'Dune' Gets a Sequel

Honestly, given the cheap way this first chapter was made (with even doubled sound track to save for the cost of a sound recording crew!!!*), I'll gladly wait that the public channel get the budget to pay for it.

I have never seen a movie claiming to re-instate an epic story with a big budget** cutting so much in the story to save production costs. But to be honest, IMO it's not the first time that Villeneuve traps the viewer in something like that. If he has ever wanted to be seen as an artist that invented a new genre, that would be probably the greedy vague...


*And why not a silent movie next!
**Most of whom was probably swallowed in commercials and PR
 
A head-scratcher for you...

When I saw original movie on TV, I had weirdest feeling of deja-vu...

It was not 'Dune, the Door-stop'. But I seemed to remember reading it as a novelette a decade or two earlier...

So, was my memory playing tricks ? ( IIRC, sand-worms and 'Weirding Modules' were in novelette, but latter was discarded... )

Or was there really a half-baked mini-me, which blossomed into the mega-book, its zillion sequels & spin-offs ??
 
Long ago, I was on a bus when I spotted a passenger reading Dune. It looked like a large book but the word Dune didn't catch my interest. The images I've seen from this movie have not grabbed me either.

I know how Hollywood works. Key scenes are drawn on large storyboards like a comic book. A Producer, or Producers, walk by, say "What is that scene going to cost me?" and recommend cuts to lower costs.
 
TomcatViP said:
Honestly, given the cheap way this first chapter was made (with even doubled sound track to save for the cost of a sound recording crew!!!*), I'll gladly wait that the public channel get the budget to pay for it.

I have never seen a movie claiming to re-instate an epic story with a big budget** cutting so much in the story to save production costs. But to be honest, IMO it's not the first time that Villeneuve traps the viewer in something like that. If he has ever wanted to be seen as an artist that invented a new genre, that would be probably the greedy vague...


*And why not a silent movie next!
**Most of whom was probably swallowed in commercials and PR
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Went to see Dune 2 (I am in a cheap country where theater tickets are under 5€ for a top of the edge experience, so didn't mind much a loss). Mind that I had long forgotten my above comment but then... Villeneuve did it again.

OK, this release has less cheap scenes (see the crew list at the end that is... Truly massive) but still, everytime the movie slips into something that could be truly epic (with big and over 10 seconds scene), he cuts it out.
As a result, the movie never truly takeoff and you stand insattiated even after 2 hours, just like in a very long pop music clip.

And then there is Thimoty Chamalot, the fluffiest hero of the Galaxy, that is so credible as a fearless warrior that poor (and fabulously acting) Zendaya looks like an aesthetic, podiums garding then, cerberus.
 
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I rather liked Dune 1. I read the book nearly fifty years ago, loved it. The David Lynch adaptation was a dissappointment to me. Dune 1 - was not.
So I will watch Dune 2.
 
Shooting a movie in the desert is the cheapest option after shooting a movie at night, or in a cave, or in an abandoned mine, or in a tunnel.:)
 

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Arjen said:
I rather liked Dune 1. I read the book nearly fifty years ago, loved it. The David Lynch adaptation was a dissappointment to me. Dune 1 - was not.
So I will watch Dune 2.
Click to expand...
Me too. But then I love playing the Dune boardgame, and even liked the 1984 film.
 
I encourage everyone to see it. It remains obviously a good movie to see with family and friends. Don't doubts about it.

My opinion is solely that it should have been better with a bit less of the pointed travers.
 
I liked the David Lynch version for its willful strangeness. Brian Aldiss (a British writer and critic of sf) didn't, and wrote that it was best appreciated with the sound off as a series of classic pulp sf covers. Considering our current thread on that topic, I think that's great (and I keep the sound on).

Part 2 is pencilled in some time this week.
 
I've never read any of the original source material and therefore watched the David Lynch abysmal abuse of perfectly good film stock timewaste snoozefest completely unprepared in the naive expectation I would actually see a real science fiction movie - 137 minutes of my life I'll never get back. The fact that there is now not only a remake but that it is turned into two parts makes me fear evermore for the future of human civilization.
 
