I don’t think they are paying any attention to the 84 film at all.
By all accounts they are trying to make a great film that is fundamentally an adaptation of the book.

And the Sci Fi mini series already did a not horrendous / not great closer adaptation than the 1984 fil twenty years ago.


Dune 84 is sort of like Captain America 1990, it’s OK for someone to take another shot at it.

I believe on the 21st of October of this year.

It’s hard to call the original film a classic.  

Really, it was a pretty lame attempt, but it happened to be all that Dune fans had at the time.

The only thing that’s (maybe) classic about it is that it was so bad in places that it was actually kind of unintentionally campy.

After seeing how he did Bladerunner 2049, I was cautiously optimistic that Villeneuve could pull off a Dune movie.

I watched it last night and holy shit he did it, it was everything I hoped for.  Very well done and I cant wait for the next one.

I was hesitant because I kept reading people talking about how it was SJW. I have not seen the old movie or read the book and have no idea what the storyline is supposed to be - but I really liked this movie.

Lol, can't say I was a fan of contrived humming lasers.

Having seen the new one, I still think the SyFy version is the best. I think it covers the characters better, definitely shows who the players are, and takes the time to build the Atreides rule on Dune. The new one completely glosses over the time it took for the Atreides to take over the control of Dune, and really build their base of power there. It makes the betrayal by Yueh almost meaningless. Duke Leto's relationship with the people of Dune is nearly nonexistent, and there is no trust built. It's like they rushed through all of that so they could get to the Fremen, without establishing who the Atreides became as the ones in control of Dune.

It will obviously need another 2 hours or so, but this was well done. I was impressed. Part 2 can't come soon enough.

I saw it with one of my kids in town.

Fantastic production values.

Sure, the actor playing Paul is not 15, but he seems to nail that coming of age teenager.

Gurney and Duncan are well done.  Maybe each is not written to quite nail the flavor of their characters in the novel exactly, but they are well done and distinct.  Say I saw it as  Gurney as the unstable brute master guns force recon guy focused killer one moment, raucous raconteur happy the next warrior poet.  And Duncan the dashing West Point grad 11A to 18A FAO and operative with extra OGA training and utilization.  

For as long as the movie is to cover, say, 5/8 of the novel,
We miss a ton of the impact of a 110% loyal royal  house physician being the traitor.
We lose the whole subplot of Jessica being seen as not quite trustworthy as she is from the witch clan.
We lose the whole Thufir concept of being a genius master assasin.
We don’t quite get the impact of how evil and intelligent and dangerous Pieter is.
We thankfully don’t get the 1984 version of the Baron and his house as cardboard, two dimensional “evil” that you could not possibly see running a planet.
We do sort of miss the setup of the Duke on Dune an his interaction as an honorable man - it’s there, but missing a ton of the overall setup.
You also do not get the whole importance of the shield, the massive impact of sabotage, etc.
There was no real look at the navigators, emperor, etc.
They don’t really go into why people are still fighting with swords 8000 years from now, and shields impact on projectile let alone energy weapons.

As for Jessica, she seems so weak and broken and all over the place for what is the equivalent of some female warrior monk martial arts expert.  They completely lose her as a strong women archetype.  We don’t quite get the full impact of just how much she and the Duke love each other.  I found her portrayal disappointing.

Which is especially weird as they go so over the top to take honorable old guy Lawrence of Arabia type Kynes and go full retard making him a strong black woman.  

The Chani and Stilhar, Fremen portrayal is fine to me at this point.  I’m not sure why it was done in the open desert, but OK.  

It was great to see ornithopters as the mess of mechanical engineering that should not work I always pictured them as.  

I first read Dune when I was a kid in the late 70s.
Again in high school, plus Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, and God Emperor of Dune.
Then in the late 1980s to Early 1990s all 6 novels plus Eye.
A dozen years ago, I read the 6 novels again, plus the two prequel trilogies co-authored by his son.

So it has been a decent amount of time since I Have read Dune.

I think Dune 2021 would be a horribly boring movie of little interest to a general audience.
There is so much backstory, character development, internal monologue, etc. how do you really follow it with no knowledge of the novel.
And with knowledge of the novel, where is the surprise, drama, etc.

Regardless, I think they did a fantastic job overall with great cinematography and a fantastic look overall.


Edit-
There was also no introduction of the other Baron nephew-
The one also a single step away from the genetic culmination of the chose one like Paul

I saw Dune 2021 today.

The Beast Rabban seemed to be a Soy Boy to me.
He seemed so weak comparing him to 1984's version.

When Chani showed I kept thinking of how Maisie Williams might have been better.


I liked the scenes with the little mouse.
It using its huge ears to collect dew to drink was a Good Idea.

It also should have included a Fold Space scene.

What kind of scene do you picture?

Dune 84 had a weird scene implying the navigators did some sort of weird space magic and did the jump.
In the physics/science of the duneiverse that’s not really what was going on in the books.

Computers couldn’t be used to calculate jumps.  Even if you used them, you still had a one in ten chance or so of the jump ending in destruction.
Mentats instead of computers calculating jumps the same.
Navigators take a future look at a good jump.
The engines are what make the jump.

What a great movie! Dune as a franchise had never really been on my radar before. Last year I tried to watch the 84 version and turned it off about 20 minutes in. Then one night I got drunk and tried to watch Dune 2021, and was completely lost the entire time. It is NOT a film that lends itself well to someone just stepping into the Dune universe. Last week I finally read the novel, and today I watched 2021 again, and it finally all made sense.

