Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, and director Denis Villeneuve share secrets from the new film and reveal Florence Pugh’s, Austin Butler’s, and Léa Seydoux’s new characters.
If you want to know where Dune: Part Two will begin, just look to the ending of the 2021 original. Director Denis Villeneuve wants to make it clear that his new movie, set for release November 3, is not so much another film as a continuation of the first. “It’s important—it’s not a sequel, it’s a second part. There’s a difference,” Villeneuve tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive first look. “I wanted the movie to really open just where we left the characters. There’s no time jump. I wanted dramatic continuity with part one.”
Before the credits rolled on that movie, Timothée Chalamet’s young royal Paul Atreides, prophesied to become a great leader, had been reduced to nothing. He had survived the destruction of his powerful family by the rapacious industrialists known as House Harkonnen, but was cast out into the barren sands of planet Arrakis. There he met Chani, played by Zendaya, an ethereal woman who had been appearing in his dreams, and was welcomed into her tribe of desert survivors known as the Fremen.
In the final moments, he watched as one of the Fremen used ropes and hooks to latch onto one of the burrowing leviathans known as sandworms, and rode off into the distance. “Desert power,” he says. Chani looks back at him and says, “It’s only the beginning,” which stands as a coded message to the viewer that the story remains incomplete.
Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides, with blue eyes from the “spice” he has absorbed while living in the deserts of Arrakis.
By Niko Tavernise.
To become a full-fledged Fremen, and lead them in a counterattack that will avenge his fallen family and defeat the powers corrupting the galaxy, Paul will have to ride one of these beasts in Dune: Part Two. “It’s a matter of life and death because, if you fuck it up, you’re going to kill yourself,” Villeneuve says. “It’s a rite of passage. It’s the way you become an adult in the Fremen world. That is a very important part of their culture and they respect the worms as half-gods, so they have a religious relationship with the worm.”
Elsewhere in the universe, Florence Pugh has joined the cast as Princess Irulan, the daughter of Emperor Shaddam IV (played by Christopher Walken), the supreme ruler of the galaxy, whose grip on the warring factions has slipped. “Her stake could not be higher because she’s afraid that her father could lose the throne, could lose everything,” Villeneuve says. “When I met Florence, I was struck by her assurance, how grounded she is as a young woman, how direct, how unapologetic. She has something inherently royal about her. I will definitely believe that Florence could become, in the future, a prime minister.”
Helping engineer the collapse that Princess Irulan foresees is another new character to the Dune universe, the lethal Harkonnen prince Feyd-Rautha, portrayed by Austin Butler. Moviegoers may remember this character being played by Sting in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, and Villeneuve draws on another rock star comparison to describe his film’s take on this soulless assassin: “Austin Butler brought to the screen something that would be a cross between a psychotic, sociopath serial killer and Mick Jagger.”
Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan, wearing the casual garb of a royal in repose.
By Niko Tavernise.
The story of Dune centers on warlords fighting for control of “spice,” the mind-altering mineral that’s found only on Arrakis and imbues those who consume it with luminous azure eyes. It’s a story about surviving with limited resources and the dangers of exploiting the natural world instead of living in harmony with it. But all of that would become abstract if the audience had no investment in who won this epic clash. Villeneuve’s challenge was to create investment in Paul’s quest for vengeance, and Chani’s determination to protect and defend her homeworld. To accomplish this, Dune: Part Two had to be an epic love story between the two.
That was easier to propose than accomplish. “It was funny trying to figure out in this futuristic space talk, like, how do they flirt?” Zendaya tells Vanity Fair. “What does that look like for a space warrior and the young duke of a planet? How do they show that they like each other? What does that even sound like? We were definitely trying to navigate that, which was funny because all of us were stumped. I think it’s just as foreign to us as it probably is to the characters.”
The solution, she says, was another hallmark of true love: clumsiness. “Awkward and uncomfortable—there’s all those things,” Zendaya says. But her hard-fighting desert survivor, a woman who is a literal dream woman to Chalamet’s character, seemed almost too competent. “I was like, Does Chani get awkward? Does that happen to her? Does she know what that feels like?”
