Dunc: Part One (2021) Thread

There is a bit in the book where a Bene Gesserit is going to investigate Feyd Rautha, with the knowledge of her husband. She is clearly going to sleep with him. I thought it was odd that an invented aftermath to that sequence was put in the movie. Turns out that Brian Herbert, no-talent son of Frank Herbert and producer here, based one of his shitty spin-off books on that.

They seem to be handwaving interstellar travel, with those tubular 'space tunnel' heighliners, instead of a ship folding from one place to the next. They don't really explain whether they have to have a ship at both ends, or the ship is in both places at once or ...?  Just, thing goes in the start end and comes out lightyears away.  

Also, they seemed to embrace technology / computers far more in the movies than the books, with the Harkonnen spy map hologram thingy, and even the tutorial holograms from the first movie.  Granted, those might not be 'machines in the likeness of a human mind', but maybe it was meant to show that the Atreides relied on mentats, etc. while the harkonen were willing to bend the 'rules'. 

Either way, they glossed over the landsraad, CHOAM, the spacing guild and all the off-world-world-building. Also Paul's plan to marry but otherwise ignore Irulan seems tossed aside, and there's a real divide with Chani. But that can be resolved pretty quickly.

lol I re-watched Dune 1 and they addressed my spice concerns in the first 15 minutes. Hope everyone remembered!

Celebith  Who were the stewards of Arrakis before the harkonnen? It's made out to be the most lucrative holding in the known universe, but when did that start? 80 years does seem like a very short time within the Duniverse, far too short to say develop and perfect intergalactic spacing, or for the BG reverend mothers to incorporate spice into their rituals. A cursory search says the harkonnen ruled Arrakis for those 80 years, but I've only read through Chapterhouse so I don't know the back story.

I’m not a massive Dune fan but I’ve looked through a pdf of the Encyclopedia and it’s a trip (and I’m a sucker for nonfiction-of/the-future anyway, frankly looking through the Encyclopedia seems preferable to reading the books since you can avoid a lot of Herbert’s personal kookiness or weakness in narrative). Spice’s origin is a big mystery: they could navigate without it but it was incredibly risky, but the circumstances of its apparently chance discovery require a lot of good fortune to happen at once. There’s speculation the Bene Gesserit found it first and directed those circumstances, but that just shifts the question of how spice was discovered earlier. They even consider that it was a gift from alien life, which would be absolutely wild and universe-shattering because there’s no evidence of aliens elsewhere in Dune apart drom the sandworms, but apparently they aren’t native to Arrakis, either.

Brian Eno! Toto! Sting! Livia from I, Clavdivs! That one guy from Logan's Run! PUGS! Captain Picard! Cat and a rat in a weird box! Jack Nance! Max von fricking Sydow! Linda Hunt! Just some spittle in your face - what a luxury! Man, this movie has everything. Bless you, David Lynch.

I also finally got around to seeing Dunc: Part 2 a couple of weeks ago. There's a lot I like about it. It's very cinema - looks fantastic and lots of meaning is conveyed through expression rather than dialogue. There are a few good ideas in adaptation - I liked Alia communicating as an unborn child rather than trying to put a creepy toddler on screen. Chani at least has a character, even if I'm not convinced by her plotline.

I have a number of reservations though. In Dunc: Part 1 there's obviously a lot of cutting out from the book but not much added in, and where there are additions they all add clarity. Part 2 seems to add a lot more stuff - conflict between northern and southern Fremen tribes, for example - and those additions often make the story more complex rather than less. There's a sense of adding in Easter Eggs for people who've read the book, but sometimes they misinterpret the book - Stilgar at the catchbasin telling Jessica not to give water to the dead and implying that to the Fremen it's a sign of weakness, whereas in the novel Paul giving water to the dead at Jamis' funeral is like the most shockingly profound thing they've ever seen. (Maybe that won't work in a film, and that's fine, but don't put it in and reverse the meaning).

Also, as Celebith mentioned upthread, the timeline doesn't really make sense. Is this all taking place over about three months? There are a couple of inadvertent Life of Brian references. My biggest issue though is that I dislike what the film does with Jessica as a character. In the book she's the nearest thing to a sympathetic PoV character as Paul becomes more fatalistic. At the end she encourages Paul not make the same mistake as his father and to marry for love not politics, and the final line is her commiserating with Chani. I appreciate that an adaptation isn't just putting what's in a book on the screen, but it's a huge reversal of her character in the film, which treats her as ruthlessly ambitious.


I'm not surprised that none of them made it into either film, as ultimately they're extraneous to the story, but my three favourite things from the book are: the dinner party scene; Liet Kynes wandering in the desert having hallucinations about his father and wondering why he's having them, then, just before he dies, realising how massively he's fucked up by sending Paul to the Fremen; and everything with Count Fenring in it.

I watched Jodorowsky's Dune, which was excellent. What a team he built, and what a passion he had! And how heartbreaking it was that every studio passed on his dream.

Haha, yeah, I'm rewatching tonight and they address it at 6:25, according to Hulu's timestamp.

Like pretty much the first point they make is how important spice is.

I didn't remember that.

Oh but he did - him and Moebius pow! pow! pow! raping that story from morning til night for two years. It's just that Hollywood wouldn't take a chance on such a rape-heavy picture, alas. Truly ahead of their time.

No! I heard it was poorly-received so I've been avoiding it, but I may check it out on your recommendation. If it's terrible I blame you, ganews.

I never tire of ranting against that documentary or the asshole at the center of it. Jodorowsky was so gleeful in saying (decades later) that he thought Lynch's movie was shit, as if his version would have suffered from executive meddling any less. Fuck off!

Don’t get me wrong I love the documentary and that it does a great job of presenting a lot of the very good art and vision behind it. I just don’t think that would have been able to congeal well in the late 70s art film world.

I’ve been meaning to get to Incal since the film came out but it feels like something you need to hold in your hands and it’s always out, intentionally misplaced, or stolen from the library (so it must be good).

I loved Jodorowsky's Dune, and while it's a shame that he never made it, we're lucky that so many other amazing things germinated from that project. Aside from all the movies, his graphic novel collabs with Moebius and others, and everyone inspired by Blade Runner and Aliens. A friend and I saw JD in the theater, and we were the only ones laughing. It was a serious enough film, but Jodo is gloriously insane.

I'd punch a baby for a copy of that Bible featured in the film.  I'll share a link to a bunch of pages once I get home, but apparently some collective bought a copy at auction and had plans to make replicas.