Meh, I liked the older movie better...

UG I’m not sure if I want to watch this.

I remember suffering through and hating the first dune movie. Oh, we gotta find the spice, oh we gotta find the spice,
oh we get to ride giant worms.


Original Dune was worse than “you light up my life”  movie.

Wait, when you say "the first dune movie", are you referring to the '84 version or Part 1 of the new movies?

Because your summary couldn't be further from accurate for Part 1.

Click To View Spoiler

Oh!  Now I think I remember one of the Harks saying that.

That’s like saying I’m a devout Christian but never heard of the Bible thing.

Yup.

Austin Butler Improvised His Dune 2 Kiss With Stellan Skarsgård

Click To View Spoiler.

Pretty sure Kynes mentioned it in 1.

Click To View Spoiler

You'd need like part 1 and 2 to both be 4 hour movies. Which no studio or mass audience would accept

Otherwise it'd be a miniseries and effects budget would be way lower....also no IMAX cameras because they're expensive as fuck for studios to "rent". Budget cast of actors...

Its a careful balancing act.


To DV's credit... he says it's excruciatingly painful for him when he's in the cutting room and having to streamline all that story into 2 1/2 hours.

Miniseries was already made back in 2000 by SciFi Channel.  

An extended edition would be nice, but only if it maintained the same quality and truly expanded upon the story.

I wonder what we’ll see when the directors cut comes out

Denis Villeneuve Cut Two Actors From ‘Dune 2’ and One of Them Is ‘Heartbroken’; No Deleted Scenes Will Be Released: ‘When It’s Not in the Movie, It’s Dead’

“I’m a strong believer that when it’s not in the movie, it’s dead,” he told Collider before “Dune: Part Two” opened in theaters. “Sometimes I remove shots and I say, ‘I cannot believe I’m cutting this out. I feel like a samurai opening my gut. It’s painful, so I cannot go back after that and create a Frankenstein and try to reanimate things that I killed. It’s too painful. When it’s dead, it’s dead, and it’s dead for a reason. But yes, it is a painful project, but it is my job. The movie prevails. I’m very severe in the editing room. I’m not thinking about my ego, I’m thinking about the movie. … I kill darlings, and it’s painful for me.”

Until Marketing has a presentation showing the studio how much money sales of an "Extended Edition" would bring.

Yeah... and If you bring those scenes back you have a whole new movie. It's not like Lord of the Rings where it's just extra explanation. The film moves in line with what he cut from the book. You can't copy paste those scenes back in and it all works.

He films everything though. He wasn't like a "fuck this Frank guy.... I've got a better vision!". For instance he filmed the part where Gurney plays the Balliset in Paul's training room. And he filmed the conversation of Lady Jessica and Dr Yeuh, that was very tense... he had to cut it.

Besides, I think itd be pretty gay to do a 1:1 conversion of the book to film. Personally I think it would be soulless and uncreative.

Hard to cram a novel the size of Dune into 5 hours and have audiences dazzled by it. Not picking it apart like Phantom Menace and all its inconsistencies....I think Dune 1 & 2 are great achievements given the time restrictions.

Click To View Spoiler

I would be down for 4hr directors cuts.

I would be, too, considering the quality of the films.  I do understand DVs point about editing but I would make an exception for this.

We saw DUNC 2 in an IMAX last night.
Almost overwhelming, and my jaded teenagers were impressed.

Looking forward to taking the wife to dunc 2, she liked the first one and also enjoyed 1980s Dune


The original will always have my respect for having the brass balls to try and depict a guild navigator folding space with 1980s film technology. Dunc didn't even bother. They're on Kaladan. Now they're on Arrakis. Things just happen

Edit: beat so many times.

Just got out of the IMAX theatre. It was fucking epic, insane, and off the fucking chain. I haven't been that impressed since The Return of the King.

Ridley Scott has been working that shit successfully for decades. Bladerunner.

Putting those 45 minutes back into the Kingdom of Heaven made it a whole new movie. From 'meh' to 'hell yeah!'

Attached File

At first I was like so what?, Watched the video - Holy crap. Its a different movie

Why do you even know about that website?

