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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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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.)