Zendaya as Chani, a warrior with the Fremen who inhabit the desolate world of Arrakis.
By Niko Tavernise.
While Villeneuve describes Dune: Part Two as “a war epic action movie,” he says he had to be careful to let the love story not be overwhelmed. “I wanted to make a very human movie, very close to the characters, despite the scope of the film,” he says. “I kept saying to my crew, ‘The most important thing is that spark, that relationship between both of these characters.’ If we don’t capture that, if we don’t have that onscreen, there’s no movie. The epicenter of the story is this relationship.”
Chalamet says Zendaya’s character is the key to his own. “The universe of Dune is a complex world of geopolitics and with tons of ecological and technological metaphors that hold up today,” Chalamet says. “But at the center, there’s this relationship where Chani sort of becomes a moral compass.” Otherwise, the messianic prophecy that looms around his hero would feel abstract. “Even to say that out loud feels kind of huge, and she’s really the humanizing, grounding force to that,” he says.
“I think something we can all relate to is just love,” Zendaya says. “These characters literally live on another planet, right? They’re aliens. It was interesting finding these tender moments in such turmoil and chaos. These characters are just young people forced into really, really intense circumstances.”
Josh Brolin’s Gurney Halleck, mentor to Paul and protector of House Atreides, blood-soaked from battle in Dune: Part Two.
By Niko Tavernise.
One part of creating that sense was shooting frequently during “magic hour,” the phrase filmmakers use for that brief window when the sun is setting and the world is bathed in gold. The film was shot in remote desert locations in Abu Dhabi and Jordan, so pressure was often on Zendaya and Chalamet to capture their romantic scenes in a hurry. Otherwise, they’d have to make the long trek again and try to capture bits of the same scene. “There’s kind of, like, a ticking timer,” Zendaya says. “You kind of feel like, Okay, we got here, but we have maybe an hour to get this. So we revisited a bit every day, and over a few days, that gives us a few hours.” The upside was that they got to refine their performances. “Every time we revisited it, we kind of got to sleep on it and think about it, and come up with a new set of ideas.”
Villeneuve credits the two actors for finding their way. “Zendaya is a fierce warrior. [Her character] has a very strong opinion about her world, about the politics of this world, about the religions and all the impact of colonization on their culture, but there’s something about that young man that cracks her heart. And Timothée did a beautiful job to bring that sincerity onscreen.”
The shadow lurking all the while is the villainous figure that Butler plays. While technically flesh and blood, his corpse-like pale visage suggests a deadness that runs deep. Villeneuve prefers to save Feyd-Rautha’s full reveal for later in the publicity campaign, but even this silhouetted image of the Harkonnen hunter-killer suggests his ominous nature, and highlights his signature weapon of twin blades. “He’s someone Machiavellian, much more cruel, much more strategic, and is more narcissistic,” Villeneuve says.
Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha, the remorseless killer who stands to inherit control of House Harkonnen.
By Niko Tavernise.
Feyd-Rautha is also a lean, coiled presence, unlike his uncle, the Harkonnen family ruler known as the Baron (played by Stellan Skarsgård), who reigns as a corpulent grotesque. In the previous movie, the levitation suit that he uses to move his immense body crashed him into the ceiling after he was successfully poisoned, but the Baron lives. Damaged, but more deadly, and ready to seize more power in the galaxy and expand his clan’s corrosive dynasty.
“He is a physically weaker character that has to use some devices to help him to stay alive as he keeps growing,” Villeneuve says. “I always saw the Baron as some kind of hippopotamus that, because of his weight, is more comfortable in liquid. He feels more relaxed in those baths, and as we see him in that picture, he’s smoking spice.”
With his failing health, the Baron will need an heir, and Dune: Part Two presents two of them. Butler’s Feyd-Rautha, and the brutish Harkonnen enforcer from the first movie, Glossu Rabban (played by Dave Bautista). The hulking Bautista and the dagger-like Butler could not be more physically different, but Villeneuve also wanted there to be an intellectual chasm between the two characters.
Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) languishing in his restorative bath.
By Niko Tavernise.