They didn’t bother because guild navigators don’t f-ing fold space.
The engines do.
The Navigator just picks the jump coordinates from viewing how the futures work out with the coordinates.

On, but the way, in the novel they also didn’t have wrist things turning voices into weapons.

While "true", they did show one planet in the foreground, with a different planet visible through the navigators ship, which along with earlier dialog that the navigators used spice to be able to fold space, worked.  Granted, more like a wormhole, but sufficient enough to not need to dwell on it, and demonstrate the travel.

I’d watch his directors cut even if it’s 5 hours.

I'm late because I was on vacation but just got back from the movie.

Am I the only one who was a little disappointed when the 2nd movie didn't end with the quote from the very end of the first book?

Click To View Spoiler

That was a bit disappointing.

My only other complaint (and I knew it would be this way) was that dumb ass chick that got cast to play Chani. All of the rest of it is fucking awesome. She just tried way too hard, had permabitch face, and in the end came off as a little boy trying to act like a tough man.

Her acting is completely out of place with the acting of the other people in the movie. Even her name single name is fucking annoying and pretentious.

Dune is a fascinating novel.  I first read it when I was about ten in the middle of the 70s.
And I have re-read it about half a dozen times since.  And the rest of the novels a few times.

And frankly, at nearly 190K words, and close to 1000 pages in some editions/formats, it was not exactly a wide audience, mainstream hit.  Sure, for Sci Fi fans and cerebral types, it is a literary work of art.  Ecologic world building, political intrigue, 20,000 years of human evolution, selective breeding, a desert people sitting on the fuel that drive the world.  I mean universe.  Advanced technology without computers.  Love,  violence, appendices, honor, warriors, betrayal, royalty,-
Linked to a classic coming of age hero cycle with a twist on the fine line between hero and brutality.  But not the kind of thing most people are going to sit through and read.  The average reader will take over 12 hours to read it.



Stop here TL/DR types or avoiding spoilers -





Dune ‘84 made an attempt at it.
And we were happy to have it.  But with deviations that were incomprehensible.  There was supposedly a 250 minute version, of which 180 minutes were going to be kept and given effects.  And we got about a 130 minute theatrical version.  And there were a few 180 ish minute TV and other versions, not involving the director.  I think Bladerunner is about the only other mess of versions on this par.  We got a lead about a dozen years older than the character, cartoonish caricature villains, and various other issues.

The Sci-Fi Channel miniseries is not much shorter at around 260-295 minutes depending on version.  While it lacked top shelf quality in many ways, it seemed to try very hard to portray the novel.  We again get a lead seeming a dozen years older than the character.  

The DV movies give us 320 minutes.  And while the actor was again a decade older than the character, I bought him being 15 at the start and having his life turned upside down.  

The cinematography, score, details, language, battles, worms-
The world of Dune is truly brought to life in an amazing and accomplished way.


But… the movie really downplayed his difference from a regular person, nearly eliminating  the impact of his power/gift.  In the first movie, the mother seemed so weak, but they invented a stronk 45 year old black woman to replace an elderly semi mentor type with a secret, and eliminated their parentage of Chani.  Which also held into the outworlder hate discrepancy in part 2.  The whole love story seems gone.  Paul and Chani lost their child, she was his anchor to being human, yet she is turned into a spiteful, hateful, resentful thing.  Part of it may be turning the years of the novel into fucking summer camp.  In part two, it concludes with his mother still pregnant.  In the novel, his sister is born, he has a child with Chani, which is slaughtered in a raid,  they build up over a few years, not a few months.  I just don’t understand a lot of the choices.  
Jessica is weak and one and evil/conniving in 2.  Chani is a cunt in 2.  The sheer love of Jessica to the Duke is gone.  The impossible horror of betrayal by a house physician is gone.  Thufir the genius feared assasin is now a diabetic MM class IDPA shooter/failure.  The houses / guilds now deny Paul and they are off on a new war.  It’s kind of frustrating and perplexing.  And the time compression.  

