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Sun Dec 6
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So, I'll start on shaky ground. Loved Lynch's Dune. Saw it before I read the book. Looked amazing to me. Very different from the other sci-fi going around at that time. Read the books...wierding module wuh? But man I was hooked. Read them a dozen times over. And by them, I mean the original 6 books. Which btw, people, go read the last three again. The Golden Path is just fascinating. Definitely not a 'muscle-y' book though. But then the last two with all the twisted BT genetics and the BG's missionaria. Stuff is inspired. Read the finale books by Brian. Meh. Good to have a wrap-up, but not so much a bang as a fizzle.
Back to movies. Liked that SciFi (Syfy wtf) tried to do something more true, but utter fail in converting an epic book to visual form. I mean, was I the only one that noticed that Stilgar was seriously "water-fat." Gurney was just not believable (or understandable at times). Duncan was ok. Lady Jessica!? Seriously, she was supposed to be beautiful. There were lots of choices for that. I think Lynch's Dune was a better visual experience, but agree that you shouldn't mess around that much with a masterpiece.
No possible way to cram the book into a single movie. All in all, I'm not looking for the story to be right. That's false hope. Just looking for something that will provide some visually appealing view of the Dune universe. Something it's fun to have some visualize it for you. But film is only 2-D. The depth is in the book. So go read them if you haven't.
@trampas: I loved Lynch's visual style. Truly visionary. I really don't care if it wasn't accurate. As for SciFi's representation meh. I DID like the remastered Lynch version.
For me suspension of disbelief in some of the things that seem frankly rather ridiculous taken on their own in the Dune series is somehow easier in the books than I found them in the film (which I nonetheless rather enjoyed) or the miniseries. I think this could continue to be a problem in future adaptations.
@disatess: Actually the the very first director attached to Dune was Alexandro Jodorowsky, the Argentinian director of such classic head films as El Topo and Santa Sangre. His vision was far more surreal and psychedelic than either David Lynch's version of the scifi channel mini-series. He didn't intend to respect the novel but to recreate it. [www.duneinfo.com]
as I said before , I think Boom studios should get ahold of the rights of dune (the original). And do a wonderful comic series , just as they done with Dicks Androids book . No rewriting it , just keep as and add art . That way you get what the book offers .
As someone who watched the 1984 film, the two sci-fi miniseries and read the first three books, I think the film gets a bad rap.
Ok, so it's not a literal translation, but it hits the key beats: noble child survives slaughter of his family, becomes messiah to indigenous people and ends up defeating those who engineered his slaughter. On top of that looked fantastic and it had a wonderful wrongness to it.
Compared to the more literal, but less inspired SciFi Miniseries, it's made of awesome.
Sadly the movie was financed and marketed by people who thought they were getting the next Star Wars. Queue bad audience reaction and an undeserved stigma.
@Shiryu: I loved the whole Gurney and Stilgar join Paul and the Duke at Studio 54 vibe of your video. I could almost see it as background music playing while Feyd Rautha dances around.
The David Lynch Dune was the worst movie I ever saw in a theatre. People booed, threw things. Many just walked out. I've never seen an audience turn on a movie so viciously. So, the bar is set pretty low for any remake, as far as I'm concerned.
@cletar: You want to see an audience boo a movie? Watch "Halloween III The Season of the Witch". They booed, they laughed (at serious, heroic moments). They groaned and I wanted to cry after just a few repetitions of "X more days to Halloween".............
In a way, I think Berg is actually the perfect guy to direct this, if he can draw upon his Friday Night Lights and Virtuality experience, and ignore any attempt to insert a little Beyhem (see: The Kingdom).
It's going to be impossible to ever create something as desolate as Arrakis or terrifying as the Worms should be, which is a good thing. It should force Berg to focus on the characters, as he did in the fantastically directed Friday Night Lights TV pilot. Make this movie about the betrayal of Leto, the mystical, otherworldly qualities of the Lady Jessica, and the charisma and passion of Paul.
Making the film more "muscular" and "violent" isn't what this film needs, and I'm hoping these were just offhand comments which will really not greatly influence the focus of the movie.
In the face of something as truly epic as Dune, Berg needs to look inward instead, and keep this movie grounded in the complex and multi-dimensional characters Frank Herbert created. After watching what he was able to accomplish in Friday Night Lights, and to a lesser extent Virtuality, I think he can actually accomplish this.
