Dune Remake Could Mean 3D Sandworms

bowman9991 writes "The new Dune remake is becoming as epic as Frank Herbert's Dune series itself. Now that director Peter Berg has been ousted, new director Pierre Morel has decided to throw out Peter Berg's script entirely, starting afresh with his own ideas and vision. 'We're starting from scratch,' said Morel. 'Peter had an approach which was not mine at all, and we're starting over again.' Morel also reveals that 'It's the kind of movie that has the scope to be 3D.' He's also keen on sticking to the original material and recognizes that he must try to delete the images associated with David Lynch's 1984 version of Dune from the public's consciousness."

Comments

Hmmm...

[DoofusOfDeath]

I don't thinking remaking the movie in 3D would make the plot any less confusing. (To someone who never read the books, that is.)

Re:Hmmm...

[MightyMartian]

The two attempts thus far have been failures to my mind. Lynch's movie had the "feel" of Dune, but as far as the script goes, it sucked really bad (which is strange, considering Herbert had substantial influence over the final product). The miniseries stuck more closely to the story, but the acting was bloody wooden. If you could have mixed Lynch's visuals and actors with the miniseries script, I think you would have had Dune down pat.

Re:Hmmm...

[KnownIssues]

Lynch's movie had the "feel" of Dune, but as far as the script goes, it sucked really bad (which is strange, considering Herbert had substantial influence over the final product).

Ironically, Frank Herbert seems to be one of the movie's biggest fans*. Perhaps he understood that a movie is by nature a different form of story-telling than a book and that a direct translation is not always the best solution. If you judge the 1984 version as poor as a movie, so be it. If you judge it as poor for not being a faithful adaptation of the book then you've missed the point of film.

*Citation need? Here's one stolen from Wikipedia: Rozen, Leah. "With another best-seller and an upcoming film, Dune is busting out all over for Frank Herbert." People Weekly. (25 Jun 1984) Vol. 21 pp. 129-130.

Re:Hmmm...

[MozeeToby]

Yep, that's the gyst of it, but to really understand the details you need to know so much backstory that even after reading it 2 or 3 times I can't relate it. I'm modded funny above but I was only half joking, I understand the plot but would not be able to relate it to someone else. To approach a detailed summary, you need to have an understanding of:

-The Empire
-The CHOAM
-The Guild
-How the three above fit together
-The distribution of atomics throughout the empire
-The Bene Gesserit and all that that implies especially:
    -The Missionaria Protectiva, the story doesn't make sense without it
    -The Genetic Memories
    -Their search for the Kwisatz Haderach and what that is
-The Fremen, especially difficult given their essentially Arabic culture, not one audiences are familiar with
-The technology, especially
    -Shields
    -Las Guns
    -Their rather explosive interactions
-The spice and how the worms fit in with it (which may not have even been related in the first book come to think of it).

Re:Hmmm...

[Romancer]

For me...

It was by the vision of Lynch that Dune acquired greatness, the fans acquire happieness, the fans have given warning. It is by will alone they set the movie in motion.

For those who had not read the books yet but like the genre it was awesome. My whole town full of geeks loved it, then we read the book and it was another completely different set of greatness. Like a double gift for sci-fi geeks. I didn't happen to like the series because of the horrible acting. The original book and the movie were seperate but both great.

Re:Hmmm...

[Angst Badger]

Ironically, Frank Herbert seems to be one of the movie's biggest fans*. Perhaps he understood that a movie is by nature a different form of story-telling than a book and that a direct translation is not always the best solution.

Agreed. Expecting the movie version of a book, especially one as complex as Dune, to be a faithful copy of the original is a bit like expecting the sculpture version of a symphony to be a faithful copy. A novel is not a movie script, much less a novel. And frankly, despite some excesses, Lynch's version is, as the original poster said, pretty faithful to the "feel" of the novel.

Where Lynch's version goes wrong is that it makes it seem like the story is all about Paul Atreides and that the Bene Gesserit are just some minor detail on the side, which is actually the reverse of the emphasis in the series of novels as a whole: Paul is just one of many tools of the Bene Gesserit in a series of stories that are, in the end, all about the Bene Gesserit. That said, I'm not sure how you could tell that story within the brief confines of a movie. We are, after all, talking about a novel that spends the first hundred and fifty pages just introducing the major characters and themes.