Dave Bautista’s Glossu Rabban, a blunt instrument of a man wielding another.
By Niko Tavernise.
“Rabban wants to please,” Villeneuve says. “He wants to please the baron. He wants to shine in front of his uncle, but there’s something touching about Rabban because he’s a bad strategist. He’s not very intelligent. Rabban finds himself, at the end of part one, in the position where he doesn’t have the brain to be able to manage and control all these operations. Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen is a very clever, very charismatic figure, and much more brilliant.”
Among the other returning characters is Josh Brolin’s Gurney Halleck, a soldier for the Atreides family and a mentor to Paul, who gave him his earliest training as a warrior. Halleck was bloody and beaten after the attack in the first movie that brought down House Atreides, but the image you see here is from the second movie—and another cataclysmic confrontation. “Gurney Halleck survived and has come back to avenge his friends,” Villeneuve says. “For people who know Dune, there will be a massive battle at the end of Part Two.”
Also reprising her original role is Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica, Chalamet’s mother and protector. As a member of the religious sisterhood known as the Bene Gesserit, Lady Jessica believes in the prophecy that her son will become a powerful liberator for the galaxy. In the first movie, as the concubine of Oscar Isaac’s Duke Leto Atreides, Lady Jessica often appeared in ornate and ceremonial outfits, befitting her position and class. In the second movie, she is a grim and hardscrabble presence. “She lost everything,” Villeneuve says. “She is a survivor like her son Paul, and she has to strategize how to accomplish her ambition. It’s a really beautiful and nicely complex character.”
Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica, the mother and protector of Paul Atreides, marked with lines of prophecy.
By Niko Tavernise.
That ambition is to obsessively work toward fulfilling the prophecy that the Bene Gesserit have been trying to engineer for eons. This work is now marked on her face. “Those tattoos are linked with the prophecy,” Villeneuve says. “We see that there’s a darkness, a very specific darkness in her eyes. Lady Jessica is one of the masterminds of Dune. She’s trying to play her own agenda. The meaning of that look would be unveiled in Part Two.”
Another member of the Bene Gesserit is a new character called Lady Margot, played by Léa Seydoux. “Margot Fenring is a Bene Gesserit sister, but will be a secret agent in the movie,” Villeneuve says. “It was very playful to work with Léa. It’s a character full of surprises.”
Is she good or evil? Villeneuve said that question doesn’t apply. “The main goal of the Bene Gesserit is to make sure that humanity will move in the right direction,” he says. “The Bene Gesserit, they don’t think about what’s good or what is evil. That’s not very important for them. What is important is to bring humanity to its full potential and to try to create a being that will bring humanity to enlightenment. It’s their full agenda, which takes place over thousands of years of planning and controlling. They are the true masters of this world. Their biggest weapon is time. They see the world in centuries.”
As a member of the Bene Gesserit religious order, Léa Seydoux’s Lady Margot helps oversee the manipulation of the galaxy.
By Niko Tavernise.
While Villeneuve gender-swapped the character of Dr. Liet Kynes (played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster in the first movie) to bring another female figure into the story, the back half of Herbert’s novel has far more for its fearsome women to do, including a bigger presence for Chani. “Ironically, the first one was definitely just visual,” Zendaya says. “I was literally mostly just a vision.” In Part Two, Chani is not necessarily a part of that galactic sisterhood and its centuries-long efforts to manipulate power. “There’s some tension,” Zendaya adds. “Without giving anything away, there’s an awareness of the negative impact that Lady Jessica, as a Bene Gesserit, has inflicted upon her people. So there’s definitely an animosity there, and an apprehension.”
As the Fremen leader Stilgar, Javier Bardem’s character is more accepting of Paul and his unusual mother. “Stilgar, like all the characters, is playing some chess game,” Villeneuve says. “He believes that Paul could be that prophetic figure, and he slowly keeps Paul under his wing and becomes a beautiful, surrogate father figure.”
