Dunc: Part One (2021) Thread

Thank you for fixing the thread title, Rando.

I can't wait for Villeneuve's next sci-fi opus, UUDDLRLRBA.

Thanks to all three of you for helping to bury that body last night.

Now where'd I put my day planner with all my contacts? I swear I'd lose my head... 

I know this is a niche thread, so it's only going to get what it gets, but this comment deserves every available like on the forum. So like... 12?

This was a bit frustrating.  They say that interstellar travel depends on spice, but Kynes says that the Harkonnen discovered spice on Arrakis 80 years ago.  So, either there are other sources of spice, or there are other things that enable interstellar travel. And there's no way those holotraining things work without computers, so why even bother with Mentats?

Still, enjoyed it, and want to see it again in IMAX.  

OK, I missed that.  Given the time scales on which stuff happens in the Dune Chronicles, it doesn't make sense for spice to be a thing which has only existed for 80 years.  It should be hundreds of years at least, if not millennia.  Indeed, it would be absurd to argue that the spice was unknown to any but the Fremen prior to 80 years ago, given that the Bene Gesserit have been using the Water of Life for at least centuries if not millennia.  I suppose it's possible that the Bene Gesserit and Guild both had secret deals with the Fremen ages ago, and then the Harkonnens figured out about spice and started selling it then, and this was when it began to just be used recreationally by random citizens of the empire as an addictive substance?  

This does bring up a question I've had about the Dune Chronicles in general, though.  If interstellar travel is literally impossible without the spice, then how was Arrakis ever discovered (unless Arrakis is the earth thousands of years in the future)?  This implies that surely there must have been some interstellar travel prior to the advent of spice.  I suspect therefore that the spice must be what enables quick and safe interstellar travel.  Maybe beforehand interstellar travel was enormously dangerous and took years.  Perhaps it's a bit like the highway system in the modern US.  You could travel by car, even cross country, before the highway system, but it took much longer and was much more inconvenient, and if the highway system were to somehow just magically disappear tomorrow, the reliance on this infrastructure is so great that the results would be absolutely catastrophic.  But all the same, if the spice was first used to aid space travel 80 years ago, it can't have taken too long or been too dangerous to travel between solar systems, otherwise you couldn't have had emperors of the galaxy the same way you couldn't have realistically had a British Empire ruling over large portions of the globe with Medieval technology.

Post Dune spoilers lie ahead for anyone who doesn't want to know what happens after the first book. 

There's that trope where the white hero who has been learning to hunt or fight with a sword for like a five minute montage gets told he's now better at this than all the samurai or native Americans or whomever that have been practicing those skills their whole lives. One detail I liked about Dune: The Book was that the first time Paul summons and rides a worm, and is all "Look at me now, replacement father figure!", Stilgar tells him, "That was fuckin' bush league shit. You made a bunch of mistakes and you're lucky your dumb ass didn't get killed, I mean, literally every ten-year-old here can do this better than you." In the Lynch version, this is glossed over, with the impressed Fremen saying "Usul has called a big one! Again, it is the legend!" but I'm holding out hope that Benicio del Toro's Stilgar will be having none of that in Dune: The (new) Movie: Part Two.

Intriguing analysis

"Dunc is derivative of Star Wars" is an... interesting take.

Great point, Rando. 

OK, so that tweet was technically taking things slightly out of context, but all the same, it's a very lazy troll article that didn't really need to be written.  I can get being irritated with the sudden popularity of Dune if it's not your thing (although I suspect that there's a pretty huge overlap between "people who are really annoyed with Dune being popular" and "LPET scolds"), but the article is very badly written clickbait.  I particularly liked the part where the author took exception to calling Dune the SF LOTR on the basis that Tolkien (whom she likes) disliked Dune.  Also the way that she considers the plot to be impenetrable, when...it's pretty straightforward, especially Villeneuve's film of the first half of the book.

Yeah, Del Toro is very distinctive and doesn't look like anyone else except a TINY bit Brad Pitt.

Now, the whole "Jeffrey Dean Morgan looks like Javier Bardem" is a MUCH closer match.

Bardem/Morgan is one of the few times I've seen one of those "totally looks like!" graphics and thought "wait, that's not just the same actor twice?

OK, I just looked them both up on www.wikipedia.org again and I cannot tell the difference between their photos.  They look the exact same.  They both have black hair that's going grey at the temples.  They both have the same shaped head and face, they're both in their 50s.  They're both wearing black shirts; they're both sitting in front of microphones at a panel event, etc.