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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."
Nice! I cant wait for a sci-fi movie that's entirely done in 3D where the main character bonds with an idigenous species who dwell on a planet that has a resource unobtainable anywhere else in the universe! They should get James Cameron to direct it!
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.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Some of us LIKE that movie. Frankly, no Dune movie can succeed without Brad Dourif.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
"Dune" is probably the greatest 20th-century science fiction novel. It is, for better or worse, unfilmable.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
Hell, I've read all the original books (written by Frank himself) and I still don't think I could summarize the plot.
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.
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.
no, but you can get atrophy.
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.
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.
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
That would be easy, just get George Lucas to do it.
NO!
Surely you mean "Dune Not Want"?
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The "memory" thing as you call it was RNA-encoded memory (it was kind of a pop-sci pseudotheory that floated around for a while in the 1960s and 1970s, Larry Niven used it for a story as well). You'll notice if you read the books that none of those ancestral individuals were there until death, basically they're identities got stuck in the RNA of a Bene Gesserit when they contributed their bit at conception. The only exception was the Duncan Idaho golah (clone) that shows up in the last two novels, who was cloned from all sorts of previous Duncan Idaho golahs, including what were obviously scrapings of Duncan Idaho's killed by Leto II (hence that Duncan Idaho did have memories of his death). The whole point of the Kwisatz Haderach was that it would be a male that could both go into the Bene Gesserit spice trance and could also access male racial memories/identities (apparently women could only see female ancestors).
As to prescience, while Herbert never really went into it, it's clear that it was a naturalistic phenomenon in his universe. It isn't magic, but what appears to be a way for a prescient individual to collapse the wave function, which is why prescience ended being so bad, even before Muad-dib came on the scene (the Guild had been using it for thousands of years since the destruction of the AIs), because it essentially locked humanity into a single future.
So while Herbert's Dune universe seems to have some supernatural aspects, that's only because, to some extent, the players treat them that way. The Bene Gesserit and the Guild, in particular, surround their powers in a thick layer of metaphysical mumbo jumbo, but underneath, those powers are rationally explainable (within the context of the universe Herbert creatd).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
People will start to care if they made a 4D Dune movie composed of prescient visions.
Excuse me, but I'm calling serious bullshit on that!
You call bullshit? Alright, I'll raise one interview with Frank Herbert & David Lynch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zw10o48NoE
Give it a good listen. Fascinating stuff.