Stilgar has been protecting his people for a long time, and they trust him. And he trusts Paul, even as the young man deepens his relationship with Chani. “Javier Bardem brought something very colorful and a lot of life to a character that could have been also just very severe,” the director adds. “That charisma explodes in Part Two. For Stilgar, the more Paul is embedded in his culture, and the more Paul evolves as a Fremen, the more he feels that they are walking in the right way.”
Javier Bardem’s Stilgar, leader of the Fremen, is determined to protect his homeworld.
By Niko Tavernise.
Completing Dune: Part Two is a personal mission for Villeneuve, who used to dream about adapting Herbert’s book when he was growing up in the small village of Gentilly in Quebec. Before the first movie debuted, his brother found a collection of storyboard illustrations that Villeneuve made with a friend when he was around 13 or 14.
The filmmaker, who was previously best known for visionary, critically acclaimed projects like the alien-visitor drama Arrival, the Blade Runner 2049 sequel, and the missing-child thriller Prisoners, spent decades trying to make a new version of Dune for the big screen. Like the Bene Gesserit, he played the long game. “Boy, it has been the most very fulfilling experience so far, and very profound for me,” he says.
Director Denis Villeneuve, photographed during the making of Dune: Part Two.
By Jack Davison.
Although the first part of Dune became one of the first post-pandemic blockbusters and was nominated for 10 Oscars, winning six, the filmmaker himself still fixates on what he feels he could have done better. “You have to accept your failures as an artist,” he says. “It’s a task that was almost impossible, for me to be absolutely faithful to what those childhood dreams were. But what brings a lot of peace in my heart is that I brought a lot of them to the screen, a lot of them are close to what I had imagined.”
For now, Villeneuve is keeping his head down, staying focused on his work. “I’m deep into sound design and the visual effects, and it’s a race against time,” he says. Even discussing the film for this story was taxing for him. “I’ll be very blunt, okay?” he says with a smile, deploying the most Canadian analogy imaginable. “It’s very difficult for me to start to talk about a movie when I’m doing it. It’s like asking a hockey player to describe how he will score as he is skating toward the net.”
A fair question I have, I think, is are these new Dune movies any good?
I always felt it would be best as a limited series so there was more time to expand on the characters / story / world and that movie runtimes - even though they're getting longer - just aren't a good medium for complex stories like this that rely on heavy background and backstory
HBO paved the way for high value high production series, seems like a more natural fit to a complex story like Dune
I've found a barbell shape to the response. People either seem to really like or hate it. Not too many people I know that are in the middle.
I will say I'm one of the people that really like it. I'm a big fan of the first Dune book and I think it does a great job of being true to the story. It's visually stunning and the score is perfect. My only gripe (and it's a big one) is that the cut the dinner scene. I don't understand that choice at all, but it wasn't enough to ruin the whole movie for me.
People that I know who don't like it think it's slow and that nothing really happens. And they're right. It also just awkwardly cuts off in the middle, so it doesn't feel like a complete movie. As a fan of the book, that didn't bother me too much because I realize it's just half the story and they can't make a 6 hour movie. But it is jarring, especially if you aren't already familiar with the plot.
And you are 100% correct that this would be better suited as an HBO miniseries. There's just way too much to cram into a movie. If you haven't checked out SyFy's miniseries and the Children of Dune miniseries, they are surprising good given the low budget SyFy had for it (compared to Villeneuve's budget at least).
I'm "in the middle"; it's certainly not a bad movie, but it also failed to really capture me. I still prefer David Lynch's Dune – yes, it has its issues[1] but it's so much more creative and bewildering than the almost sterile "Villeneuve look". I certainly don't begrudge Villeneuve for following his own creative vision, but I wish it was more Lynch-esque, minus the problems of course.
[1]: The DVD copy of Dune I bought at the store many years ago has a cover with visible JPEG artefacts. It's a perfect cover.
I agree the movie is really good and hits the author's main themes pretty well. I also like the dinner scene in the book, and it plays a key role in fleshing out the complex socio-political-economic world of the Imperium - but for a movie it really wouldn't be feasible. It introduces too many characters (the banker, the water-seller, the smuggler, the honeypot, etc.) and has too many side-stories and nuances - it would probably take at least half an hour of screen time to do properly, and trying to cram it down would make it meaningless.
