Noticed that Paul Atreides says 'There's a crusade coming' in the trailer. In the book they specifically use the word 'jihad' repeatedly and the book draws from a variety of influences in the Middle East. I hope they haven't toned things down too much for a modern audience. Part of what made the book so special was its vocabulary.
I can’t completely blame the writers. Since Dune was written, a few things such as 9/11 have happened. Radical Islamic terrorism was nowhere near what it ultimately became after the book for dune was released in 1965.
Prior to 9/11, I think the majority of the public probably had a very different association with the word “jihad.” It pretty much conjures the image of crazy bearded Muslims in Afghanistan strapping bombs to themselves and blowing things up.
That image simply does not describe precisely what happens in the book. I think the word “jihad” also creates a jarring interruption and a distraction also.
“What the hell, why is this white guy talking about jihad?” It feels like a non sequiter and a distraction. Do white people jihad things? What???
The media will jump on it and start calling this a racist tv show which perpetuates stereotypes. It’s also cultural appropriation by modern standards, which are crazy.
HBO has had a HUGE blowback to Game Of Thrones on this topic in a dozen ways. I think the blowback was so bad they changed their entire programming to be more diverse and inclusive (Watchmen, Lovecraft Etc). George Martin has been constantly pestered with questions from concerned audiences about white saviors and other such things.
Long story short, the term jihad is an unwelcome distraction, too loaded, opens HBO to criticism they don’t want and it doesn’t accurately describe precisely what happens in the book.
I think crusade is correct and doesn’t create this interruption.
From "Why Muslims See the Crusades So Differently from Christians" [1]
Are jihad and crusade related?
PC: There is a family resemblance because they share roots in monotheism, where God is a jealous God. And both Crusades and Jihad offered martyrdom to those who die. But while they look alike, they have some important differences. Crusades were directed at the liberation of sacred land considered rightfully Christian, whereas Jihad was about rescuing souls.
SM: I personally don’t find any structural difference between the two. Jihad has an Islamic concept: religiously sanctioned aggression. The Crusades were precisely that.
What was the impact of the Crusades in the Muslim world?
SM: The legacy of the Crusades in the Muslim world is that a lot of Muslims think of where they are today in terms of Western encroachment. For some, the Crusades are seen not just as a medieval threat, but as a present one—a perpetual Western attempt to undermine Islam. It could be physical colonialism or cultural colonialism.
“Crusade” and “jihad” (other than in the particular religion of origin) have pretty much identical denotation, connotation, and cultural baggage.
The idea that “jihad” has problems that “crusade” does not is pretty exactly the same problem that you point to HBO getting in trouble for in regard to Game of Thrones, so it is super ironic that you present the narrative you do as a defensive reaction to the blowback from GoT.
I had the impression that the Fremen were based on the middle Eastern stereotype male. This was a great use of the word Jihad to describe. The culture needed a focus point and the Atreides family provided one by manipulating their beliefs.
Jihad was also used to describe the past where thinking machines (AI) was destroyed in a tech smashing jihad which lead to the world of the books without AI.
While I liked the books 20 years ago .. I think that the previous Dune movies were really bad and I'm going to give the new movie a chance. Even without being true to the books and somewhat politically correct.
I thought the jihad that Paul fears is part of the 'great enemy' to humanity, not the fremen. The fear of that jihad/crusade/great-enemy is what gets Leto going on the Golden Path and the eventual scattering of mankind.
Muad'Dib fears the jihad he himself would unleash on the universe, and can't find a way to stop without ceasing his own quest for power.
The 'great enemy' that Leto tries to forestall is sometimes called Kralizec and isn't necessarily explained in detail, although there are hints it would be some kind of Ixian hunter-killer assassination machines which run out of control, and hunt down all of humanity which is within view of prescient sight. Hence, the Scattering and Leto's breeding program to create humans invisible to prescience so that humanity could never again be vulnerable to extinction from any such threat.
I mean I get the debate going around about using "crusade" instead of "jihad" but straight from the books appendices:
>JIHAD: a religious crusade; fanatical crusade.
>JIHAD, BUTLERIAN: (see also Great Revolt)—the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G.
Yeah I caught that too. The whole book was a critique of colonialism, unsustainable capitalism, and deconstruction of the white savior complex. I hope he doesn’t shy away from these subjects.
My very first thought when they were doing this remake was literally that word.