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Justo Miranda said:
Shooting a movie in the desert is the cheapest option after shooting a movie at night, or in a cave, or in an abandoned mine, or in a tunnel.
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Tell that BBC and ITV, they used in 1970s same quarry to shooting "alien locations"
Once they shooting Episode of "Blake's 7" in this quarry, as they disturbed by loud noise.
They send assistant to see whats going on there and stop this
The "Blake's 7" assistant encounter halfway a assistant from "Dr Who" who was send for same reason...

In Hollywood you got "50 miles range"
you shoot you movie in 50 miles radius around Los Angeles, it cheaper as go to original Location...
same goes for Vancouver.


For Dune part two
go and see it, a fantastic movie !
 
Rhinocrates said:
I liked the David Lynch version for its willful strangeness.
Click to expand...
I admit some of it was good, exactly because of that.
It was just the 1984 Dune didn't quite draw me into the story in the way that the book did.

Rhinocrates said:
Brian Aldiss (a British writer and critic of sf) didn't, and wrote that it was best appreciated with the sound off as a series of classic pulp sf covers.
Click to expand...
That^
 
Michel Van said:
Tell that BBC and ITV, they used in 1970s same quarry to shooting "alien locations"
Once they shooting Episode of "Blake's 7" in this quarry, as they disturbed by loud noise.
They send assistant to see whats going on there and stop this
The "Blake's 7" assistant encounter halfway a assistant from "Dr Who" who was send for same reason...

In Hollywood you got "50 miles range"
you shoot you movie in 50 miles radius around Los Angeles, it cheaper as go to original Location...
same goes for Vancouver.


For Dune part two
go and see it, a fantastic movie !
Click to expand...
In my country we have a saying: “segundas partes nunca fueron buenas” (second parts were never good)

-"My name is Lando Calrisian and I'm a traitor"

- "I've cut off your hand because I'm your father"

-"Indiana Jones in India, without the revolver"
 
From a purely biological point of view, the worms in Dune are stupid. Can you imagine the energy needed to move that huge mass through the sand? The surface sand of the desert can shelter small burrowing animals to a depth of fifty centimeters, but at greater depths the sand (including that of any planet with standard gravity) turns to stone. There's a thing called the Reynolds number that SF writers are under no obligation to know, but it's useful for designing believable animals. If those things are attracted by the vibrations of the ground, they should have been exterminated on geological faults and volcanic terrains.
 
Arjen said:
You've never watched Paddington 2, then?
Click to expand...
I haven't seen the movie but my wife writes children's stories and loves the series that airs on a children's TV channel in my country, Nicky Junior. The series is good, the characters are well defined and the drawings are of very good quality. I can smell a lot of patriotic money in the project.
 
Marmite time I think. I dont like Science Fantasy or for that matter any Fantasy (sorry J K Rowling and J R Tolkien). Same reason I dont like most poetry. My increasingly small brain can never remember who is who or why?
Science Fiction has a tendency to ooze into Fantasy. My prejudice (another of many) is for stories that are developed from existing reality. Thunderbirds or Star Trek in the 60s were projections of the contemporary world into the future (even the skirt lengths).
Dr Who definitely oozes into Fantasy. The Daleks and Cybermen (like Romulans and Klingons) are easy enough clones of Cold War enemies (Terry Nation modelled the Daleks on the Nazis hence their well known catchphrase Exterminate!!!). But the whole Galifrey Timelord story is a massive yawn for me. The British comic TV21 and a series of annuals in the 60s took the Daleks and turned them into Dr Who less stories in vivid colour (we only had B/W TV until the late 60s).
 
Justo Miranda said:
From a purely biological point of view, the worms in Dune are stupid. Can you imagine the energy needed to move that huge mass through the sand? The surface sand of the desert can shelter small burrowing animals to a depth of fifty centimeters, but at greater depths the sand (including that of any planet with standard gravity) turns to stone. There's a thing called the Reynolds number that SF writers are under no obligation to know, but it's useful for designing believable animals. If those things are attracted by the vibrations of the ground, they should have been exterminated on geological faults and volcanic terrains.
Click to expand...
Interesting question.

By the way, i looks like Perucetus colossus wasn't so massive.

www.eurekalert.org

Slimming down a colossal fossil whale

A 30 million year-old fossil whale may not be the heaviest animal of all time after all, according to a new analysis by paleontologists at UC Davis and the Smithsonian Institution. The new analysis puts Perucetus colossus back in the same weight range as modern whales and smaller than the...
www.eurekalert.org

So, what might a real kaiju be like?