I will give Lynch's version this much: prior to seeing it, I had tried on three separate occasions to get through the confusing tedium of those first hundred and fifty pages and given up. After I saw the movie, I was motivated to make a fourth attempt and ended up reading the book in its entirety that weekend, and then read the remaining books, one per day, over the next week. (I was a freshman in high school at the time -- I wish I had that kind of time to read now.) And yes, it was immediately obvious how far from the novel the movie was, but considered as a thing in itself, the movie is actually not bad at all. It's visually stunning, has some first rate actors, and has some genuinely stirring moments.

The people who bitch the loudest about Lynch's adaptation of Dune will be the ones begging for mercy when someone finally does a faithful adaptation of God Emperor of Dune. I'd love to pitch that to the studios: "It's a good six seasons worth of a human-sandworm hybrid sitting in a hole in the ground, thinking to himself, until the climactic final episode when he knowingly allows himself to be lured to the surface by a cute chick and he falls to his death from a bridge. And for a followup, we have easily another ten seasons of the spinoff series, Everyone Kills Duncan Idaho. It's television gold, I tell ya!"

Re:Hmmm...

[argStyopa]

"Rampaging cult overthrows galactic government."

That's so 1990.
This is 2010:
"Drug-funded religious terrorists led by charismatic, evasive leader hiding in desert caves attacks and successfully overthrows hegemonic commercially-based government." ...on that basis, I'm surprised the books haven't been banned.

Unless it is as close as the SciFi one or better

[h4rr4r]

Unless it is as close as the SciFi one or better we can do without. 3D is a neat effect at first, but just like explosions don't make Michael Bay movies watchable neither will 3D rescue an abortion of a film.

Oh, Hubris!

[mujadaddy]

"recognises that he must try to delete the images associated with David Lynch's 1984 version of Dune from the public's consciousness."

Some of us LIKE that movie. Frankly, no Dune movie can succeed without Brad Dourif.

Re:Oh, Hubris!

[realmolo]

The Lynch version, as a movie, isn't that great. Though it's definitely worth watching once.

But the LOOK of it is fucking awesome. It's absolutely perfect. It's going to be hard to beat, purely from a design standpoint. Lynch's vision of decaying/dirty semi-clockwork technology and culture was absolutely spot-on. "Dune" is dirty and creepy and weird (no pun intended). It has to be.

Re:Oh, Hubris!

[SpryGuy]

Yes. And the main problem I had with the miniseries is that the look was AWFUL. It was completely wrong. Too clean, too sparse, too pretty. Just completely wrong in every way it's possible to be wrong.

Still gonna suck.

[iluvcapra]

"Dune" is probably the greatest 20th-century science fiction novel. It is, for better or worse, unfilmable.

Re:Still gonna suck.

[Areyoukiddingme]

Because when Hollywood adapts William Gibson, they create Johnny Mneumonic. Need I say more?

David Lynch movie was innaccurate but was ART

[Anonymous Coward]

The David Lynch interpretation was brilliant. It was artistic, it looked great, had excellent sets and cinematography. The literal stage play, I mean the SciFi production, was flat, dull lacking in emotion and life as it tried to accurately portray the novel. Nerds! Stop it! Movies are cinematic interpretations of a novel or another body of work, for it to work in the movie format, many things must change. The David Lynch version had a great score, had actually emotional scenes, the Baron was excellent, Sting brilliant. Yes you hate it because it wasn't accurate, fine but you don't respect excellent cinema either.

I hope this version pisses you particular nerds off by being cinematic, beautiful and daring in the liberties it takes with Herbert's fine novel. Really now it can't be any worse than what his son has managed to accomplish.

Wasn't the SciFi network mini-series good enough?

[Paul Rose]

I thought the SciFi network mini series a few years back was pretty faithful. I'd watch a new 3D big effects version, but it hardly seems necessary.

Re:ain't broke, don't fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry for being a grammer nazi when I'm far from perfect...

You're right; you are far from perfect. To begin with, it's a (potential) spelling error, and spelling has fuck all to do with grammar. In the same breath, you also misspelled grammar. Way to go.

Here's a tip for the future: Instead of apologizing for being a grammer nazi,

just fucking skip the attempted nazi-ing all together. You'd look less like a jack ass, and save both of us some typing.

3D, who cares

[omfglearntoplay]

Why is 3D mentioned? Who cares? I am so sick of people chasing carrots. Just make a fucking good movie and be done with it. Or at least try.

Re:ain't broke, don't fix it

[RiddleofSteel]

Every Sci-Fi geek I know liked the film, non-geeks hated it. I'm not saying we loved it, but for the time it was different and interesting. So I really don't think he's overstating the popularity for it's market base. For many people they had not even heard of Dune before the movie, and while the books are much better I never would have read them without the Lynch version.