@Smeagol92055: R.O.A.C.H.: Lynch wanted Sting to be completely naked but that would have kicked the movie into R territory and Dino De Luarentiis wanted to keep a PG-13 rating. The costumer designed Sting's ridiculous looking codpiece on the fly as a compromise.
@Silentkiller2774: Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, Chapterhouse Dune.
There are no other books in the Dune series besides these. Don’t believe anything otherwise that people might tell you. You’ll be a much happier person this way.
@RandomFrequentFlierDent:
Well, I read dune and I had the unfortunate luck to read House Atreides... and... damn what was the other House called. Well I only got partway through that other House book.
Well thank you, I shall read all of those.
@Grey_Area: I wish I'd stopped at the end of the third one. Maybe just the first. I'd say read the first, but if you read the 2nd, go ahead and do the 3rd, and then stop for sure.
Especially on the fourth book, which I actually found a good character study that people have been programmed to dis utterly. So, boo. Honestly, the second and third are kind of awful in my opinion and the fourth is a good bookending antidote.
Although it's heresy, I'm brave enough: I really liked the Butlerian Jihad trilogy. The "House" books are pointless, but the Jihad books are a worthwhile aside.
@Silentkiller2774: The explanation is a little spoiler-y.
Basically, the first three books are about Paul and his immediate family within a 30 year time frame.
Between the third and fourth book there is a jump of roughly 3500 years and one of the characters has become a giant, almost invulnerable, nearly immortal man-worm. Or worm-man. From there it gets a little weird and pretty convoluted.
@Evil Tortie's Mom: R.O.A.C.H.: What ETM said. The correct order is to read Dune first, then go read something else and treasure your unsullied memory of the really great book forever.
1. Dune, then stop. Dune is a great book, and works by itself really well.
2. Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune. This trilogy effectively deals with Paul's life, and then ends.
3. Same as #2, but throw in God Emperor of Dune, which effectively wraps up his son's story.
4. Same as #3, but wade through the clear embodiment of sexual frustration that were Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune.
5. Keep reading all the post-Frank sequels in the order of publication, but if my experience with Kevin J. Anderson from the Star Wars EU is any indication, make sure you leave a mop and bucket handy so the next person that comes along can clean up the ooze that used to be your brain.
The only way to do a Dune movie is to give it the long 3 movie LOTR Treatment.
Scifichannel had that much right by splitting it to a 3 part miniseries.The book is huge and will not be good as a one movie 2 - 3 hour film.Then you will have to cut all sorts of stuff.
I am not looking forward to another version of Dune.time to moveon hollywood and find a brand new original thing to do.Like how about continuing the Dune series.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blah blah blah. I'm better than David Lynch. No, you're not. No one is. You can make you're movie more actiony, more coherent, more "fun", but you'll never make it more stylish or compelling. David Lynch has more style in his ass hairs than Peter Berg's entire body.
@Mark 2000: You could take the pages of Dune, rip them out, throw them in the air, reassemble them, and it would still be more coherent than Lynch's Dune. Lynch's Dune has excellent styling, but that is all that can be said for it.
@detoys: That's honestly not true. I've never read the book and I understand the story just fine after only two viewings of the Lynch film. If you don't have a taste for it, fine. And after this film is made we will still be looking to Lynch's film as the gold standard. Trust me.
@Mark 2000: Okay, so wait a sec...You've never read the actual source material? The Lynch movie had some nice qualities but DAMN, read the first three books. There is depth and texture that he could never capture.
@Mark 2000: The David Lynch movie was one of the worst movies of all time. It was Plan 9 with floating fat men. It failed on all levels--as an adaptation of a book, as a film-it was atrocious. The effects were laughable, even for the time, the costumes were silly, acting was wooden, the lame incessant voice-overs--it was awful. It's the opposite of classic. It was worse than Star Trek V.
@detoys: The incoherence is not David Lynch's fault. He intended a 3 hour movie but it was the 1980s and producers felt that audiences wouldn't sit still for that long so Dino De Laurentiis forced Lynch to edit it down to 137 minutes (2 hrs. 17 mins.). The movie lost 43 minutes....Think about that for a second.
@Bill-Lee: I've seen the extended version and while Lynch may have disowned it (think about THAT for a second) it's got the footage Lynch created and was forced to remove. It's not any better.
