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New Dune Movie Confirmed
bowman9991 writes "Peter Berg will be directing a new big-budget Dune movie from Paramount. SFFMedia reports that 'although there were some doubts that they were going to get it,' the producers have secured the rights to the Dune novel from Frank Herbert's estate and are looking for writers to provide a screenplay that is true to the original text. Can't wait!"
It's swords and sorcery fantasy with a slight patina of technology. You have magic psychics, aircraft that flap their wings, space folding (just say teleport, asshole), and weapons that magnify a shout. This is magic, not sci-fi.
Edith Keeler Must Die
'The Iraqui insurgents have figured out a doctrine that works against armor. That's new.'
Command-detonated mines, conventional mines, and Panzerfausts (ancestor of the RPG) are hardly "new".
Refusal to be prepared for that sort of thing is the fault of US military leadership. They were amply warned by Somalia and Chechnya, and had "lessons learned" reports aplenty. The "insurgent" doctrine works against ROADBOUND convoys in URBAN areas (and of course against vehicles whose operators keep them on roads elsewhere).
Open desert is different because it does not channelize vehicles into kill zones. RMA firepower works very well there.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I've never read the book. I've seen the Lynch movie and I liked it; I've liked other David Lynch movies I've seen as well. I've never thought that the movie didn't make sense apart from the unrealistic technologies.
In the Lynch movie Paul and Chani have a relationship which seems to transcend time: He dreams about her before ever "really" meeting her. I can hear her voice playing in my head saying something like "I've always loved you" to Paul in some dream-like sequence where they interact, so it would seem she never falls in love with Paul because she was always in love with him to begin with.
Unless you're talking about a different Hollywood, originality there had already died, IIRC, in the 50's, when they proclaimed the Monomyth as their One True Religion. Ok, One True Way To Write A Story.
It's not just that the general structure is set in stone, they've long been at the point where they prescribe in exactly which minute of the movie each twist will happen. If your movie is X minutes long, by jove, you have to have to reach the first milestone in that script in exactly minute Y.
Honestly, you could probably get away with bigger deviations from the Qur'an (and I chose that as an example, because you're not even supposed to translate it, lest that corrupts the meaning) than from the sacrosanct Monomyth.
So is _any_ movie original nowadays? Hollywood essentially has 1, maximum 2, sacred scripts per genre that the High Priests approved (all in turn based on the Monomyth), and each movie has to use exactly those. Fill in your own character names and locations, and you have a pre-made script for your movie. I don't know why they don't make a script generator with drop-down combo-boxes yet. I mean, that's the result anyway.
So from the other end of this, as a viewer, once you've figured out which of the sacred scripts they used, and such details as who's protagonist, who's antagonist, and who's the love interest, you can accurately know who'll die in what minute and roughly what twists will the plot have. Again, and in which minute they'll happen.
And I'm not just talking about that as a theoretical possibility or hyperbole, but speak very literally and from first-hand experience. By high school I only needed the first 10 minutes of almost any movie, to tell you what's going to happen until the end. And not as in "in retrospect I should have seen that coming", but as in, literally, I'd bet someone that I can tell them exactly what happens in the rest of the movie. I did it with Mom so often, that eventually she too got into that game. It was ages before I read about the Monomyth too, and it just finally told me a name for the phenomenon I was seeing.
And, I'm, you know, just an average Joe. I'm certainly not the biggest genius on the planet or anything. I can't be the only one who noticed that they're using the same scripts over and over again, only with the character and town names changed. Even if not everyone actually reverse-engineered it all the way back to the one script per genre they're using, I'd expect there must be enough people coming out of a cinema with the gut feeling that they've seen the same movie before. Repeatedly.
Is that originality? Sure, each movie was based on a different book, but it had been digested and shit into the same mold. Even if you'd find a writer who still can write a non-monomyth novel nowadays (in itself a challenge, after so many decades of courses, seminars and colleges teaching everyone how to write only clones of that script), a screenplay writer would slave over it and mangle it into fitting the sacrosanct pre-approved shape.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.