And I guess here is a lot of the problem with Dune.
You have to be fairly familiar and appreciative of the novel to be interesting in sitting through long movies with deliberate pacing vs a Michael Bay flick.  But…. If you are familiar with it, some omissions and changes are going to be kind of mouth opening and glaring.

Read the book. It's one of those tales with so much backstory that they could never put it all into the movie. For example, the Bene Gesserit just come across as crazy witches in the movie, but there's so much more to them and they serve an important purpose in the grand scheme of things.

It's kind of like Shogun in that they could never fit the full breadth of those books into a movie.

As much as I dislike the Chani portrayal, at the end of the day the acclaimed director has directed films with close to 30 Academy Award nominations and close to 10 wins. And had a production budget for the two films in the area of about ten to twenty times the net worth of the actress.  I’m going to say the character was portrayed exactly as he wanted.  There’s maybe a dozen actors with a combination of net worth, earning potential, and audience draw that could have been involved with the production - and has noted essentially that for whatever reason he wanted to show Paul’s growth via characters.  This means the characters are changed/different.  I would rather he just showed us the change more directly and kept the original characters/relationships.

Went for a second viewing today - this time in IMAX (1st view was in 4DX and I hated it, so tough to follow the amazing fight choreography). It's a "faux" IMAX though (think twin 2K projectors?), but huge curved screen and the SOUND. O.M.G.

I've never experienced a brown note, but I almost had a yellow note - the bass came close to making me piss myself.

I have not heard anyone complain about the cinematography or score.

It’s amazing.


And the enemies are less comic, etc. and various other things.
It’s the missing impact of a lot of the characters and relationships that are rough to take,
Plus the conversion of key figures into something they were not.

Let’s say Star Wars / Empire Srikes Backhad been a novel.
Exactly as it was shown, maybe wordier and far more detail.  

Then they made a movie, and
made Ben a 45 year old woman, minus decades of his history and experience,
Leia hates Luke, hates the rebellion.
We never see Luke learn to use the force.
Han has a fraction of the screen time.
And chewie seems like a big scardey cat the first half then evil and conniving the second half.
3PO betrays them with no explanation.  
R2 is still in pieces and not fully put together yet.
Lando in awe of Luke and thinks he is the second coming of the force.

It would just feel off after reading the book.

So, we just saw Pt2.

Things I don't like:

1. They pronounce names wrong; Harkonnen and Leto's name. Was a gripe of the first film also.

2. Chani's attitude almost ruins the movie.

3. Feyd being tested??!! WTF?

4. Jessica being portrayed as a spreader of "religious" propaganda was off putting as well.

5. Alia being in her mother's womb still and communicating through Jessica was weird also. She was born eight month's after Leto's death: so she should have been born in Pt2.

Other than those things, I enjoyed the film.

I watched the 84 film first, then read all the books that Frank wrote but didn't finish chapter house. These films are making me want to reread the series - and my son wants to also. He's read Dune and Dune Messiah.

I also want to find the Sci-Fi series from back in the day. CGI wasn't grest, but it followed the story well from what I remember.

My handle on here is derived from my love of Dune (Muad from Muad'Dib).

Just finished Dune the book. Haven't read the appendices in the back yet, there are a few. The two biggest departures of the movies from the book were IMO, 1 Alia still being a fetus, and 2 the fact that they didn't show that the surviving Atradies thought Jessica was the traitor and not the Doctor. In the book Gurney almost kills Jessica.

Not sure why those changes? It wouldn't have added length, not much.

Click To View Spoiler

I’m very familiar with the source material and found it very non specific.
Like-
What the F is Irulan doing getting knocked up by him.
The actress was too similar and the situation too cloudy to clearly demonstrate this to the majority of viewers in my opinion.

Explained in the first movie.  Shields attract worms.

This. I've only watched the new movie, but I was aware of early versions and the books. I don't how anyone can be a "big sci fi guy" and not have at least heard of Dune.

Just watched Dune pt2 on IMAX and came away from it with mixed feelings.

On one hand there is no questioning the technical aspects of the movie. Cinematography, special effects, soundtrack and the acting are all top notch. If this movie doesn't recieve an aware for that alone, it will be a travesty. On the other, it's the editing and plot choices that give this movie something less than four stars. Some you'll notice and others you won't unless you have the book(s) somewhere in your garage and have seen the 80s movie a number of times.

