Ok, I read this story about a week ago and while (being a huge Dune fan) found it interesting, I wasn't particularly excited given the previous attempts to adapt the behemoth that is Dune. If you've seen either David Lynch's fascinating train wreck or the commendable yet flawed mini-series with the over excitable costume designer with he big hat fetish, you'll know what I mean.
That was before today, because today I watched The Kingdom and holy crap, he just might do a GOOD adaptation! Ignoring for a second The Kingdom's action elements, that while very good and engaging (worthy of a Ridley Scott film) do not dominate the picture, which is mostly focused on the people and the emotion - the true mark of a good actor turned Director.
While nobody who has read the book (and has at least with half a brain still working) will expect a "perfect adaptation" because it's not really possible, but based on what little he's said about it and his track record I think it may be something special. After all, who would have expected a cheezy, B-movie horror director to turn around a produce the masterpiece that the The Lord Of The Rings?
Posted by Mars Needs Women (Member # 1505) on :
Well lets hope they bring back Sting!
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
I would argue that "half a brain sill working" is about the best one can hope for, after slogging through Dune.
Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
I gave up on the 5th book, which introduced all the same kinds of organizations with slightly different names, after the Emperor's death in book 4. Maybe it got better after that, but I don't have the stomach to continue. The story was rather nicely completed in book 4, I reckoned.
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
I like the original Dune, and always will. I watched it at the golden movie age, 13. First played the awesome strategy game with a friend, then procured the movie. Best combo ever.
"We have wormsigns the size of which GOD has never seen!" "I want to spit once on your head, Jessica. Just some spittle, in your face! ... What a luxury." "The stillsuit will retain all your moisture in desert fashion. Your feces will be stored here, here, up here, and in this little pocket here. Also here. Enjoy." "The weirding module gun reacts to power words, killing words. Hm. Rooooooxaanne! *kaboom*"
No, I love it. And the "Shai-Hulud" worm suit worn in the halloween episode of "Chuck" validates it, binds it together.
Posted by HerbShrump (Member # 1230) on :
I much preferred the Scifi mini-series over David Lynch's motion picture. While the deleted scenes/expanded introduction from the movie make it a little better, I felt the mini-series (both Dune and Children of Dune) were much more faithful to the books.
I read all of Frank Herbert's Dune series. It took me two tries. First was back in 8th grade and I made it from Dune to about the middle of God Emperor. Then right after high school and the release of Chapterhouse Dune I went back and read the entire series.
I refuse, refuse, REFUSE to read the prequels because I feel that Kevin J. Anderson is a hack that cannot write anything original to save his life. He's the reason I stopped reading the Star Wars novels. Star Wars - An epic story set in an entire galaxy and what does Anderson do? All of the characters know or are related to or connected to all the other characters. Instead of doing an original story he re-introduces the Death Star not once but TWICE! He even lifted lines of dialog from the movies and passed them off as new dialog in his stories.
Uh, what were we talking about again?
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
I did read the Dune-prequels and the man just can't write anything but shallow, formulaic pulp.
He and Brian Herbert seem to love spamming pointless and childish cruelty for effect, like having Gurney's hatred of the Harkonnen stem from Beast Rabban drugging him and then letting an entire platoon rape his sister, before Rabban goes in himself and then finishes by strangling her. Because Gurney had punched him once. Over the course of the books Beast Rabban also strangles his own father and later he strangles the inventor of the only no-ship in existence. Without aquiring any blueprints. Then he crashes it into the Bene Gesserit's planet, beyond repair.
They also turn the Baron Harkonnen from a machiavellian, ever-patient supervillain into a bumbling, shortsighted idiot, and they elaborate on him and Reverend Mother Gaius conceiving Jessica together. How? Why through violent rape of course.
But enough about rape, what time frame are we talking about for the movie? 2010? (Weird that we are soon living in the year 2010 by the way)
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
I'm about two thirds of the way though reading "Sandworms of Dune" and like most of the other Brian Herbert/Anderson books it's pretty turgid stuff. I'm just curious as to how it all ends. What gets on my nerves is that they waste whole chapters on plot lines that are totally unnecessary to the plot and somehow manage to do less in half a book than Frank Herbert would have done in a single paragraph. If you read the Dune books again you should see that surprisingly little actually happens "on screen" (or whatever the literary equivalent is.) He skips over years of Paul and Jessica with the Fremen, the move from Caladan to Arrakis and even the final battle at the end, yet you never miss them. Brian and Kevin on the other hand would give a stroke by stroke account that would bore you to tears. I think it would have been SO much better if the entire book just stuck with the no-ship and ignored all the shenanigans with the New Sisterhood, Ix, Guild, new Facedancers and most especially the identity of the Enemy should have been kept a mystery to the very last moment, rather than blowing it way to early so they could have a weird little plot with the Baron's Ghola.
