Just saw Dune yesterday.
Pros: It's honestly not nearly as woke as the race swapped characters would suggest. The cinematography is great, and I think the cast was well selected (unnecessary race swapping aside). They did a great job of designing the costumes and the spaceships too.
I haven't seen anything in the way of woke pandering and politics thrown in your face, but Zendaya doesn't really do anything in this movie so who knows about the next one.
Cons: It's a bit confusing who/what everyone/everything is if you haven't read the book.
You will have to use the bathroom after watching it.
It falls victim to about all blockbuster movies in the past few years. Hollywood prioritizes the "international market" [China], when making movies. Which means the cinematography will be top notch and everything else will be dumbed down. The plot will be dumbed down, the dialogue will be dumbed down, the acting will be dumbed down, everything.
The plot was already set for this movie but there are two meat head actors in it who cant act, and it cuts out Pauls internal dialogue where you learn he is extremely conflicted. There was the pain box incident and the seeker incident which had Pauls inner dialogue from the 1984 movie cut in the 2021 version. Also there were a few scenes where Paul is staring pensively as the camera slowly zooms in on his face, almost like he was thinking something, perfect for some internal dialogue but it doesnt happen.
It used to be a given that humans all had an internal dialogue, but apparently, this isn't true. Perhaps the people they're aiming at don't have one, and don't understand the concept .........
yep, there were some Twitter posts about it. people are astounded that others have an internal dialogue and/or can picture stuff in their head, like a fucking apple.
When you said a fucking apple, my first thought went to some conceptual R34, so I guess I'm degenerate, but apparently on their 1-5 scale I'm a 0, since it's beyond the scope of the imagination outlined.
lol, I can envision apples not of this world"
If I really think about it, this is terrifying. I want some serious studies done on this phenomenon and I want these people to get the treatment needed to evolve into humans.
Just..thinking about what my life would be like without the ability do some of the mental processing I do every day, it's actually scary. I might want to kill myself if I became like that. Do they gain some other ability in its place? Is it like autism where you can basically be a retard while being really good at math?
I always hoped this stuff was just a joke.
Honestly they have to dumb things down as audiences are pretty thick anymore.
Better than I expected. Probably more consistent than the Lynch version, but that's ultimately half of why it falls short. The other half being that it's literally just half a story.
The cinematography is midwit great, i.e. it fools people into thinking it's deeper than it is. 2049 was the same way. Lots of long, unnecessary slow panning shots over drab, subdued landscape. Worse in Dune because sand dunes look the same everywhere.
I thought Paul was cast well surprisingly, given that I don't really like that French kid. Jessica felt a little weak. Gurney and Idaho were cast well too I think. I don't know about Thufir though. While he is a Mentat Master of Assassins, he's also old enough to have served 3 Atreides, so I think he just had too much vitality. I think Patrick Stewart or someone similar in age, build, and sci-fi acting would have been a better choice. There's also no Feyd-Rautha at all which is disappointing.
I get this with all of Villeneuve's stuff. I remember thinking Sicario was some of the dumbest shit I ever watched, particularly the ending - but I can't remember exactly why because it was simply not very memorable. I rarely abandon movies mid-watch but I did so for both Arrival and BR2049 because they were respectively incredibly boring and incredibly stupid. You wouldn't think so to hear anyone talk about his output, so the only explanation for the mismatch in content vs reception is the fact that it all looks so gorgeous and feels contemplative.
People are very suggestible. When presented with something that is very obviously trying to be calculated and contemplative, they rarely reach the conclusion that says 'wait a minute, there's actually nothing much worth contemplating here.' 'Midwit great' is a good way of putting it.
It was an OK movie. Had some scenes that would make good posters and desktop wallpapers but was otherwise forgettable.
I didn't see anything particularly anti-white about it. The "desert power" thing was turbo cringe. Mostly it was just boring and I hit the 30 second skip button when a lingering glance opened into a conversation or when women were talking.
I wholeheartedly agree. The race swapping is the only egregious SJW thing about the movie, it's very good despite that.
I can't get passed that, so I likely won't be watching it.
It's not just race swapping, it's gender swapping as well. But it is at least contained to one character.
And that character gets (spoiler alert) brutally murdered and eaten. So that was nice.
Didn't they add the colonialism theme to the movie? My impression (which may be wrong because I never read the books) was the Harkonnen and Fremen initially didn't give a shit about each other because they exist in completely separate niches.
Well that theme was present in the books and the older movie. The Harkonnen did have trouble with the fremen, since they were the "conquered" native population of the planet.
But yeah, it has a SJW sorta flavor in the new movie. It's a source of conflict in the source material, but just one of many.