**Spoilers**

The first, most jarring aspect of the movie is the chemistery between the main characters of Zendaya (Chani) and Chalamet (Paul). Frankly it's shit, primarily due to Zendaya's uncharismatic passive-aggressive attitude toward her relationship with Paul, and it's only made worse with the plot choice to have her factionalized into the anti-white man colonizer camp as opposed to supporting her mate as the would-be messiah. Yes, the more I think on the matter, the more I really do believe that this was a girl-power concession, because the ending radically changes the arc of the canon material. The 80s Chani wasn't a jilteted lover. She was a partner in crime iirc and fully bought into Paul's messiah position as the plot progressed. Moreover, she knew and was okay with the fact that she was always Pauls real lover while the Empress was a paper concubine. I suspected the Zendaya/Chalamet pairing would be shit in the first movie but was hoping they could turn that around. Nope, she's still completely unlikable here as well.

She's no Sean Young in her prime, that's for sure.

Now don't get me wrong-- The 80s material doesn't age well, but the more I compared the two, the more I began to wonder what the hell was Dune Pt2 doing with that 2 hours and 46 minutes of run time versus the 80s movie that clocking in 2:17? For all it's expositional flaws, the 80s movie was paced far better than Pt2 and managed its plot material much better in my opinion. And lets be clear-- The fault specifically lies with Pt2. Pt1 was damn near a master piece. The fall of house Atraties was a masterwork on the topic. The poltical tug of war between the houses, throne, spice guild and sisterhood could have used a bit more attention, but overall, it was great stuff. Part 2 meander needlessly for far too long in the desert. Whereas the 80s material comfortably captured Pauls doubt, installation as a fremin and rise to messiah in the space of two hours, Pt2 squandered its time to the point where some very obvious editing had to be done so that they could squeeze Pauls sudden rise to messiah and sacking of the emperor in a half hour. Compared to the awesomeness of the fall of house atraties, the counter offensive against the emperor felt far less epic and absolutely sandwiched in for run time. I guranatee they could have mined that half hour by cutting out the various scenes of people camping in the desert over and over.

And dem nuclear missiles. LOL.

On the pacing, the decision not to have Aliyah born in this timeframe didn't strike me as bad as I though it as going to be. Originally, having the slightly crazy child kill off baron harkonnen with her super powers was a great bit of fun in the source material and helped illustrate Pauls time amongst the fremin, but on the other, watching mom just mumble to herself and make plans with the girl in her womb was just as wtf diabolical. That said, it means movie one and two happened inside 8 months, whereas the 80s material takes at least three years to get Paul to be a messiah. On that same note, somebody else already noted that Paul seems like a normal person with a cult following. Aside from the voice, there was no Messiah moment or something indicating he was THE ONE. "Oh I know shit about your family" isn't enough IMO. In the 80s material, he made it RAIN. He split Fey open with his voice. The pacing of his rise to sainthood was a constant curve with examples shown, not a sudden, vertical wall of plot to get him there. This Paul seems... Average.

In the end, i'm left conflicted. Part 1 seemed to use its long run time to greater effect while part 2 squandered it on unimportant scenes, resulting in the obvious need for editing down in time. The problem was they chose absolutely the wrong things to trim. Maybe when viewed ogther the whole will make up for the sum of its parts- especially a directors cut version -but that won't fix Zendaya's wholely unlikeable personality and the plot choices they made with her.

Yeah man, you did an awesome job of spelling those points out.

Chani's character almost ruins the movie for me...

Just saw it in 1570 Imax. Damned incredible. Fantastic movie. I look forward to part 3.

Lucky! I was stuck with FauxMAX.

And like others I didn’t care for Chani.. tried to give the actress a chance but…

The director has stated that Dr. Kynes was in fact her mother, though it’s never mentioned in either movie. I thought that would have been interesting to note because Kynes seemed to know of the prophecy and didn’t condone it.

Zendaya is almost playing Mary Jane from Spiderman again. Aloof, arrogant, detached.