There are times when words change for PC reasons, but this isn't one of them. 'Jihad' is a very potent word in the modern lexicon and it would just be unnecessarily out of bounds to use it. It would have the wrong context and be a huge distraction.
'Crusade' is fine, and not 'unPC' because it has Christian connotations, so few care, and creatively perfectly fine ... but I feel is actually a little hypocritical in a sense to use it, in lieu of 'Jihad'. But it's a hard word to replace.
Already, the culture wars are starting, with industry people on Twitter indicating this is a 'move about Middle Eastern culture with no Middle Eastern Actors' type thing, comparisons to 'God's of Egypt' - when of course, this is definitely not a movie about 'the Middle East' rather, that's only one of many cultural artifacts borrowed for the setting.
As for the trailer:
The music is absolutely terrible, it's going to ruin the film for me.
Otherwise, it looks 'contemporary' i.e. it will be 'good' but not 'timeless'. David Lynch's version was a 'flawed masterpiece' - the characters really embodied the 'realpolitik baroque noir' of the book. David Lynch used a lot of serious actors with stage backgrounds, who could also evoke and embody the very cold 'old world' callousness of the nobility. Jason Momoa does not.
In the trailer there are just too many standard Hollywood, familiar faces, Timothy Chatalet feels like a 'regular gen Z kid', relatable, but doesn't have the 'weight of the soul' on his mind.
The aesthetic is 'of the Villeneuve style' but it's definitely not exciting or novel, I feel Villeneuve & Co. have 'operationalized' their schtick and it lacks enthusiasm.
If we can judge from the trailer it will be 'passable' for most fans and regular people, but it won't be great at all.
I predict this will be about as good as his Blade Runner remake.
I am disappointed because there is huge opportunity for creative expansion - instead of 'standard remake for 2020' they could have actually tried some art.
The fact that people are still watching this movie 35 years later implies there is something very good about it.
Lynch distanced himself publicly from it, because it was an economic disaster bad on many levels, but I'll bet $100 that with some afterthought, people can recognize what is 'good' about it.
It's a genre defining feature, almost entirely unto it's own, the creative design was 'otherworldly' to the point it probably has not been matched in SciFi ever. Baron Harkonen's scene where he murders of his aid ... the scene where Paul sends his ultra-creepy sister Alia in, alone to 'face the emperor' and she murders Baron ... the representation of the Gild Navigators - just so well done.
Almost everyone but possibly Feyd (ie Sting) and maybe Duncan Idaho, maybe the Padishah Emperor was perfectly cast.
Lynch bit off more than he could chew, and there were too many characters in too little time.
You know when a creative representation just 'feels so right it's right'? For example with the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy? Frodo, Gandalf, the Elves - it was 'perfect' - it seemed to 'everyone' that 'this is right'.
I feel the creative direction with Lynch's Dune was that. Reverend Mother Gaius Mohiam from Lynch? I think this image is etched into our minds as 'exactly what she is like'. Our comparisons in the future will be in reference to her.
There was a very interesting version by Jorodowsky that looked really fun, however, I feel it was way too corny, and would have ended up more like Barbarella [1].
For those interested: Jurodovsky's Dune [2].
The missing ingredient in everyone else's Dune is the acid! I would say to Villeneuve "Ok, now take what you have done, and remake it while you are on an acid trip". It's a psychedelic movie about transcendence, God, realpolitik etc.. Hardcore stuff.
I’m also a huge fan of Lynch’s Dune. Lynch, I would say, probably hates the movie because of memories of industry drama and studio pressure- more to do with having had a bad experience than the movie being actually terrible. It also almost killed his career in a way. I wonder if he had a desire to work on more big budget films in the mainstream like Spielberg throughout his career and perhaps Dune was the film which ended those dreams. Guy has like three of four legit towering masterpieces (not including twin Peaks)so his career was great despite things but I do wonder what kinds of movies he’d have ended up making if Dune was a success or if he never made Dune after The (very nearly perfect film) Elephant Man.
High concept sci-fi is consistent box office poison and while this new version of Dune looks good, and I want to see it, I don’t think it will set the world on fire. It seems to feel like YA fiction more than I’d like it to be and borrows heavily, stylistically, from Lynch’s Dune but doesn’t seem to have the same design impact as the original. The YA tone in the trailer for me feels like studio meddling. But we’ll see how good the actual movie is. Blade Runner 2 was a fine film but not quite a home run and I expect the same from Dune.