Considering structural strength, conventional bones won't hold up a giant worm with a maw 80 m wide in a circular section - and then displacing sand equivalent to its volume would require incredible energy. A real shai-halud might be wide and flat, crawling over the sands like a vast rug.

I'm thinking that there might be these possibilities for kaiju:

A pyramid: Godzilla has immensely thick legs and tapers to a small head.

A gothic cathedral: all arches and buttresses, a physiogomy nothing like any vertebrate we know. Maybe such a structure can support a huge beast.

A megapede: Each segment is big, but not impossible. If you want it to be huge, then it achieves that by being very long and the beast is proportionally narrow, like a millipede.

A slime mould: OK, the real ones are small, but it's flat and spread out. It might not be tall, but its total area and biomass is huge. Organisms that breathe by diffusion can't be more than an inch in depth/radius. To be bigger, thicker, whatever, it needs some sort or pump to get oxygen into its tissue - lungs or gills linked to a circulatory system.

A clone or a fungus: The real ones are huge and massive but aren't very exciting. 'Oh look, this tree looks a lot like that tree over there!' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree) . Mycelia are even less obvious - certain fungal networks are truly huge, but while they might be interesting, they're not exactly dramatic.

Zeppelins: a staple of sf (see John Varley's Titan and Arthur C Clarke's 'A Meeting with Medusa') they're big, lighter-than-air bladder creatures. They're huge but it doesn't have much mass and they're more or less rigid due to internal pressure. Being filled with hydrogen, if they're in an atmosphere containing oxygen, a cigarette lighter is a lethal weapon.

A superorganism: like an army ant colony. Army ants can link together to make bivouacs, so maybe, like locust swarms, the small individual units come together at certain times but in this case, rather than just been a huge 'glittering cloud,' they are more condensed into a single body.

Frank Herbert, wisely, doesn't go into to much detail - just enough to make the worms seem real but holding back enough to make them mysterious. Maybe a silicate skeleton, apparently a very hot metabolism. How hot? Who knows...
 
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Ultimately though, the problem with big animals is ecological. Ecologies can be thought of as stepped pyramids. Autotrophs - plants - and prey - herbivores - are at the lower tiers and the upper tiers consume those. As a rule, each upper tier is one tenth the biomass of the lower tier, though if the lower tier reproduces at a much greater rate, that rule can be bypassed to an extent. Also, rorqual whales prey not on animals immediately below them in terms of scale but on animals - krill - that are right near the base of the ecological pyramid and exist in huge numbers. Here's the classic text explaining the principle:

press.princeton.edu

Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare

press.princeton.edu press.princeton.edu

Sandworms can only exist if they have a lot of resources to consume, are high on a great ecological pyramid, and have an immensely energetic metabolism that produces enough energy to displace sand equivalent to their mass rapidly.
 
...Aaaaaaaaaand they again made Rabban a dumb brute. Seriously, it looks like "Dune" producers are incapable of just reading the book. They have one scene with the character, and they utterly unable to understand that Rabban is actually a smart man, whose problem is that he is not cunning and treacherous (and have no willpower to actually said Baron - who is cunning, but not smart - to shut up).
 
Rhinocrates said:
Frank Herbert, wisely, doesn't go into to much detail - just enough to make the worms seem real but holding back enough to make them mysterious. Maybe a silicate skeleton, apparently a very hot metabolism. How hot? Who knows...
Click to expand...
Actually the main problem with sandworms is why they are so intent on digging through sand? It was shown in the novel, that sandworms have zero problem with moving on the surface - which actually is much simpler and energy-consuming, than trying to push the enormous body through the dence medium.
 
Dilandu said:
Actually the main problem with sandworms is why they are so intent on digging through sand? It was shown in the novel, that sandworms have zero problem with moving on the surface - which actually is much simpler and energy-consuming, than trying to push the enormous body through the dence medium.
Click to expand...
The burrowing animals of terrestrial deserts bury themselves to escape the heat of the sun, but the friction produced by one of Herbert's worms would be enough to kill any form of terrestrial life with heat. Even more stupid is that when digging into hardened earth, worms ALSO produce vibrations.
 
You should probably give The Battle of the Five Armies a miss.
But then you'd also miss The Big Yin, shouting something rather rude, at the top of his voice, seated on the back of his battle-pig. Win some, lose some.
 