Similarly, in the book the time period between the arrival of House Atreides on Dune and the subsequent invasion is much longer and has many other side-stories going on, all of which are eliminated in the movie. Including all that material would require a HBO Game of Thrones type approach, with each book consuming an entire season.
Deciding which material is the most important must have been a hard decision, but I think they did a very good job considering the limits of the movie format, and the overall atmospherics felt just right.
Personally I'd like to see a David Attenborough-style special on "Dune: The Ecology of the Sandworm Life-Cycle" but it's not likely.
I'm with you mostly on the "really like" side. Sound all the way around is excellent. Little details like the horn blowing dust when they disembark from the ships on Arrakis are great. Salusa Secundus in the rain was great. The overall visual style is great. Casting was mostly great.
I just wish some of the sets were a bit more dense. The room for the Gom Jabbar scene, the Bene Gesserit walking back to the ship, cone of silence scene, and especially the palace fight on the stairs. Kinda gave my Sky Captain vibes.
I also don't like cutting the tension between Jessica and Thufir, although if Thufir doesn't end up under the Baron I guess I get it.
Interesting - having read the book several times I don't get the reference to the dinner scene; will have to look it up.
The parts which bothered me were the Zendaya slow-mo flash-forwards being too long and too frequent with no substance, and Lady Jessica crying far more than reasonable for the character I remember.
I think the one we've seen so far had to pick and choose which pieces of the broader tangle of themes to engage with, by necessity of the constraints of the medium. But it did a very, very good job taking a movie-formattable slice out of the thing and presenting it with the honesty and scope of the source material.
> HBO paved the way for high value high production series,
HBO also paved the way to the superficialization of the stories of those series, the loss of themes and the reversion to sort of base storytelling patterns.
> HBO also paved the way to the superficialization of the stories of those series
Completely agree. Modern TV is excellent in many ways – I think it's great at showing complex inter-character relationships and "politics" over long running stories, telling stories that are just a bit more complex than a 2.5 hour film, and things like cinematography have become really good.
But I don't think it's good at capturing the peak of the art of film-making. Dune is a subtle story in many ways, it doesn't really need 8-10 hours for a miniseries, it needs ~4-5 hours of really considered storytelling. The cinematography in the first film, like Villenueves other films, is also a cut above modern TV.
Other than turning Paul into a crusader, what did they really leave out of the book? The dinner scene, and some of the more minor Leto scheming was all I could remember. Did they have the Jessica finding the conservatory scene? I can’t remember…
Are you referring to Paul's visions of future jihad? That is definitely in the novel. Paul takes advantage of the Fremen seeing him as their Mahdi, and uses their zeal to fight the Harkonnen, avenge his family, and win control of the Imperium, all the while having visions of a future bloody galactic-scale jihad, which he struggles with, ultimately causing him to leave The Path, and in the sequel, become The Preacher.
The 2022 screenplay is more or less identical to the 1984 screenplay, scene for scene, except for giving Duncan Idaho his due, at which the 1984 film notably failed. They did not reinvent the wheel here, and I don't blame them. It would be a daunting task.
They left out pretty much the entirety of the Butlerian Jihad and Orange Catholicism as themes motivating the world. Mentats are barely discussed even though they are present.
And yeah, no dinner scene, and no conservatory, as far as story telling beats
Oh yeah, I guess they did… I imagine they’ll have to expand on that a little bit more in the part 2 for the rest of Thufir’s story to make sense though. Now that I think about it they didn’t put much effort into Piter de Vries either.
Honestly I'm not even sure they're going to do more than unceremoniously kill Thufir off in the background. But it's possible that they took the first movie as a chance to explore Arrakis, and will take the second to explore the broader galaxy and its politics, players, and philosophies.
We still haven't met the Emperor or his Daughter, the Imperial Court (beyond an emissary. No dinner party means no Fenrig and Margot), the Guild (as political players) CHOAM? (I forget if it's even mentioned). All of these could be worked in (and it seems like they will be given we see casting of Irulan at the very least), but you can imagine a version of the story that is less concerned with the broader politicking than it is with the action on Arrakis.