08/07/09
Back to movies. Liked that SciFi (Syfy wtf) tried to do something more true, but utter fail in converting an epic book to visual form. I mean, was I the only one that noticed that Stilgar was seriously "water-fat." Gurney was just not believable (or understandable at times). Duncan was ok. Lady Jessica!? Seriously, she was supposed to be beautiful. There were lots of choices for that. I think Lynch's Dune was a better visual experience, but agree that you shouldn't mess around that much with a masterpiece.
No possible way to cram the book into a single movie. All in all, I'm not looking for the story to be right. That's false hope. Just looking for something that will provide some visually appealing view of the Dune universe. Something it's fun to have some visualize it for you. But film is only 2-D. The depth is in the book. So go read them if you haven't.
08/09/09
08/07/09
Aren't there a MILLION other fantastic Sci-Fi's out there to adapt?
08/07/09
08/07/09
08/07/09
08/07/09
08/07/09
[www.duneinfo.com]
08/07/09
08/07/09
Ok, so it's not a literal translation, but it hits the key beats: noble child survives slaughter of his family, becomes messiah to indigenous people and ends up defeating those who engineered his slaughter. On top of that looked fantastic and it had a wonderful wrongness to it.
Compared to the more literal, but less inspired SciFi Miniseries, it's made of awesome.
Sadly the movie was financed and marketed by people who thought they were getting the next Star Wars. Queue bad audience reaction and an undeserved stigma.
08/07/09
08/07/09
08/07/09
08/06/09
08/07/09
08/06/09
08/07/09
08/07/09
08/06/09
It's going to be impossible to ever create something as desolate as Arrakis or terrifying as the Worms should be, which is a good thing. It should force Berg to focus on the characters, as he did in the fantastically directed Friday Night Lights TV pilot. Make this movie about the betrayal of Leto, the mystical, otherworldly qualities of the Lady Jessica, and the charisma and passion of Paul.
Making the film more "muscular" and "violent" isn't what this film needs, and I'm hoping these were just offhand comments which will really not greatly influence the focus of the movie.
In the face of something as truly epic as Dune, Berg needs to look inward instead, and keep this movie grounded in the complex and multi-dimensional characters Frank Herbert created. After watching what he was able to accomplish in Friday Night Lights, and to a lesser extent Virtuality, I think he can actually accomplish this.
08/06/09
Have you seen Sting in that movie?
08/06/09
08/07/09
08/06/09
08/06/09
There are no other books in the Dune series besides these. Don’t believe anything otherwise that people might tell you. You’ll be a much happier person this way.
08/06/09
Well, I read dune and I had the unfortunate luck to read House Atreides... and... damn what was the other House called. Well I only got partway through that other House book.
Well thank you, I shall read all of those.
08/06/09
08/06/09
08/06/09
08/06/09
08/06/09
08/06/09
Especially on the fourth book, which I actually found a good character study that people have been programmed to dis utterly. So, boo. Honestly, the second and third are kind of awful in my opinion and the fourth is a good bookending antidote.
Although it's heresy, I'm brave enough: I really liked the Butlerian Jihad trilogy. The "House" books are pointless, but the Jihad books are a worthwhile aside.
08/07/09
Basically, the first three books are about Paul and his immediate family within a 30 year time frame.
Between the third and fourth book there is a jump of roughly 3500 years and one of the characters has become a giant, almost invulnerable, nearly immortal man-worm. Or worm-man. From there it gets a little weird and pretty convoluted.
08/07/09
That is a rather odd shift in plot.
08/07/09
08/07/09
08/19/09
There are five possibilities:
1. Dune, then stop. Dune is a great book, and works by itself really well.
2. Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune. This trilogy effectively deals with Paul's life, and then ends.
3. Same as #2, but throw in God Emperor of Dune, which effectively wraps up his son's story.
4. Same as #3, but wade through the clear embodiment of sexual frustration that were Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse Dune.
5. Keep reading all the post-Frank sequels in the order of publication, but if my experience with Kevin J. Anderson from the Star Wars EU is any indication, make sure you leave a mop and bucket handy so the next person that comes along can clean up the ooze that used to be your brain.
08/06/09
Scifichannel had that much right by splitting it to a 3 part miniseries.The book is huge and will not be good as a one movie 2 - 3 hour film.Then you will have to cut all sorts of stuff.
I am not looking forward to another version of Dune.time to moveon hollywood and find a brand new original thing to do.Like how about continuing the Dune series.
08/19/09
Too bad SciFi couldn't actually hire actors or a costume designer.
08/06/09
08/06/09
08/06/09
08/06/09
08/07/09
08/07/09
08/07/09
08/07/09