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Sci-fi Channel's Children of Dune
jazdogg writes "Caught the trailer last night on the Sci-fi Channel for the new Frank Herbert's Children of Dune mini-series. I only hope this series is better than the previous one." I dunno - I liked the last Dune series, and am looking forward to this one.
Would anyone else besides me like to see Sci Fi channel concentrate more on adapting SF literature than on recent bad horror films?
I have this love-hate thing with David Lynch movies. Most of them I hate, but even in the bad ones, you can tell that Lynch is really working his ass off stylisticly.
I didn't read Dune before seeing the David Lynch version. I still thought that it was a hell of a movie, despite its many problems. (I hate Kyle Mclaughlin almost as much as I hate Ben Affleck.) Even having read Dune, the Sci-fi mini-series just left me flat up next to the sheer style of the first movie.
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After the second book, even the bogus political / religious issues took on a tiresome sameness, rather like the plotions manufactured for each episode of Star Trek. I found them frustrating. He hinted at all these worlds, each of which could easily have been as interesting as Arrakis (I wanted to see a book set on Salusa Secundis) but they all focused around the lame Bene Gesserits.
I hope the SciFi channel has enough sense to stop filming sequels after this book.
John
Dune is a part of the must-read list, as far as the first book. The movie/tv stuff paled in comparison.
Before I read another "is there no shame" post, herbert is getting what he deserves: paid. This guy has a trmendous imagination and the motivation to organize it. I support the commercialization of anything, because it means it's popular. Unlike free-as-in-beer software, there is a place for "selling out" as much as possible. Fiction has a commercial lifetime, and capturing the sweet spot is part of the game.
Let the Dune franchise flourish.
mug
what were you expecting them to spend every day of the rest of their lives mourning their lost son? after the death of their first son leto, paul reassures chani that they will have more children. naming both the first and second son leto is not a coincidence but rather another display of paul's affection for his father and desire to have a son with his name.
Wasn't Children of Dune the third book in the saga? Are they planning on incorporating it with Dune Messiah (which would be more than a little tricky, IMO), or are they simply going to skip the second book?
The over commercialization did harm to Star Trek? You must be joking. ST was designed as a purely commercial venture. It's first incarnation was a prime-time TV show designed to capitalize on the average joe's hunger for western themes. They just swapped in space as a setting after the Apollo project killed the target market's interest in the visual aspects of cowboys and indians. That said, I don't think it's possible to "commercialize" Star Trek.
I agree with your point though... the depth and character of Dune can only be poorly represented on the screen. On the other hand, I thought the same thing about the Lord of the Rings, but the Two Towers was very, very good.
...was too...clean. I always thought of Arakis as a really dusty, grimy place...the mini-series /looked/ as if it was filmed on a clean soundstage.
And as for the acting...*sigh*.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
just look at what over-commercialization has done to the Star Trek franchise?
OK, I'll bite. What?
Seriously, the Dune books are written, they are what they are. No one can take anything away from them. If, as a result of the new TV movies, five people go and read the books who might never have picked them up, great! It's not like Frank Herbert is still writing 'em and some new populist direction derived from the TV shows is going to somehow alter a greatness that might have been or the greatness that is and was.
With luck, the shows will be wildly successful, a new generation of people will read the novels, and the dim expectations of a youth culture made to believe that the likes of "Farscape" or "Babylon 5" constitute the best SF has to offer, simply because they're a tick above the Star Trek/Star Wars "Happy Meal" fodder, will be raised.
I don't think the Fantsy genre has been ill-served by Peter Jackson's reverent treatment of LOTR. If anything, it means that the public tolerance for a "Sword and the Sorcerer II" has been lowered drastically. All good.
I just wish they had put some of this money into another season of farscape...
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
I've read this before-- the thing about how Frank Herbert had plans for a book 7-- but it seems to me that the ending of Chapterhouse is just too perfect. I prefer the saga the way it is now, ending on a cliffhanger and with that little commentary by Marty and Daniel, who many people think represented Bev and Frank Herbert talking out of character about the story itself.
It seems to fit, for me, with the interwoven theme of prescience. Paul was cursed by his prescience, and Leto's vision of the future was of humans who were immune to prescience. The end of Chapterhouse, in which Duncan and Sheeana fleeing the known universe in a no-ship, seems to symbolize Herbert's creation escaping beyond the limits of his own vision.
But what the hell do I know, anyway?
I write in my journal
I consider myself a fan of the series. I got started by seeing the Davis Lynch version of the film sometime in '89. That got me interested enough to read the books. In hindsight, the Lynchs' version isn't faithful as it could be. But it is loaded with style, good actors and great locations. As a stand-alone, it fares pretty well.
Now zip forward a decade or so and I keep hearing about Sci-Fi doing their version of "Dune". The majority of opinions I hear say it's pretty good. I eventually get around to renting the DVD, and you know what? I had to force myself to watch the whole thing. It's that bad. The costumes are lame (someone here made a comment about the costumes being stolen from "Liberace's closet". That's a pretty accurate statement.) Their use of soundstages are far too obvious (A lot of the backdrops look like they were painted by high-school kids.) and a majority of the acting was just piss-poor BAD. Whenever Alec Newman (Paul Atreides) spoke, I cringed as if someone were running their nails down a chalkboard. William Hurt slept through his role as Leto, seemingly there to collect a paycheck and nothing more. I could go on and on. But what I don't get is how I seem to be in the minority! Hey, if people want more "Dune" and Sci-Fi is willing to give it to 'em. So much the better. Just don't expect me to counting the days until the sequal airs.