They also fundamentally changed the nature of Kynes' death. So it is possible they are not even interested in (or, to be kinder, that they feel they don't have time for) the planetological lifecycle of the worms and the spice. That it will serve only as a mcguffin. But that's pure speculation.
I missed the conservatory scene. I know it could be covered in other ways, but I love the other-worldly feel of a lush, moisture-laden room, against the harsh dry dustiness of Arrakeen.
I think it is on the LOTR level of translating the source material - the jom gabar scene is about as perfect as it could be. There is also a lot of confidence given to the audience, i.e. Paul's visions are shown but not explained, so seeing multiple possible futures is definitely confusing, but it mirrors Paul's confusion as he grapples with his ability.
I've read the book, and I quickly found the movie to be unwatchable because of dumb, pointless changes to the story. Not quite as bad as David Lynch's "Dune Velvet", but still bad.
One thing that really bothered me is that the movie had Gurney Hallack warn Paul not to sit with his back to the door rather than Thufir Hawat. In the book, this was an important early scene because it's a setup for Thufir's death scene at the end, when he says, "The universe is full of doors." Of course Thufir's death hasn't been shown yet in the movies, but they already degraded it somewhat.
There were other changes that bothered me too. IIRC there was something crucial missing from the gom jabbar scene that left out a big part of the motivation for it. I don't remember all the details now. (Edit: Now I remember. The Reverend Mother explained that an animal would gnaw off its own leg to escape the trap. In the book, she explains that a human would fake death and kill the trapper to eliminate a threat to its kind. Whereas in the movie, she just says "What will you do?" WTF?!?) I stopped the movie after a half hour or so. I didn't see the point, when the book is so much better.
I loved the build-up of the pain in Lynch's version ("Dune Velvet", I'll have to remember that one :). Somehow it seemed more suspenseful than the new version.
It won 6 Oscars, deservedly, though all technical, but should have won Best Picture, which went to CODA. CODA had a budget of $10M and a box office take of $1.9M, while Dune had a budget of $165M and a box office take of $402M, if that tells you anything. Chalamet should have won Best Actor, he did quite well, but he is too young. He'll get one later when he's older, undoubtedly. Best Actor went to Will Smith for King Richard, and Smith is certainly talented, but Chalemet is in a class by himself. Smith probably should have forfeit his Oscar for his violent outburst at the ceremonies.
The acting in Dune is simply excellent. Everyone brought their A-game. The cinematography, special effects and soundtrack are all excellent. The screenplay is surprisingly very similar to the 1984 film.
Academy convention is to award older, more accomplished actors for previous work that was not awarded. Chalemet's age compared to Paul's is irrelevant. IRL, Chalemet is too young (compared to his competition in 2022) to be awarded an Oscar. Not technically, but in practice, Oscars are more like lifetime achievement awards. For example, Jamie Lee Curtis did not give an Oscar winning performance in Everything Everywhere All at Once, but they had to give it to her for her lifetime achievement and the fact that they awarded Oscars to two other actors in the film. That movie was terrible, but Michelle Yeoh deserves an Oscar for lifetime achievement. Ke Huy Kuan, 51, was certainly adequate, but the roll was nothing special. Hong Chau, 41, should have gotten his Oscar for her work in The Whale, which was a notably amazing performance. Kuan got it because of his age, even if his lifetime achievement is limited. Someone decided Everything Everywhere would sweep the Oscars, and it had everything to do with Michelle Yeoh's and Jamie Lee Curtis' lifetime achievements. The Whale was a far better film with more difficult acting that was nailed. It was just too controversial. Frasier got the Oscar even though his supporting actor Chau out-acted him, and pretty much everyone in all other movies. Her performance there was one of the best I have ever seen, and I had never heard of her. She'll be back.
I tried to watch it three times and failed. I don't have a problem with audiences liking it. But awarding it the Oscar for Best Picture was tragic for The Whale. At least it is SciFi, but Star Wars or E.T. it was not.