Totally agree, and your point about 'budget and studio' I think hits at this.
This is a 'remake' of the 'everyone is doing remakes' theme, and it's designed to make money first.
There's so much money at stake, it's hard to tell who is pushing for what and how and it's really 'something else' to ask a Director (+ team, remember, he has his own 'team' for every flick) to 'risk everything' on some high concept stuff.
So we get Lynch translated into Avengers with some modern styling and that's that.
I'm hoping that a Billionaire Herbert fan will give a project like this to someone willing to make a go of it and 'let them lose' - or - more practically - after this film is a success (and it probably will be) - we'll get the Netflix series for the remaining books, made in the UK by people who know what they are doing and at least it will be 'good TV'.
When Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney he was talking about using to money to produce medium to high budget genre films with deep fine art sensibilities with almost zero meddling which is almost never what we get from Hollywood. Unfortunately that was like ten years ago and Lucas is like totally removed from the cultural zeitgeist.
Deal makers need to be forbidden from creative decisions. One of the major studios should consider adopting a Blumhouse business model where new talent are given a very small budget to prove themselves with zero restrictions or meddling and if they can turn a profit on the Low stakes film then they are promoted to a new budget tier using the previous films profits to bankroll the next film. I truly believe the cream would rise to the top under this model and a new golden era of groundbreaking pictures would occur. Or not, we’ll never know until someone tries. I’m really hoping Blumhouse keeps going in this direction and take bigger risks.
There’s no reason why Dune couldn’t make a great movie, or any other SF book classic but it seems like once SFX and money enter the picture you get deal makers injecting weird love triangles, buddy sidekicks, Rihanna songs, whatever it takes to ruin everything. Hollywood is also super arrogant about how they have mastered storytelling so whenever they adapt something good, like let’s say the Sandman comics, they need to “fix” everything to make it really good.
I'm more cynical and believe that the amount of risk involved means a serious degree of risk aversion towards 'proven models' - which means boring or at best 'fun and chipper' but not 'great cinema' - like Avengers.
The 'lowest common denominator' on planet earth is actually significantly lower than merely just a US audience.
Stories have to be simple and stupid (think Transformers) in order to make a run in theaters.
They have to work across cultures.
Something like 'The Joker' can work - but that was relatively low budget - and still risky.
Avengers are basically the perfect format for today because they are fun characters, a big fanbase, and with some 'smart writing' all they need then is 'good production'. That's it. It doesn't have to be great.
Star Wars and Star Trek should fit this model but they screwed it up.
Dune and many other stories are just 'out of bounds' given the risk involved.
A lot of actors are lamenting this, and it's why we are only seeing 'remakes'. Comedies, RomComs - dying.
I agree with much of what you say but I’m still optimistic that smart, high concept genre films can be made with integrity and turn a profit without the need for calculated compromises or a kind of censorship against anything being too cool or interesting to the point of alienating 1/2 people. But it’s possible that a film like The Matrix, as an example, is about as good as SF/Fantasy could possibly get and we should count ourselves lucky that films like that sometimes are made and become successful.
Take Starship Troopers for example. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who dislikes that movie. It almost seems like everyone between the ages of 10 and 20 when the movie came out has seen it in some form. But it seems like a movie such as Starship Troopers would be impossible now, especially with its satire intact. I often feel like we are regressing in many ways as a population of mature adults and the overall state of the film industry suggests exactly that. I remember hearing Spielberg talking about how he can’t get funding to make theatrical releases anymore. Even Spielberg has become high risk. What are we even becoming as people?
But I digress. I hope the trailer for Dune is slightly misrepresenting the film. I want fantastic cinema to make a comeback.
It might be a fun project to go through the movie after its release and bleep out every politically charged word or phrase. I really do hate this reductionism.
Really liked Lynch's, even though it's a bit off in a few aspects(weirding way changes, trying to 1:1 a book:movie, etc). But just the amount of passion and effort that went into it(costumes, practical effects, sets, etc). How strange and unique everything was and looked.
This really just feels like a SciFi paintjob on a modern SuperHero movie. Kind of sterile.
Also not really feeling the StillSuit's looking like motorcycle and airsoft gear slapped together. Versus the old rubber looking ones in the original.
