Captain Jean Luc Picard oversees a traditional knife fight between the mayor of Portland, and the musician, Sting.
I’m pretty sure this violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the prime directive…
it was during the times when he was blackout drunk
I had no idea he was Sting’s cha’DIch.
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it just makes all of the sense
Gotta recycle that dick sweat.
Bowies inspiration for Labyrinth.
The old movie did the best job with the side characters.
The miniseries did the best job with the political machinations.
The new movie did the best job conveying an intelligible plot and the scale of the spice operation and the worms, and with actually showing the Paul described in the book.
None of the adaptations have had a plausible Chani. Zendaya was particularly bad.
I hate how it seems like almost no time passed between the two parts of the new series. It feels like a month at most between Paul joining Sietch Tabr, and the attack on Arrakeen…
Meanwhile in the books, he had a baby and that baby died in a sardaukar attack FFS! We should have felt there was a time spent training those tribes to become galaxy-jihad-ready force we see in the end. Meanwhile, all of Part 2 is a smooth ride between: Paul in Sietch -> Paul riding the worm -> Paul finding atomics -> Fremen blowing the shield wall.
Part 1 was amazing though.
Yeah we didn’t really see him growing into the person who would be willing to kill hundreds of billions of people.
Meanwhile in the books, he had a baby and that baby died in a sardaukar attack FFS!
I forgot all about this
i kinda have the soft spot for the miniseries because it was so theatrical - just actors doing acting most of the time. It also had the best Baron Harkonnen
We just had a whole David Lynch discussion over on unpopular opinions. I will make two points on Dune; first he wanted a trilogy and lost control so someone else cut it into the fucking disaster that film was released as, second he wasted way to much money on the composite glass screen shot of the Atreides landing at Arrakis for the first time. I’m not sure it was worth it.
it was De Laurentiis production so the monumental shitshow was more or less baked in. Dino been trying to get the Dune project off the ground since the mid 1970s and there was a lot of sunk cost tacked onto it by the time Lynch got onboard. Lynch famously passed on directing The Return of the Jedi because in the end of the day it was going to be George calling the shots. So Dino did his Svengali trick and talked David into directing Dune with the promise of reasonable creative control.
The thing is - they started on the wrong foot from the get go. Originally, the plan was to split the book in two movies. That’s how the initial drafts were written (the very first one even had some Herbert’s input) - story wise it was closer to the Villeneuve - it ended on the Harkonnen takeover with the rest set aside for the sequel. By the time they started crunching numbers - it came to their attention that this whole two film plan is actually a giant financial risk so they had to roll it back to one movie covering the entire story. That’s why the movie chugs along for the first two thirds and then races towards the end. While the production was underway - Dino pushed for preliminary works on the sequel - that’s how the unfinished Dune Messiah draft ended up happening.
In the meantime - Universal and De Laurentiis started butting heads over running time and screening slots opportunities (less runtime more screenings = MOAR MONY) - so the compromises had to be made.
Because of that, after Lynch delivered his rough cut of the movie he had to shape what was initially a 4 hour assembly into a movie while it was never really planned to be a 2 hour long. The initial plan was to make it 3 hours long or at the very least 2,5 hours long. So Lynch went for vibes storytelling going hard on the visuals. Predictably, it didn’t go well with the audiences. Universal got upper hand got their way. That’s how infodumps ended up peppered throughout the movie. And since a lot of the stuff in the movie was conveyed purely visually - chopping it and explaining away was so challenging and frustrating at some point the process was reduced to “that’ll do” approach of just sticking to basic plot point without much elaboration. So the balance was even more off. The movie tanked and took De Laurentiis company with it. But hey - we got Blue Velvet out of it.
