Dune

Got tickets for Thursday night at our local-ish independent place (30 miles away). £7.50 which is almost half the price of the Odeon and they usually have an interval with an old fashioned organist providing entertainment. Plus I've the next 6 days off work and the place I'm staying at totally to myself over the weekend.

I'm living the dream.

Does it has Sting in it?

I cannot spoiler-tag the quote, so you have to do it ;-)

Just finished.

Oh dear.

Whether it's the cinematic equivalent of beige, the design that feels "10ys old Deus Ex:HR", the droning wash of a score (with bonus Inception horn) or it just feels that everyone is just saying "the lines" rather than being characters, holy shit this was a chore. That last part especially irked me, pandering to the "oooh he said THE THING" nerdgasm crowd, along with the tacked in token action. It's certainly not Shakespere, and I don't understand holding the script to such stilted reverence to the book when liberties are taken with other elements. Even the old film had the balls to introduce the weirding module stuff...and this has shielding that accounts to being fuck all use.

Lead fella lacks any charisma, Issac takes Leto from charming righteous to arsehole, and Jessica just simpers around before magic badassery.

At least the ol' film had a sense of theater and fun (and I'm probably biased because of it's influence on 40k).

/not a book wanker

Booked IMAX tickets for saturday and then spent the rest of the evening thinking 'shit, that theatre looked a bit full'.

Unusually, all three of us want to see it otherwise I would have gone for the lonely divorcee showing, too.

I guess if you haven't read the book or understood how the shields work then you might think they're pointless. Tbf they only briefly explained it once in this film.

The Weirding Modules were one of the worst things about Lynch's film. They're not in the book and they are a lazy plot device so they don't have to film epic hand to hand battles, just shout at people through a megaphone.

Oh, I understand how the shields work, tell that to the action scenes, where flashes of red are what ? They're slowing the blades at the very point of contact ? Looks like a playschool slappy fight and no real emphasis on the martial arts I believe everyone's trained in. Missed an opportunity for some slo-mo.

And the weirding modules ? They also serve as a technological edge, a weapon giving any chump firepower that trumps shielding/martial arts/Gesserit training, and supports the notion of the Atreides rising as a house, Jessica spilling Bene secrets (along with training Paul), and the Fremen swinging from harrassing to dominating Harkkonen forces in a short spell. It might be cheap compared to the purity of book kung-fu shenanigans, but it works on several levels.

And what exactly can we spoil about a 60yr old story, with an almost exact script from a 40yr old film ?

Sterile. That's the term I couldn't think of last night. It all felt so sterile

That's a hot take right there.

Lead fella projects presence to command troops and be a believable religious Messiah despite being built like Harry Potter. Isaac's Leto meets with the Fremen and makes efforts to understand their culture and form an alliance with them at the same time as being a strong military leader, the Leto as Herbert imagined. Jessica walks the line of obeying the Reverend Mother, serving Leto faithfully and also shows a mother's concern for Paul when he has to do his Gom Jabbar test, despite being a capable person in her own right.

This is the problem with Lynch's Dune, it was a bit shit but worse of all it conveyed nothing of the tone of the book. If that's all you know Dune by, then you wouldn't understand the lead characters very well and might not "get" Villeneuve's Dune, which absolutely nails the characters and style of the book, that Lynch barely attempted to do.

Yeah, where the shields at flashing red, that's the slow blade penetrating the shield. It's a visual representation that they've used to help the audience understand when they are slowing their blade down in a fight scene to get through a shield and it works.

Again, 40k. Know the wiki/Lynch/games/lore but never actually read the book. Based on this version, I doubt I'd want to.
Lynch threw everything in, and even with the liberties, gave you a world you wanted to know more about.

Prachnow saw Arrakis as prestige and position, Issac went full "A Violent Year" bringing up money several times. Lady Jessica was certainly so, rather than looking like a plain housemaid. The two Mentats of the houses are barely scenery characters in this new one (and I don't think Pieter's name was even mentioned). The opportunity to emphasise ancient martial arts missed imo, with the Paul/Gurney scene even more of a brawl. Even Kyle got to dance with the combat drone. The weird decision to have muttering under breath and subtitled handsign to avoid the narration associated with Lynch's version...

The more I think about it, the more this does come across - disassociation with Lynch while box-ticking.

Who knows ? It might all come together in Part 2, bringing a better pace and depth along with Villeneuve's plans for a Part 3.
But the cynic says WB are hedging their bets already, and are not happy with numbers so far. And so the curse continues.

Seeing it tomorrow night, just finished rewatching the original for the first time in 20 years! Fucking hell, what a mess, not sure if it's a glorious mess, I think it might be!

I love how they crammed 2 or 3 films worth of stuff into the last 30 minutes!