I’m thinking it will be a pretty good movie based on Villeneuve‘s track record but I’m betting this bigger budget will bring on more studio story experts and general meddling and in the end we’ll get another genre movie with touches of good taste decisions (Trailer does have very nice cinematography/lighting and the sand worm looks good) mixed with watered down/familiar design and formulaic story beats. I think the movie will shoot itself in the foot by trying to make everyone happy. It seems like it will be a well-made film that no one seems to love.
Lynch's Dune never looked so good! The actors were fully committed, whereas those in the trailer look like they're just reading the lines. No conviction. Guess we'll see if that holds in the full film.
Lynch's version also had an unbeatable cast: the Baron, the Reverend Mother, both mentats, Sting in his finest moment as Feyd Rautha, Kyle MacLachlan, etc. Throw in the sets and costumes and it's a tough act to follow. It would have benefitted from another hour, but so it goes.
Plus, those sandworm teeth in the trailer just don't look like they'd make a good crysknife.
It would have been nice to see what Lynch made of Return of the Jedi, which he apparently turned down for this, but I'm glad he made Dune.
I'm not sure I agree. They have taken some liberties with the dialogue, but many of the quotes in the trailer are near-direct from the novel. Anyways this seems like something that would be hard to tell from what little the trailer offered in terms of talking.
Just from the trailer, this seems like it will at least be more faithful to the source than the Lynch version.
Totally agree, this looks like it'll be missing everything that's weird and wonderful about Dune.
Lynch's Dune can be bewildering coming at it without the context of the book, but that aspect of it is frankly just something you get used to with Lynch's works, and like you said its filled with so much oddness and detail. The hulking Heighliner spacecrafts, the mutated ghoulish guild navigator, the fascinating cave-like imperial palace set, the manic cyst-covered Harkonnens. I've never understood why it gets a bad rap, I think it's a hugely underrated film that did a wonderful job capturing the strange universe of Dune.
Isn't that basically true of every modern mainstream director? I can't think of anyone I would call Tarkovskian.
> whilst technically impressive, lack something fundamental and come across as sterile.
I try not to be curmudgeonly about big-budget filmmaking - I don't think there's anything inherently bad about it, but surely there's some truth to the idea that Villeneuve "sold out" starting with Sicario, right? I'd say Prisoners, Enemy, Incendies, and Polytechnique are all extremely good films, but they're precisely the ones that most people haven't seen. I don't think there's any way you could call those films "sterile", though Enemy certainly has a dry intellectual air to it.
I think what you might be latching onto is the aesthetic of Villeneuve's films. They tend to be gritty and realistic, which can read as soulless but I don't think it's quite the same thing. Calling a movie soulless speaks to its (lack of) spiritual / emotive vision, and while none of his films have the slow pacing of a Tarkovsky or their sense for atmosphere, I would say his early movies (and probably BR2049) don't lack a vision. They have something they want to say, and that message isn't a nihilistic or misanthropic one.
Thought the same - the trailer came across as dull. Especially after having seen Alejandro Jodorowsky explain in this documentary what he envisioned with it the trailer seems like yet another self-indulgent Hollywood movie.
The Dune subreddit community (/r/dune) organized a discord server featuring two reading clubs that will begin book 1 very soon. One club is for first timers and the other for those who are re-reading and potentially spoiling in discussion. There's something unusual about this and thought it was worth sharing here. People are very passionate about the Dune stories and are desperate for a remake worthy of the book. I hope that the film can meet expectations.
The designer David Rudnick has a term he uses for this aesthetic of modern sci-fi: "future without art"[0]. The hazy, dark, washed out palettes being used the portray the concept of "dystopian future" are truly underwhelming and I think he term makes sense -- why must ALL modern sci-fi movies just be mixtures of shiny plastic and grime? It makes me appreciate Luc Besson so much more.
Chalamet's Paul seems to lack the unshakeable self-confidence of McLaughlin's Paul from the few seconds I saw in the trailer. Paul should not wince during gob-jabber. Nor should he grimace in pain or fear in battle.
In the book it described Paul feeling almost unbearable pain, almost to the point where he was pushed too far, but the Priestess turned off the gom-jabbar just in time. Wincing was the last of Pauls problems at that moment... Paul was not a cold robotic person - he was subject to great emotions all the way through the book.
Yes, what you are sensing is something much deeper though.
People are much less serious and more affable, gregarious than they were even 50 years ago - and it comes out in everything, dialogue, disposition. You can tell immediately, before they say a line, it's how they stand, and in their faces.