Then a couple of years later someone at Universal found out about how Heaven’s Gate got reappraised after Z Channel showed the director’s cut so they decided to repeat the gambit. Except unlike Heaven’s Gate - there was no director’s cut to reappraise. And that’s how we got the extended cut. Instead of bringing back Antony Gibbs (who edited the theatrical cut) the extended cut was thrown together by outsiders who had no intricate knowledge of the material. To make matters worse - the footage required more work to be done and it was far from just reediting and inserting back some deleted scenes and that wasn’t the plan. Neither was actually restructuring the movie to meaningfully integrate the new footage. That’s why the quality jumps all over the place and the movie with this start stop pacing. That’s why Lynch was pissed and rightfully demanded his name to be removed.
Have you seen the SpiceDiver cut?
I haven’t. Is streamable or do I have to go sailing?
its on internet archive and another version was actually officially released in the recent physical release. here’s the link - https://archive.org/details/dune-1984-alternative-edition-redux-fanedit-mkv-flac-subs
When I watched this movie, I had just read the novel a couple months before. So it didn’t bother me that it was incomplete, it was more like just visualizing parts of the novel. And it does a great job of that.
the thing with this movie is that it is for the lack of the better word is misshapen. It was supposed to be a two part adaptation, then it wasnt, then it was supposed to be a three hour long movie, then it wasnt, then the studio decided to pull a Snyder Cut except there was never a director’s cut to begin with so they scrambled something out of unused footage even though it required more work.
Have you seen the fan edit?
Yeah, I remember reading something about that. No, I haven’t seen the fan edit. tbh I think Dune as a story is pretty good, but there’s a lot better SF out there. Even the novel I only read once, and I don’t remember anything about the sequels.
The fan edit is very good. It imitates Lynch’s editing style and leans harder into dwelling and sinking into the shots. it feels slower and more deliberate.
Dune is great series mostly because it was written very well - there’s a lot of straight up poetry weaved into wacky space fantasy and Herbert is very good at conveying reasonably realistic psychology of the characters - that’s what made the series appealing from the get go.
That dune is made of pharmaceutical grade cocaine.
so basically cough medicine?
Just (re)watched it recently (read the book ~10 years ago), and wow, what a bizarre movie. So much time spent on the first third of the book, and then a speedrun to the end. The weirding way of magical shouts and movement was hilariously bad… Just give fremen weapons. (Although the new Dune has “secret nukes”, so that evens out I guess?) Somehow still enjoyable though.
FATHER! THE SLEEPER HAS AWAKENED!
the speedrun to the end happened because originally it was supposed to be a two part movie - the first draft is the proof - more or less like the Villeneuve movies ending with the Harkonnen takeover and then switching to Atreides comeback in the sequel. Dino was on board with that and then Universal who paid for it said “NOPE” so the story was remodeled into one movie long movie and thats how it went into production. And then the test screenings went badly and the movie got reedited into a two hour running time making it even less coherent.
Secret Nukes were always a thing. The family atomics were used to destroy the shield wall to Arrakeen in the final siege, they don’t really explain how they managed to keep them though to my rememberance. No one seems to know how to resolve the whole lasgun+shield=even bigger explosion thing though. Something I thought for sure they would have used when Harkonnen raided the Atreides occupied palace in the new movies since it happened in the books.
Either way big explosions are cool regardless of source.
the “Secret nukes” were in the book
If anyone ever tells you that they “wish Jodorowsky was able to complete his vision of Dune,” then you should tell them to stfu.
Jodorowsky didn’t even read the novel. He bragged about never reading Dune. That’s fucking stupid.
Jodorowsky been very weird about whether or not he read Dune. He probably didn’t read it when the project was brought to him - but he definitely gave it a close reading afterwards. He wasn’t going in blind - that’s for sure. The script is out there and it shows that he had way more than cursory knowledge of the book and its lore. He gave most of it his own twist and propped up a lot of rituals and symbols but in its core it oddly close to the book conceptually and even goes slightly beyond towards a territory covered by the latter books. he even kinda gives the story a sort of morbid happy ending.
For those that want to see a couple interesting movie posters for this, there were a couple drawn posters by Ryoichi Ikegami in Japan.
i have his stuff in the backlog for future posts!