I would strongly say: yes. I was very skeptic, I am a big fan of the book and actually liked the first movie. All newer productions ever failed to excite me - until the new movie. That in my eyes is really well made. Looking forward to the second part!
That comment seems like 3 independent thoughts. In my opinion: yes the first part was great, yes it could cover more details as a series, yes a HBO style high value production would be cool to see.
The possibility of having something better does not make this movie bad.
If you can go into it accepting that: not everything will be covered, the book has lots of internal thoughts and little action which doesn't work well on a screen, the politics part was not skipped but wasn't given lots of time either - I think you'll have a good time.
HBO started production on a prequel, Dune: the Sisterhood, based on the Brian Hebert books, I haven't read them, only read the first six by Frank Hebert, but just based on the twist in book five, the origin story of the Bene Gesserit could be bonkers.
I agree. I think these are the best interpretations of the book that I've seen.
However I've also done a complete 180 on the book itself. I think there are just too many holes in the logistics of the Dune world for me to keep up the suspension of disbelief as an adult.
Given that, I'm pretty neutral towards the movies as the book adaptations. I hope they don't take the source material too seriously actually, because the source is honestly not as captivating to me as an adult as it used to be as a teenager.
For one thing, just one little thing, what's the Baron's guy's name? Not the Feyd-Ruatha/Raban amalgam. The mentat.
No one says Piter's name!? If you haven't read the book you wouldn't know WhoTF that character is.
- - - -
I could go on and on, but what I really want to say, what I want future filmmakers to hear, is just this:
Just film the book.
Don't change the dialog, don't change the characters, don't add scenes and for fuck's sake don't delete any! Just film the book. Don't second guess Frank Herbert. He lucked out, made a masterpiece, and a whole Universe so real you can taste it. (the rest of the series not so much, but "Dune" itself is a window onto an alternate Universe.) You wouldn't hack up Shakespeare, you're not going to improve on Dune. Just film the book.
This is an impossible request. Movies are fundamentally different from books, they have different languages and cadences, different historical developments, different audiences, different expectations and traditions and tropes.
If you want to read the book, read the book. The film adapted from that book might not be for you and that’s okay.
> You wouldn’t hack up Shakespeare. . .
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of the greatest comedies of the modern era, and it gave us The Lion King 1 1/2, one of the greatest animated films made after the Disney Renaissance.
That would be one weird movie given how much the characters in Dune think about things rather than talk about them. There are important conversations of course, but... there would be a lot of "Paul thinking about the future" voiceover.
Exactly, Dune is practically unfilmable without heavy adaptation. There's a bunch of that inner-thought voiceover stuff in David Lynch's Dune, but still only a tiny fraction as much as is in the book, and it's frankly really damn goofy (full disclosure: I'm waiting to see how Part II turns out before I decide whether this version, or the Alan Smithee cut of 1984 Dune, is the one I'd be more excited about if someone proposed a re-watch—I love that glorious mess)
>that movie runtimes - even though they're getting longer - just aren't a good medium for complex stories like this that rely on heavy background and backstory
Peter Jackson would disagree. If you can't get it done in a single "getting longer" movie runtime, just make it into 3. Harry Potter did it in 2, Twilight did it in 2, etc. So the precedent of using multiple movies is there.
> Peter Jackson would disagree. If you can't get it done in a single "getting longer" movie runtime, just make it into 3.
That's how we got The Hobbit series, which were getting a bit too thin/stretched IMHO. LoTR as three worked, maybe Hobbit as two could have been better (was a love triangle really needed?)
I love the movie, but I didn’t go in expecting a complete work. I expected something that would cut off abruptly at some point. There’s just too much to fit in. So perhaps with that framing in mind, I enjoyed what I watched and would have gladly sat hours to watch more. Very immersive world.
A limited series could be good, or it could be like the Foundation series where the creators decided the book(s) were too hard and are using the series to tell their own story instead (which isn't a bad story, but also isn't the story Asimov told in his books).
> A fair question I have, I think, is are these new Dune movies any good?