Anyway, for those who never got past "God Emperor", Heretics and Chapterhouse are very much worth it, if only for the character Miles Teg. Easily my favourite character out of all the books.
As far as the previous adaptations are concerned, I rate the Children of Dune mini as my clear fav, with Alec Newman doing surprisingly well as the Preacher. The 2000 mini suffered mostly form some poor casting choices, a silly wardrobe and a painfully fake desert backdrop painting, most of which was corrected in CoD. As for the Lynch film, while it is the least faithful to the book and easily the most bizarre (par for the course for any Lynch flick) it had a superb cast. Oddly enough only Patrick Stewart seamed miscast as the roguish troubadour warrior while the likes of Brad Dourif, Freddie Jones and Francesca Annis were PERFECT for the roles.
As far as this new one goes, I think Berg has another film to do between what he's doing now and Dune, so it'd probably be more like 2011, depending on how much post production gets done. On my personal wish list for this film is to finally see a properly done ornithopter, a "realistic" Lasbeam and to see Herbert's ideas of humanity as an ecological force and Fremen ingenuity faithfully represented. Also, the Sardaukar should be hard bastards, so when the Fremen outfight them it should be all the more stunning.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
I actually liked the 2000 miniseries' artistic choices a lot. The choices were budget-conscious, but I got a very strong overall feeling from the wardrobe, camera angles, and even the unconvincing desert that I was watching a play on a stage rather than a movie, and that this was a deliberate choice. Speaking as a theatre guy myself, I quite enjoyed the motif of us being "narrated" the story much as a chorus or fourth-wall character would in a five-act play.
Mark
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
I think I disliked it for the same exact reasons that you liked it. Everything felt so much like a theatrical production that it just took me out of the story. The siech orgy is a prime example and just screamed theatre to me, with the funky primary coloured lights and the exaggerated choreography...oh and the fresh faced Fremen with the squeaky voices and public schoolboy accents was a huge mistake. I suppose the my main gripe was a total lack of the subtlety I kind of hoped for given the source material. Theatre doesn't do subtle. Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
The Sardaukar shocktroops where dressed like 18th century romanticist ponces. I expected them to come at the fremen with sharpened paint brushes and codpiece thrusts.
I prefer the David Lynch-style "Toxic Avengers". Although what I'd really like to see would be a rendition of the PC-game version of Sardaukar: Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
That's slightly too mechanised for the Dune Universe, remember the great convention. Looking too machine-like is a good way to get yourself nuked! Besides, shields render armour like that redundant.
Besides, it's not the hardware that makes Sardaukar or Fremen so formidable, it's the sheer physical fighting skill. Dune is about the limits to which the human body can be pushed, not how advanced technology can be made. Prime examples of this is would be the Mentats, Tleilaxu, Guild Navigators and of course the Bene Gesserit.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
Yeah, isn't the whole point that humanity fought a war with AI machines ages ago, and had since reformed to never allow ANY human-looking or human-thinking machines to exist again? Also, the major plot has something to do with keeping humanity from self-extinction somehow..?
Mark
Posted by Shik (Member # 343) on :
...Wait. Dune has a plot?
Posted by Fabrux (Member # 71) on :
One of these day's I'm going to dust off the First Edition copy I have lying around and read it...
Posted by Pensive's Wetness (Member # 1203) on :
/me drives the topic bus into oncoming traffic...
anybody read Mechwarrior: Dorkage books?
thoughts? ideas? I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours... Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
Wait, I thought we've been through this already... Resurrect your own damn thread, Macross boy!
Mark
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
quote:Originally posted by Pensive's Wetness: /me drives the topic bus into oncoming traffic...
anybody read Mechwarrior: Dorkage books?
thoughts? ideas? I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours...
No, so bugger off.
Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :
Haaaup!-
Mechwarrior/Warhammer literature. It's like the CUBE, it exists because someone had the choice to either create it or admit it's pointless. 40 000 years of slaughter with no sign of stipping, how can there be any development?
That galaxy needs a Big Crunch and a nice, clean reboot. Or send a black Monolith slab into the greatest, most climactic battle of the combined MechWarhammer furball battle in recorded history and just let it suck all the ships and battlestations and battlestationplanets together to form a new sun, it'd be the best achievement ever for them! People could finally start growing corn again, instead of making depleted uranium shells for their chieftain's bolter.
Lane change: Regarding the Children of Dune-novel, I always imagined Leto II looking like a green-black version of Venom, without the white eyeblobs and fangy mouth, but kind of Venom/Spawn-ish. Slightly pulsating or writhing epidermis, like a living bodyshield, and karate chops that could cleave boulders. I didn't like the sparse pieces of sandtrout the Leto-kid had in the miniseries, four pieces didn't feel enough to give him the powers he made use of. He had a bit more in the very end but by then it wasn't �ber-time anymore, just the start of 3000 years of boredom.
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
I imagine a full body latex/silicone "trout suit" would have been too expensive for the budget they had, to say nothing of the sheer discomfort placed upon the actor. If it were done today (or in the next few years) I reckon it would be done with a mo-cap gimp suit, a la Gollum or Davy Jones. But yes, a few bits glued to his forearm was a bit disappointing.
Of course the real challenge would be the full God Emperor Worm. A few years ago I would have said it couldn't be done in a satisfactory way, but now I'm pretty sure they could pull of a viable character out of that behemoth. I just hope for the sake of whomever eventually gets cast as Leto II that he knows what would be expected of him in the second half of his two picture contract!
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
Just to chip in with my 2�...
I have to agree almost completely concerning most of the Kevin Anderson stuff. Anderson's Star Wars books were complete and utter crap -- but then, so were almost all the others that weren't written by Timothy Zahn.
However, for some reason, I was still absolutely enthralled by the Butlerian Jihad trilogy that they wrote. Maybe it was just the excitement of seeing all the various primordial elements of the Dune universe... or the fact that the philosophical issues of the Jihad resonated much more strongly with the traditional Frank Herbert themes, compared to the complete exercise in wankery that was their first prequel trilogy. And the character of Erasmus was a brilliant personification of the thinking machines... even if he was a bit clich�d. I definitely enjoyed the Jihad trilogy.
(The final two books were somewhere in between for me. I won't post any spoilers, but suffice to say that they were... trite and predictable, but still satisfying in that they brought the plot to a close.)
quote:I just hope for the sake of whomever eventually gets cast as Leto II that he knows what would be expected of him in the second half of his two picture contract!
Wait, are you suggesting that they're going to try to make a movie out of God-Emperor of Dune? How in the hell could they even attempt to deal with such a monstrosity? (And I'm not talking about the worm...)
About Leto II in the end of the miniseries, they might have been a bit light on the makeup, but I think it was more than enough to convey the meaning. I always figured that some of the sandtrout were absorbed into his body, not just into a shell around it. Kinda beneath the skin, I guess. After all, Leto couldn't have run so far all over the place and become so powerful if he just had the sandtrout covering his skin, could he?
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
quote:Originally posted by Nim: Warhammer literature. It's like the CUBE, it exists because someone had the choice to either create it or admit it's pointless. 40 000 years of slaughter with no sign of stipping, how can there be any development?
Not so. I been playing 40K since 1990, and know the timeline better than anyone, probably. Everything was going along fine until the Eldar (read: Space Elves) got all decadent and accidentally fucked up warp travel for the entire galaxy. Human civilization broke down because they couldn't travel or talk to each other and there followed about ten thousand years of general social disintigration, depending on local resources and will. After warp travel was restored, the Emperor started pulling humanity back together until the Great Heresy. The contemporary era of Warhammer 40,000 is only a little less than ten thousand years.
So somewhat more stretched out than the Dune timeline. In my sillier moments, I like to think the events of the Dune universe happened during the Golden Age/Dark Age of Technology of the Warhammer 40K universe, and that all of that's been forgotten during the chaos of the Age of Strife that followed.
--Jonah
Posted by Daniel Butler (Member # 1689) on :
Hm. And here I thought Dawn of War was standalone.
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