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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."
Alternatively, they could use Frank Herbert's screenplay that he wrote for the original Dune movie (rejected for length; hardly an issue given the length of recent epics). That would arguably be closest to his own vision.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
Maybe it was my age when I saw it, but to me I don't care what's in the books - the Lynch movie is what the Dune universe is to me, complete with the TOTO soundtrack, sting, the floating fat man, and all the stuff not in the book.
He'll never be able to erase that, and might as well not even try.
Just do the right thing and make it a long movie, anything shorter than 2.5 hours won't even scratch the surface - it will be like "a day in the life of Yoda" vs. the original Star Wars trilogy. And they better over-shoot, planning to cut a lot so we have a balance between character development, setting, and plot. None of this 10-minute introduction crap which establishes everything you need to know to understand the characters' motivations.
In short, I expect massive fail unless they rely on 3D as a gimmick like Avatar did. Impressive it will be, but forgotten like Dune 2000 it will also be.
Please prove me wrong, two generations of Dune fans deserve it.
I haven't read any Harry Potter and I have found all the HP films to be very enjoyable, personally.
"Dune" is probably the greatest 20th-century science fiction novel. It is, for better or worse, unfilmable.
Yes I think they should at least try to film a different unfilmable novel. How about Neuromancer or Ringworld?
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"Dune" is probably the greatest 20th-century science fiction novel. It is, for better or worse, unfilmable.
No. It's a difficult adaptation but not impossible. LOTR was thought to be impossible. I think Peter Jackson did a bang-up job. Your mileage may vary.
The mini-series adaptations were noble in effort if flawed in execution. The problem with something like Dune is that it really demands to be made into a full season. Take the first three novels since they were meant to be the original story. Season 1, season 2, season 3. 13 episodes a piece. That's more than enough time to tell the story. As it stands, the miniseries would probably be incomprehensible to anyone not already familiar with the story. And trying to do it in a single movie? Impossible. Madness.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
First off pick up the book again some time and read the dialog aloud and tell me
Herbert's writing doesn't define wooden.
That's OK, maybe the Bible has more in common with this book then say,
the slangy chatty "Avatar".
That Lynch pulled in stuff from a different dimension was well and good. I personally
think "milking a cat", Gurney attacking with one hand on a gun and the other holding
a pug, heart plugs and the tubes going into the brains of the Guild are more poignant
than anything in the book.
Lynch's "Dune" sent me to a different dimension. "Avatar" sent me to bed
with a headache.
Do we really need another attempt to re-make 'Dune'? Yes, David Lynch's 1984 film version was really, really bad. Unwatchable, even. But I thought the healing process was complete with SciFi's Dune (2000) miniseries.
I watched the miniseries (but not the followup, Children of Dune (2003)) and thought it was great. They did an amazing job with the story. With a 3-part miniseries, you can take your time with the story, so it doesn't feel so rushed. Sure, it had William Hurt in it (I find him boring) but was good nonetheless! :-)
I'm not convinced we need another re-make of this.
I think what makes Ender's Game unfilmable is all the naked kids running around in it, not how "cerebral" it is.
I thought the final book really sealed it off. It was a vision of true panspermia intentionally designed to insure the survival of their civilization.
Not the right word. Herbert called it an exodus iirc and I think that's more accurate.
Paul foresaw several problems. And by Paul we can also say by extension Herbert because Dune is a huge allegory for the 20th century.
1. Even having gone to the stars, all of humanity remained within the control of a relatively small number of grasping assholes. Same on earth as it is in the heavens.
2. This level of control threatens staticism and decline leading to eventual collapse of civilization. While it's possible to see the risk of Earth falling to this, I'm not quite sure I agree that a 10,000 world Imperium could suffer a similar fate. But it's Herbert's story and according to him it could happen.
3. Even without prescience, staticism threatens humanity. Prescience just makes it all the worse. Presumably this prescience is what cements the likelihood of everything turning to shit even across an inhabited galaxy.
4. The Golden Path to keep humanity alive is to become the ultimate tyrant and put society under so much pressure that when things burst pieces will be flung so far apart they'll never come back together again. There will always be far-flung pieces of humanity to survive even if all the rest fail. And just like nobody wants to see another Hitler, Leto II planned on being such a bastard that nobody would want to see another god emperor.
5. A secondary goal of all this is to breed humans impervious to prescience. That negates the power of a tyrant such as the god-emperor.
When I first read it, I thought that just and excellent, but looking back, I think the point may have been to ask what exactly we are trying to preserve when we say we want to insure our survival as a race? Backstabbing and intrigue? The strong overpowering the weak?
I'd say that's not the part of humanity to be preserved, rather a symptom of the weakness Paul/Herbert saw that would doom us all without implementation of the Golden Path.
I really don't think that it was as incoherent as it's often made out to be. Herbert was not just a hack churning out books.
I like the idea of exploring the rise and fall of a messiah and how his life and teachings become twisted by his followers. I'm sure this sort of tale has been told before but Dune is the first time I encountered it. The story was also retold quite well in The Man From Earth. If you have not seen it, read nothing more but just rent it and watch it cold. You will thank me later.
As I said in another post, I didn't like where the story went with the whole god emperor bit. And after that Herbert lost his muse and was just churning out books for the paycheck, just like Clarke in his later years. Awful, awful Space Odyssey sequels, Rama sequels, and Gentry Lee bullshit.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Some of the Harry Potter movies (Order of the Phoenix being the worst offender) are so off it's funny
I thought that film was one of the best. The book had about 300 pages that a half-decent editor would have cut. Nothing of interest happened; no plot, not character development. The film only covered the events in the other 400 pages.
In contrast, The Half Blood Prince felt like they'd pulled all of the pages out of the book, thrown two thirds of them away, and then filmed the rest verbatim in a random order.
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The Dune series was the biggest test for my "if I start a series, I finish it" rule.
Clearly you never read Mission Earth
I think I've only ever met 1 person stubborn enough to finish them all. I gave up after 4 books.
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"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Ridley Scott hated the theatrical release of Blade Runner, but I loved it. What the filmmaker thinks of his films has little to do with how much I like them. I thought the Dune movie was pretty awesome when I saw it first, but it didn't age well. But, like other readers, that's the Dune universe I knew. I didn't mind the Weirding modules. They reminded me in some ways of Spider-Man's web shooters. Not needed, but a cool part of the mythos that says something interesting about their inventors.
Still haven't read the book though, but I didn't have to read Phillip K Dick to appreciate Blade Runer either.