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I have had another look at David Lynch's 1984 Dune. As a moving, speaking production I now find it insufferably stilted. Freeze it, and you get some attractive stills.
I have seen some of Lynch's other productions, which I did like. He can direct, but I wish he had never taken on Dune.
 
Rhinocrates said:
…. Zeppelins: a staple of sf (see John Varley's Titan and Arthur C Clarke's 'A Meeting with Medusa') they're big, lighter-than-air bladder creatures. They're huge but it doesn't have much mass and they're more or less rigid due to internal pressure. Being filled with hydrogen, if they're in an atmosphere containing oxygen, a cigarette lighter is a lethal. ….
Click to expand...
Science fiction and fantasy authors have explored sky whales several times.There was a science fiction re-write of “Moby Dick” that featured sky whales flying over a desert planet. Sorry but I cannot remember the author’s name, just that he was a better story-teller than Herman Melville.

K.W. Jeter featured lighter-than-air “angels” in his novel “Farewell Horizontal.” They were slender humanoids that featured an extra set of external “lungs” - aft of their rib cages - that helped them fly outside a huge skyscraper. The extra “lungs” were filled with an un-named lifting gas … perhaps hydrogen since the novel setting is a near future earth.

When you consider the physics and physiology, a sky whale only needs a few bones - to carry compression loads - and those bones would need to be hollow and filled with air … like bird bones. The rest of the structure/body can be in tension or tension provided by internal gas pressure.
The simplest way to generate lifting gas is methane filtered out of intestines. Perhaps add an extra organ (re-purposed appendix?) with an extra enzyme evolved to filter hydrogen????

Internal pressure could be maintained by a set of ballutes which are airbags/swim bladders that regulate hull/torso pressure to keep blimps stiff. A soft structure can be made to appear rigid as long as the outer skin is stiffened by internal pressure.

I wrote the first draft of a fantasy novel/alternate history that involves a pair of wandering Vikings encountering a slumbering sky whale. The startled sky whale dumps ballast … er … poop to fly away.
Hah!
Hah!

Finally, consider that imagined sky whales do not necessarily live on a planet with earth’s atmosphere or gravity. I suspect that when humans finally meet another species on another planet, that they will not recognize a lighter-than-atmosphere species floating around in the heavy atmosphere of a gas-giant planet.
 
riggerrob said:
Science fiction and fantasy authors have explored sky whales several times.There was a science fiction re-write of “Moby Dick” that featured sky whales flying over a desert planet. Sorry but I cannot remember the author’s name, just that he was a better story-teller than Herman Melville.
Click to expand...

Um... The Wind Whales of Ishmael, by Philip José Farmer maybe? Haven't read it myself but browsed it in a bookshop once. He had an imagination and could tell a tale.

There's Arthur C Clarke's 'A Meeting With Medusa.' Indeed, it's one of those gas giant inhabitants.

From the era of open cockpits, there's a short short by Arthur Conan Doyle, 'The Horror of the Heights.'

etc.usf.edu

“The Horror of the Heights” | Tales of Terror and Mystery | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | Lit2Go ETC

etc.usf.edu
 
uk 75 said:
Marmite time I think. I dont like Science Fantasy or for that matter any Fantasy (sorry J K Rowling and J R Tolkien). Same reason I dont like most poetry. My increasingly small brain can never remember who is who or why?
Science Fiction has a tendency to ooze into Fantasy. My prejudice (another of many) is for stories that are developed from existing reality. Thunderbirds or Star Trek in the 60s were projections of the contemporary world into the future (even the skirt lengths).
Dr Who definitely oozes into Fantasy. The Daleks and Cybermen (like Romulans and Klingons) are easy enough clones of Cold War enemies (Terry Nation modelled the Daleks on the Nazis hence their well known catchphrase Exterminate!!!). But the whole Galifrey Timelord story is a massive yawn for me. The British comic TV21 and a series of annuals in the 60s took the Daleks and turned them into Dr Who less stories in vivid colour (we only had B/W TV until the late 60s).
Click to expand...
I wonder what you'd make of the Gormenghast books? Plenty of what happens is absurd, which is the point, but very little's impossible. 'Dickens on crack' as one actor in a TV adaptation put it.
 
I watched the BBC series based on the books and did enjoy the story, perhaps because of the acting.
 

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