This particular iteration is trying to be far smarter than necessary or useful. If you watch the some Youtube breakdowns (not sure why you would - eg Why Dune's Editing Feels Different), you'll see that there are attempts to artfully inform the audience about things from the book through indirect means. Does it work? No. As a movie, it's pretty at times, but middling as an adaptation.
You're asking a movie question in a forum that's probably very resistant or even actively hostile to visual storytelling[0]. Weight answers accordingly.
For my $.02, it's a great film. I loved it; we have a cheap IMAX in our city and I must have seen it there a dozen times, and then a few times at home later. Greig Fraser was a fine stand in for Deakins, which was a relief. I love the look of the Lynch film, expected to remember it better than the DenVil designs, but then the new movie surprised me by topping even Tony Masters' fantastic Lynchian fever dream.
As the film tells a story, however, it has some weaknesses[1] that it inherits from the text, and doesn't really completely dig itself out from those. Which is bad - that's an adaptation's only job - and it might explain the sort of empty feeling the movie leaves you with. The worst of this is the choice of ending point: probably the vision in the tent would have been the latest possible moment to do a solid ending, IMO. That single change would have made the movie 10-20% better, and is the lowest hanging fruit. It still baffles me, because Dennis is no idiot, and I wonder if the payoff is next movie.
Another is the character count from the books. I'm going to say some bad things now, so get ready: the characters of Gurney and Duncan should probably have been amalgamated into a Duncan Halleck. There's zillions of other places to do things like this, because Dune is littered with characters who don't appreciably advance the story and disappear after Book 1; Shadout Mapes and Chani could, I think, be realistically amalgamated, and it would be a kick in the pants when you learn the housekeeper is daughter of Liet. Yeah, the book fans are gonna be pissed, but they were going to be pissed no matter what you did, because unlike LotR the novel is a young adult / coming of age story and people get weird about those. I've had friends screaming about the "missing dinner scene" for a year now.
Something more abstract, too, is the lack of an object - metaphorical or physical - that the danger revolves around. Lynch's film dealt with this via several devices: the signet ring, the weirding modules. Dennis' film does not. Now, disclaimer. Dune as a giant metaphor rejects, in its own way, narrative as a generic concept, or at least the heroic narrative, so you have to bite your lip and wonder if this lack is intentional, and Dennis chose to push that absence forward as a metaphor. But metaphor tricks in storytelling only work if they leave the movie's skeleton to function; push them too hard (like, IMO, The Lobster did, critic tonguebaths notwithstanding) and a film can fall apart, like a sloppy abstraction.
[0] This is "Hacker News", after all, and if there's one thing that's core to the word "hacker" it's "text".
[1] "Weaknesses" from a movie perspective, where time is the most critical resource. Vs a book or video game, which can - and does! - stay engaging even when the main character is going to the bathroom, or climbing a mountain, or chopping garlic.
I particularly appreciate hearing someone other than me point out that Dune is very much not the hero’s journey. The first book sure rhymes with it, with some odd dissonant notes if that’s all you’re expecting. I loved the Lynch movie, but it basically leaned into the hero’s journey on acid, so it worked (for my adolescent self) as a movie, but was clearly not something hewing to the point of the series.
I feel like this new take is much more likely to capture the ambiguity of operating at the scale of galactic civilization rapture and stasis. We’ll have to see the next film to know!
I am shocked every time I hear people be surprised that the dinner scene was removed. There’s no way to translate that scene to film in a way viewers could understand, and I don’t get why people feel it was so load bearing to the novel.
Really appreciated Villeneuve adding small scenes to the movie like the gardener watering the date palms and the ecology outpost. It rewards people who read the book and also helps people who are just watching the movie with understanding the world.
Curious to see what other tid-bits from the book they will keep in part 2. Hopefully we can see some Fremen Sietches.
On another note, I've always wanted to write a load tester library, I would call it Gom Jabbar. If the service falls over it fails the test.
> Really appreciated Villeneuve adding small scenes to the movie like the gardener watering the date palms and the ecology outpost. It rewards people who read the book and also helps people who are just watching the movie with understanding the world.
The biggest miss was Villeneuve not including Dr. Yueh's conversation with Lady Jessica that provides more context to why he did what he did.
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