Go and look at 'Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin' - the big baddie from from Star Wars who very confidently dismissed and told off Darth Vader ("Enough of this. Vader, release him!"). This guy would embody the quasi-aristocratic head of say, the East India Company Governor back in the day. A kind of cold, callous, calculating CEO, who's involved in war, blood, serious repercussions etc.. English stage actors have the ability to do this. Most of the cast of Lynch's Dune were well trained actors, and Kyle MacLachlan just had a very special air about him.
Isn't the whole point to Paul is that he realizes how screwed he is about half way through book 1 (causing space genocide) and just endlessly runs from his own destiny and hides away in his castle for all of book 2.
I've always felt you can't do Dune in a single movie, the world is just too big. I'd say it has to be a minimum of two or three parts to really tell the story.
Depends on what your yardstick is. The existential pontifications of the main character are what most people are captivated by when they refer to God Emperor of Dune as a great book.
It suffers in terms of elements that are traditionally used to judge a novel, as do all of the other books in the series.
(plot, characters, etc...)
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
One aspect of the original novel: Frank Herbert is rather terse on his descriptions of the environment, world and universe, leaving a lot for the reader to imagine. He excels at world building without being prescriptive, I think it’s a strength in the novel and allows for a certain timelessness.
Lynch’s film production design was pulled out of nowhere and it isn’t any more accurate than Villeneuve’s. It just has a more direct relation between the subject - a future space feudal society - which most people correlate with pomp and elaborate visual motifs.
In fact, if you consider the only visual work based on Dune that Herbert himself endorsed, it recalls the the newer film more than the baroque aesthetics of the former - the work of John Schoenherr for an illustrated edition of the novel: http://ski-ffy.blogspot.com/2010/08/illustrated-dune.html
The trailer ends with "Only in Theaters". What does this mean? Did Warner Bros decide to wait it out until theaters open again, or this was just an oversight ?
Theaters have been open where I live in the EU for quite some time. I haven't been, and capacity is reduced (to provide proper spacing), but they're open.
I'm in EU, I watched Tenet in theatre. It's a nice experience, lot of room, very few people, you can order everything online. They even reserve an empty seat on each side of your tickets to help with social distancing.
And Herbert skips over all the details of that massive war. You go from one chapter describing the start of the war to the next chapter of Alia standing before Baron when most of the action has taken place. Anyway, that is at the end of the novel, which will not be included in this movie. So, I guess the clips shown are from the arrival on Arrakis and the battle that took place during the night to overthrow the Artreidies, which in the book is described as a relatively short battle and also not in much detail.
To be honest, the premise of the story is pretty retarded.
Control of the galaxy is determined by intergalactic space travel, and to do that, you need “The Spice”, which is the shit from these giant sand worms, that are tamed by the locals of that planet.
Then, to add further suspension of disbelief, you have a guild of these space folding specialists that uses the power of their brains to conjure up the space warp travel, because apparently a computer system couldn’t handle the complexity of the physics of space travel. The whole premise falls apart, and dwells in nonsense.
I can’t imagine what is so good about this story, except that it is some space soap opera from a lost generation trying to make its mark.
You're misremembering (or didn't follow far enough to get?) a few things.
The spice prolongs life, in a way they are unable to replicate or otherwise export production of. Production of the Spice also is devastating to the ecology of Arrakis (nee Dune). The natives haven't tamed the worms - but do co-exist with them. The Houses exploit both however, and the planet itself.
The guild navigators value is NOT they can perform computations machines cannot - it's NOT a complexity problem. Some spoilers so I will be oblique, but their ability is tied directly to what the Bene Gesserit are trying to breed. And to what Paul is/his abilities are. It's inherently an "organic"/meat-puppet power - as it is implied it's tied to forebears and progeny...
And finally, as noted, there is a deeply held proscription against "thinking machines" due to an... event. This actually isn't HUGELY relevant, but allows Herbert to eschew futorology in favor of his allegory.
The story's GREAT :)
(especially up to and including Book 4, which completes a full arc.)
Sorry to me its actually a pretty good premise that was ahead of its time when written in the 60's.
It was interesting and very different to imagine a far future where there is great technology but no "thinking machines" due to a previous human machine war (Butlerian Jihad). You see this concept reused in later sci-fi (Terminator, The Matrix). Then exploring how you could replace computers with the human mind given some help (spice).