Give the guys some credit,eh? The SciFi channel isn't a move production studio nor does it make the millions that Universal or whatever makes. They're at least making an effort to actually adapt decent SciFi for mass consumption. :: the casting on the SciFi miniseries was much better done and the dialogue was much better. It did miss some of the scenes that are in the book and adapted others (for example, the hunter-seeker scene in Arrakeen). The Lynch version I think touched upon the mystic of the entire thing much better than the SciFi, but the SciFi version made a better emphasis on the political nature of it all.
How many people do you know has *even* read Dune or, for that matter, Children of Dune? I've read both of them, watched both versions of Dune, and each has their strengths and weaknesses.
If we're going to nitpick, I'll say this
Neither are true to the book anyway.
Hopefully, Children of Dune (which is the destruction of Paul's dream and Aila's nightmare) will be done in the same spirit and I can understand the pitfalls of smaller studios - at the end, it's how much money do you have to burn for the production?
Cheers...
I am the Spirit within The Machine.
One of the most interesting things about the Dune series is that it's one of the only series where I don't meet with a general consensus on the quality of the various books. I've met people whose favourites were the first, third, fourth and sixth. Even rankings after favourites aren't consistent. How many novel series do you know where most people don't agree, "The first one was best and blah, blah, blah....".
Don't blindly accept the parent poster's judgement. Even if general experience suggests that sequels are often weak, Dune is a series where I have specifically noticed this odd exception.
Yes, but support them when they do actual science fiction.
--- Ban humanity.
I think it's great that Dune fans finally get to see some Children of Dune in a tv series. It's always fun to watch something that you've read about millions of times.
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"but it seems to me that the ending of Chapterhouse is just too perfect"
Actually. If you look at when the man died (1986) not long after finishing chapterhouse and before it's publishing (July 1986) you can kind of tell that he knew he wouldn't be writing another book as he was finishing the sixth and just kind of tied things up quickly so as to not leave anything open ended.
I get the impression that he just kind of gave up on living or at the very least knew he didn't have much time. Chapterhouse near the end starts to seem that it is being rushed. Not as much lush detail in his words as in the beginning etc. Of course, this is my opinion and there are a million of 'em.
It is sad that we lost farscape, but I will watch as long as it has Stargate.
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There was great hype about the SCI FI Channel's production of Frank Herbert's Dune when it was released. I remember a great portion of SCI Fiction oriented websites were debating the merits/demerits of both productions with regards to Herbert's own literary work. I find it only natural that the debate would continue about the next production. Oddly enough, I find the Dune series (literary works) intriguing. Very rarely do you find the creation of such works so very rich with detail. So complete is the marriage of ecology, religion, political intrigue, and human nature into the fabric of the Dune series that there is virtually no gap in the story. The underpinnings and background of the Dune universe leave no question of "how", "why", or "who" in the story. I plan to reserve my comments on whether the new SCI FI mini-series will be good or bad until after I've seen the show. Besides, SCI FI could do much worse in picking a literary work to produce as a mini-series.
Anybody read the prequels by Brian Herbert? Thoughts?
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
Like some people, I watched the David Lynch movie before I read the book. In fact, I read the book more or less concurrently with the showing of the miniseries. All in all, screenplay-wise, the miniseries was much more faithful to the book, and the casting was generally better. I really do want to like the miniseries more than the movie... however, I'm having difficulty.
This may sound shallow, but what absolutely DESTROYED the miniseries for me were the desert scenes. I can understand that some scenes have to be done on sound stages. However, those backdrops couldn't have been more obvious if they had painted images of Tux the Penguin on them. I watched those scenes, and all I could see were those damned backdrops. I never felt I was watching characters on Arrakis. I was watching characters on a cheap Hollywood soundstage pretending to be Arrakis.
I remember reading somewhere that they intentionally did that, to make it seem more unreal. Well, guess what, guys? It didn't just look unreal, it looked FAKE. I'll watch Children of Dune, but I seriously hope they learned from their past mistakes.
Just my $.02...
I never thought of it that way; the destruction of Dune in the end of the 5th book always seemed to me to be a better fulfillment of Leto's plan: Humanity is now beyond prophecy because the origin of prophecy has been reduced to a molten rock. But I can definitely see your point about Chapterhouse.
:)
Still, Chapterhouse feels almost as if it is grasping at threads the entire time, and the ending does seem like it wants to be a new beginning, and it might have worked better with a 7th book, but I guess I can't fault the man for dying.
So in an imperfect world I need to choose between thinking of book 5 of 6 as the end, or book 6, which feels more like the first part of an unfinished sequel to the series. But then again, some time back I think Tim O'Reilly made a good point; the last three books basically build off of and restate the lessons that we as readers, and Paul as character should have learned from the first, so maybe after Children of Dune they're all unnecessary.
But personally God Emperor is my favorite