point is only because they removed certain degenerate tendencies of Baron Harkonnen. Still a very believable version of the character IMO.
Other than that I really enjoyed everything else. The whole thing is pretty based with uniforms and ceremony, customs and culture, etc...
My favorite thing is probably the absolute WH40K direction they took the Sardaukar in.
Obviously all the technical aspects are seriously upgraded from Lynch.
8.5/10 will watch again. Here's hoping we get a sequel.
Kynes doesn't... really matter too much. I get the sentiment, but if you were going to adapt Dune and pick an inconsequential character to rewrite, that's the one.
Kynes is an incredibly important character, both to the backstory of Dune as well as his daughter marrying Paul. He's basically the bridge between the Atreides and the Fremen, without him the story just would not happen.
I'll rephrase...
Kynes' traits are inconsequential.
It's the things the character DOES that are significant.
Yeah sure then let's make Mario a black woman too. After all it's what Mario does that's important, not his appearance.
lips that touch tokenization shall never touch mine
Ordinarily I'd be all against total rewrites.
But I've always thought that having Channi be Stilgar's daughter would make Stilgar's rebellion against Alia in Children make a lot more sense because he'd be Leto and Ghanima's grandfather and would be fighting Alia to protect Ghanima.
A female Kynes makes that plausible.
I think low IQ takes on kynes usually revolve around the checkovs gun issue: "he appeared and then he didn't seem to do much, therefore he wasn't of consequence".
If saving paul and his mom from being butchered, thus leading to paul being the fremen leader and setting the universe on fire, is "inconsequential" then wtf do you need?
if him being the father of the slut paul wants to go after is inconsequential, then wtf do you need?
If him being the judge of change, where his word could reduce the new house on dune to ashes because he just didnt like them, was inconsequential, wtf do you need?
kynes in the book behaved like someone with power. Kynes in dune2021 equivocates, speaks half-truths, and generally sounds like peter griffin when caught out in an embarrassing momenet with the mumbly 'no im just uh following my job here I didnt see nothing".
They also made Jamus a screaming zombie-rage lunatic.
They took people and hired them for black skin and them made them look pathetic and weak.
They made the fremen look pathetic and weak."halp we're so oppressed by harkonnens"
I've read Dune, when I was much younger, but I don't ever remember the Fremen being weak in any way whatsoever. I always got the impression that they were disinterested in the galaxy and focussed only on their own affairs--but seriously scary dudes in their own affairs.
Im sure it could be woke-written as "frank herbert being white ignored taking an in-depth look at the pains and oppression" but the Harkonnen didnt even know the fremen had a 10 million strong desert population. They considered them lesser beings aka in a racism sense, but they didn't exactly try to exterminate them either since the fremen and sard were on equal ground for fighting, and harkonnens were weak in comparison.
Politically, they viewed empire houses coming to mine as annoying outsiders. The people most affected by the "squeeze" policy were not fremen, but poor immigrants who either moved to arrakis for work/money or perhaps slaves, since we all know harks were fond of their slaving.
Fremen were mysterious strangers, who's customs and values weren't well known, even after all that time hark spent on the planet. In fact, im sure that the books said "fremen dont mix with the city folk often".
So the people actually being oppressed by brutality were city folk aka outworlders.
There is a wokism involved in screwing this narrative up, because if the harks did try to go fullscale war on the fremen, they have 10 million who'd rise up.
Also there was a "the tribe" moment. Fremen were innumerable tribes, each dictated by separate sietches. They weren't a unified tribe.
I recall all of that, actually, vaguely. I specifically remember it being noteworthy that the Arrakis populations didn't know shitall about the Fremen because nobody ever really talked to them and the Fremen just didn't give a fuck about interacting with Hark and co.