I cannot wait until part 2.

I agree having watched that version in the past several years................. but for the 1980's, and on the big screen, it was pretty solid.

The biggest problem with Lynch's Dune was, well, Lynch. I mean his claim to fame was Eraserhead.

The second big problem was the end revealing Paul to actually be a God, instead of a man worshipped as a God.

Bought Dune21 and liked it, for a movie.

But this is the age of Binge Streaming, and Dune NEEDS to be a 7 or 8 hour series with huge swaths of prequel exposition.

The worldbuilding for Dune is great, because it’s nebulous and undefined… you just glimpse parts of it.  If you tried to pin that down into specific stories, it would not be as good. This is Brian Herbert’s grave miscalculation.  His prequels were awful.

Sometime before Zendaya hits menopause, hopefully….

I saw the movie on a flight to Sydney last month.

I enjoyed it.  Was disappointed that it ended so soon.

The 1984 version of Rabban was a fat guy acting like a retard.

Chani would be too close in character type to Aria Stark and therefore draw too many comparisons between the two IPs.

My wife says that all the time, for some reason…

Wait, what were we talking about?

Just got myself a Sardaukar T-Shirt for working out.  

Really enjoying the new Dune and looking forward to this sequel.

Who else thinks that the individuals being bled out during the Sardaukar ritual in the movie were the guys who failed selection?

That seems likely, and consistent with Herbert’s theme that tough environments are what create strong men.

“God created Arakis to train the faithful.”

Correctamundo

(IMO, anyway)

Yeah, love the Sardaukar.  Their only misfortune was to have such a terrible leader in the Emperor who was far removed from their martial tradition.  

They should do more books on the Sardaukar before the Dune movie timeline.

Looks like they are trying to "de-Arabize" the Fremen, as (in the new Trailer for part 2) Paul yells "Long Live The Fighters" (according to the subtitles)......but the audio is definitely not "Ya Hya Chouhada!" (the "future" Arabic from the novels).



@2:42

He’ll always be the Lisan Al-Gaib to me.

We can’t have a bunch of people running around in the desert, killing people and blowing stuff up in a holy war, speaking Arabic…

I just want to see a movie about the Sardaukar.

The Freman have ZERO business being as good at war as the Sardaukar.  The Fremen have ZERO operational or strategic experience at conducting wars and zero experience outside of desert fighting.  The Fremen have never operated in any environment let alone conducted naval actions (i.e. spaceship fighting).   The Fremen have no air support and other than the Worms (a great resource, but not one they can hope to get off planet to fight anywhere) have no real support for combined arms warfare.  

It also seems like the Freman would be very vulnerable to attacks on their water supplies. I imagine they don't have many of them and that their agriculture is very limited, so how would they hope to supply a military fighting any sustained campaign?   The Sardaukar could likely just avoid direct battle and draw them out into long deployment until the Fremen's resources were stretched to breaking point.  

I don't care how good the Freman are at one on one fighting, it just doesn't matter in a larger war. Look at the Spartacus uprising in Rome, sure Spartacus had some top notch brawling gladiators, but it ultimately didn't make any difference against the relentless military machine that was Rome.

It's a fun work of fiction, but it's hard to fully enjoy it when the Fremen just have so much plot armor.

The movie made me like the Sardaukar, I kind of want them to win now.

The Fremen pretty much control the spice. Controlling the spice means they control the Spacing Guild. No Guild, no space travel for the Emperor or anyone else. It makes concentration of force much easier when your enemy has essentially no strategic lift.

Here's another wrinkle, though. It's shown that off worlders have trouble fighting on Arrakis since shields are useless in the deep desert because they attract the worms. Won't Fremen have this problem when they start their jihad and go offworld? Trying to get all stabby stabby only to have shields blunt their attacks? I know they're supposed to be taught some of the Bene Gesserit tools, but that hardly seems enough. At a guess, some suicide troops with lasguns are used to take out shielded troops to encourage the others to turn off their shields, giving Fremen 'line' troops their opportunity to show what they can do with a crysknife.

Also, since there's some pretty heavy Islam/Arabic themes going in, once the Fremen get the Jihad going there'll be a lot of converts along the way to bolster numbers and skillsets.

For the record, I read Dune a bunch of times during and shortly after high school, but it's been a few decades.  And I couldn't get myself into the sequels so I don't know what canon is after the first book.

It’s been years since I read through the series,
But they address the watering down of the Sardukar.

Like,
Originally they were sort of on par with a bunch of Green Berets, LRRPs/Ranger company guys, SEALs, and Force Recon guys that had survived a couple of tours in Nam, were thrown together and the surviving MACV-SOG guys got another tour or two and their reputation was built on those guys.

But at some point they had become sort of a combo of regular 82nd guys and tomb of the unknown soldier ceremonial guys plus a bunch of psychos that had failed basic kind of patched together living off the reputation of the old types.

And the Fremen were basically a culture that had been hunted and survived generations of seek and destroy missions.

In spite of a brief stint with the Seabees (as a photographer), Herbert knew nothing about military action or logistics.  Dune is sociopolitical fiction, not military fiction.

In Herbert’s world, toughest wins and logistics mean nothing.  Controlling the spice (and consequently all space travel) is the trump card and ultimate political leverage.