I'm out: this woke generation is not capable of non-injection. Pun intended.
Jihad is jihad.
lips that touch race-swapping shall never touch mine.
There’s a good Invicta video on YouTube that outlines the world of Dune.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaDxLCKFvlE
I’ve heard the same thing. Mostly good. I also heard he was forced to race swap from studio. Race and gender swaps are a massive turnoff nowadays but glad to hear the movie is good
The main theme that permeates all of Frank Herbert's work is that power corrupts and that governments and power structures are untrustworthy and faithless. The whole Dune novel series reinforces that messaging over and over again. The Fremen are portrayed as incredibly tough and independent because of the harsh environment they inhabit, and they gradually become less so as life gets easier for them.
The film largely held true to those themes and stayed true to Herbert's characters. Not so much with Liet Kynes, and that was a clear pander. Zendaya is not a good actor at all, and Chani is a redhead in the books, so that casting was also pandering, but casting Javier Bardem as Stilgar was actually a good choice, I think, and most of the rest of the casting was pretty good. The Atreides family was supposed to be of Mediterranean descent, so casting Oscar Isaac was not necessarily a "race-swap" as it's traditionally understood. The Harkonnens are supposed to be Nordic in origin, so Stellan Skarsgard was a good choice, and Dave Bautista's portrayal of Rabban is pretty true to the books, even though he's not Nordic.
My real concern is that they're never going to be able to maintain the faithfulness of those portrayals. A faithful portrayal of Vladimir Harkonnen would earn the film an R rating, for one thing, because in the books he is absolutely, disgustingly depraved. And as for what ends up happening to Paul Atreides' son, I don't think that will translate very well onto film, so if they end up making a film out of Children of Dune, they'll have to deviate from Herbert's vision while still trying to stay true to his message, and I doubt they will.
I also found Dune to have acceptable levels of propaganda where I could still enjoy viewing it.
I still wouldn't recommend paying for it though.
I think they changed crusade into holy war in the movie itself. Only the trailers seem to mention "crusade".
And they breeze over a lot of the book's lexicon in general, I think in an effort to simplify a very dense story.
The Jihad/Crusade swap is a really wierd choice to me, but I have to accept that as someone who has known of Dune since I was a small child, I am not the average casual movie-going joe public pleb when it comes to this.
Ultimately they probably did it because marketing told them that 20 years post 9/11, Jihad is still a dirty word to many westerners.
It's a fair enough translation in this context, but to me, it's a needless drain on the authenticity of the Fremen.
When Herbert wrote, jihad was a weird word that few of his audience would be familiar with. Authors do this to give an aura of foreign weirdness. It is a fair point that that word is not nearly as foreign today and thus loses some of its intended effect.
Still, I wouldn't have changed it. The Fremen are crypto-future-Muslims. You can't change that without changing the whole story, so why bother changing one word?
This section of the story, Paul is supposed to come off as entitled and naive. In that regard he did a fair job. I will wait and see if/when part two comes out if he can pull off the messianic leader if a Jihad.
He's very androgynous.
People can claim that Paul is naive and inexperienced in the first half of the first book. And that's true. He's also the son of nobility in a setting modeling European warrior aristocracy. He regularly trains hand-to-hand combat with expert warriors. He's probably going to look more like a HS football player than Chalamet, who looks like a damp paper towel.
Their form of fighting is portrayed more as dancing, though. I'd say less football player and more soccer player. Unless that's what you meant lol
How it's portrayed is up for interpretation. The movie is going to stylize it in a way that makes the fights more visually dynamic.
I don't think Herbert described the fight choreography in enough detail that you can really say for certain what the fighting looks like. What we do know is that each combatant is armored (via Shield tech) to the point where the only way they can actually hurt the other opponent is by getting in close and delivering slow, precise & deadly strikes. This is similar to European knights whose armor was so effective that they were mostly only vulnerable to stilettos at vulnerable points in the armor joints.
A better example would be a high-school wrestler. If you're fighting with someone hand-to-hand with knives, grappling techniques are essential.
To be fair, Paul Atreides is a tiny guy. I want to hate Chalomet on some sort of principle because I don't like squirrelly looking dudes, and his rise to prominence seems inorganic, but he did a much better job as Paul than I thought he would
"His oval face was like his mother Jessica’s, but he had stronger bones and a browline reminiscent of his maternal grandfather. He had a thin, disdainful nose, long lashes concealing lime-toned, directly staring green eyes, and a hardness in the expression like the old Duke, his paternal grandfather."
You're quite literally introduced to him with the Reverend Mother asking "Isn't he small for his age?" And not that much time passes between the Gom Jabbar on Caladan and the Arrakis arc