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Children Of Dune Tonight
JQuazar writes "Time to get to that Tivo and select 'pick programs to record,' Children of Dune starts Sunday on the SciFi channel!" Waiting...patiently...
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It was actually the miniseries that got
the characters right, the movie got
them wrong.
Basic plot summary (not too spoilerish): Paul has a fremen concubine and a wife (who is from another house). Paul and the fremen woman are trying to have kids, but find that they can't, so they use an ancient fremen fertility treatment which not only helps pregnency, but speeds it up and give the child born special abilities due to the spice.
Paul becomes blind due to a terrorist attack on a city he is visiting. The ancient fremen way has blind people go out into the desert to die, which is rather respectful since they don't demand the body water they carry at death. His sister reigns while his child is growing up. A fremen prophet rises up against alia (pauls reigning sister), saying that arakis is and should be a desert planet, rather than the green earth-like planet pauls and now his sister's reign has made it. The worms are dying because of this.
Real story (Big spoilers): Pauls public wife is giving his fremen concubine contraceptives. The are discovered, and decide to use the fremen method to overcome their effects. She has twins, a boy and a girl, and dies in childirth. During this time those who were instruction pauls wife to give the contraceptive launch another plan to prevent the birth or kill the children. They fail, but pauls wife dies due to the speed of the pregnancy and delivery. The children grow up under the care of pauls wife and sister (their aunt), as paul leaves for the desert due to his blindness. During the remainder of the movie paul lives as the prophet testifying against his own riegn and sister. Most of the other characters do not realize this, but suspect it so they don't have him assasinated as they would any other detractor.
The remainder covers the treachery of another house trying to disrupt the spice trade so they can gain additional power and control. This fails due in part to their own treachery, and in part to pauls mother. Sister alia becomes delusional and power hungry, and eventually kills herself. Pauls son becomes one with the worms, and thus endowed with power begins to bring down the house of paul atreides, bringing arrakis back to its desert self.
There's more, but I gotta go.
-Adam
the first miniseries was AWFUL.
:-)
Every character was totally uninspiring and the acting was just... horrible (never to mention the odd accents getting in the way of everything).
Kyle MacLachlan can act the pants off this Alec Newman guy.
William Hurt is a normally a fine actor, but in the dune miniseries they had him as if he was permanently goosed up on nyquil or something.
Then the sets. Many of them were BLINDINGLY obviously sound stages, especially the desert scenes. It was very distracting.
The only thing distracting about the Lynch production was Duke Leto speaking into a socket wrench
As jumbled as the Lynch dune production was, and despite how much it deviated from the book, it was easily a million times more enjoyable than the miniseries production.
Given all that, I guess they can hardly do worse than the first miniseries. Nowhere to go but up...
To understand and enjoy the (original) miniseries, it is vital to understand one critical point.
It's not a movie. It's a filmed theature production with a few special effects.
Without that, you're doomed.
The performance of the Baron Harkonnen is most telling and what first twigged me to this; after the big space scene with the House Atreides moving off Caladan it looked like a movie, but as the planet Dune fades into the Baron's face, who is quite obviously delivering a soliloquy, I understood.
After that, the soundstages, the extreme lighting, a lot of other little things, it will all make sense. I also think that given the obvious budget constraints the hybridized approach allowed a superior product to be produced, vs. the cost of doing the whole thing as a movie. The cost of filming "on location" would have been truly prohibitive, and the project would simply never have been at all. Considering the IMHO fine quality of the final product, I think it's worthwhile.
I didn't find the acting flat, I found it appropriate for that environment.
I suspect the same will be true of the sequel, though as I can't get the Sci-Fi channel (sob!!!) I won't know. So watch it as a recorded theatrical production, not as a movie, and I think you'll see what I mean and enjoy it more.
The only thing that I really feel was sacrificed and I wish they had tried a bit harder ($$$) was they lost the feeling of being out on the Dunes. Even just one shot on location with a nice sweep away (my choice would have been as Paul and Jessica emerged from the ornithopter just prior to finding the Fremen) would have added a lot and I would have forgiven them the rest of the soundstage stuff. (Remember in Star Trek VI the huge pull-away done on location in Alaska? Effective, even though all the scenes on each side of that were soundstage.)
The plot of God-emperor was inherent in the original plot of Dune. (I can't speak to the TV series. I heard about the atrocity of a movie, and assumed that a TV series would be even worse.)
... wrong.
Anyway... Dune was basically about ecology. Dune Messiah was about politics. Children of Dun was about duty. God Emperor was about evolution. Chapterhouse Dune was about death.
I don't have a one word summary for Heretics of Dune, but the one-word summaries are clearly too shallow anyway.
When evaluating any action taken by Paul, Ganima, or Leto II, one must always ask themselves what future are these people manuvering away from. (Not towards. One of Paul's early discoveries was that manuvering towards a future was a bad idea. The secret was to manuver away from the one's you don't want to encounter.)
Leto's "Golden Path" is called that as a reference to the Sun Kings. It is a particular kind of balenced madness, similar to multiple personalities taken to the limit, but in this case each of the personalities is a person who has lived. It is presented as an autocracy, but the ego is not in charge (i.e., Leto isn't the autocrat.) This is something that it's quite difficult to be consistent about, and to me it seems that he slips many times. It ends with all of the personalities that had been Leto spending an appearant eternity in a sensory deprivation condition. (This is a part of why he manuvered things so that 'Rakis was bombarded with atomic weapons until there was nothing left alive. That brought the eternity of sensory deprivation to an end, for most of him.)
In the series taken as a whole, the main theme is "don't be short sighted!". Of course, if Paul had been braver, then HE would have taken the Golden Path, and spared Leto. The alternative was the end of humanity. We aren't given any details of how this would have happened. But there are indications that Siona is the answer, and that without her the Bene Tlielaxu could have built killing machines (think Saberhagen's Berserkers) that would have ended up killing everything. But Siona is impossible to trace.
The prequels are atrocious. They aren't a part of the series, no matter what they claim. No Ships were not invented until towards the end of Leto's reign, and were one attempt to work around him. That failed. (He could see them.) This is an important element in the God Emperor. Siona was the answer that he invented, but he was continually pressing others to come up with answers that he couldn't forsee... probably because he hated the end that he could see he was headed for.
I'm skipping a lot, and trivializing an extremely deep work. And it's been about a year since I reread the series. But there's an immense depth and coherrence. You may not agree with all of his assumptions or conclusions (I think some of them are silly), but trivializing it is
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.