Re:that's a matter of opinion

[jollyreaper]

If your books are about half imagery and half story, when the movies end up having about an hours worth of plot and the rest as battle scenes and aforementioned imagery then I guess you have done a bang-up job. But Dune is a bit of a bigger undertaking. It's like trying to create a movie around The Foundation Saga. It's just not as easy as massive battle scenes full of cut and paste soldiers.

Gonna start a nerd holy war on that one. :) Lord of the Rings, both the movie and the book, was about more than just battles and imagery. Dune really is more of a psychological story than Lord of the Rings which was meant to be epic myth-making on an epic scale. Dune has a lot of character-driven conflict that could just as easily be played out on an empty stage. Lots of eye-candy and worldbuilding will be icing on the cake but there's nothing about the book that says the story has to remain in the book. The hard part, of course, is handling exposition in a fashion that is not an infodump but remains interesting and engaging.

The part I'm not entirely satisfied with in Dune is Leto II's interpretation of the Golden Path and the whole transformation into the god emperor. That was the point where the story felt like it slid off the rails and the following books cemented that feeling. The whole Honored Matres thing felt tacked on.

The other part that really bothered me was the whole other memory thing. The Dune universe is presented as materialistic and godless, at least with no more proof of God's existence or lack thereof than in our own world here and now. But there's evidence of supernatural things such as the other memories awakened within the bene gesserit by the spice. The baron's own personality lived on within Alia and consumed her. How is this so? Is there some sort of junian universal subconscious, a collective soul we're all connected to? Or is all of that memory supposed to preexist within the eggs of the female line? But then the male reverend mother they sought would have access to the male side of the memories as well so this means they're passed through sperm, too? Or is it really an external thing? And if there is such a thing, could it may as well be God for all intents and purposes? A god made manifest by the shared minds of humanity. And clones presumably only need the source DNA. But Herbert never explains it and the whole mystical side seems out of place given the otherwise hard scifi setting. I can buy superb mental conditioning and powerful developments of the human mind in the post-AI age. I can buy abilities that lie within the extremes of the physically possible. But the mystic stuff presupposes a mechanism to explain it and that raises a whole host of new questions. If I see a vampire, I now wonder if there are werewolves. If I see inexplicable psychic powers, now I wonder what else could be possible.

Re:"Dune" is militarily obsolete

[kenp2002]

The basic problem with "Dune" today is that it predates the Gulf War. We know what "desert power" looks like now - M1A2 Abrams tanks and A10 Warthogs. There were worries back in 1991 that mechanized armies couldn't operate in the desert.
Wrong. You go through more air filters. Some spare parts get used up. The tanks keep rolling.
Remember those Iraqi solders in the first Gulf War who were all dug in, armed, and ready to fight? THe US sent in a line of tanks equipped with bulldozer blades, rolled over them, and buried them alive in sand. Being out in the open desert against a modern army is death. I don't care how good your knife fighters are.

And a giant sandworm with a big open mouth looks like a good RPG target.

There are insurgency tactics that work, but they depend on having a friendly population to hide in. They also require an opposition that doesn't consider extermination of the entire population in the area an option.

Actually if you read the books it isn't an issue. The whole shield technology they developed made even a simple shielded human into a portable nuclear bomb. The shields rendered conventional ballistics useless but energy weapons hitting it made the shield go "giga-boom". Unlike desert storm Arrakis is pure sandy nothingness. Not bed-rock or compressed earth. Even an Abrams tank in that situation could litterally bury itself in the sand (Think sahara not the badlands. Dunes and sandbases that are at least as deep as a sand worm is tall.)

The worms themselves are pretty durable apparently and conventional ballistics had been long abandoned due to shield technology. What is left are energy weapons and the skin of the worms might be able to endure quite a bit of heat energy and with all that silica acting as refractory sufraces radiation may not be an issue.

The political aspect wasn't lost on Herbert. The Fremen were in control of Arrakis in reality with leverage against the Spacing Guild. The Emperor or any would-be house would suddenly find it hard to transport a real full army to Arrakis to wipe out the Fremen. Only after Paul rallied the Fremen did it appear that the Spacing Guild would allow a real full contingent of troops to arrive.

The books were more about politics rather then military or traditional SciFi.

Paul is a fictional icon that the BG held in reserve to "whip out" when needed. Paul was an abberation that fit the messiah template. Paul and his mother exploited it and the BG lost control of that cultural element. With access to the inner oracle (genetic memory) Paul with the messiah template was nearly unstoppable from a political standpoint due to the religious leverage he held.

That is the brilliance of the story is the complexity of the political, social, and religious interplay. Something Lynch completely ignored.