I read some of the Dune novels - the first four I think - back in the nineties. I was very young at the time, I'm pretty sure most of the books went over my head, at least as far as subtext or parrallels with history or anything like that. At any rate, I remember very little of the books, and other than perhaps the first book, I don't remember being particularly fond of them. When the movie was announced, I wasn't really interested.That was partly because I have so little faith in Hollywood adaptations, and in big budget movies in general right now, but also because I don't really consider myself a fan of the books. So I didn't bother watching this when it came out in the cinema. But with my friends excited to see the sequel in the cinema, I finally borrowed the bluray and sat down to watch.
The movie is good. But I didn't enjoy it.
Watching on my PC with the sound cranked all the way up, I still couldn't make out most of the dialogue. So I had to turn on subtitles, and the only English subtitles were "for the hearing impaired". Which meant text kept popping up on screen to inform me that the movie was playing sad music or whatever, which did take me out of it a touch. I didn't get the cinematic experience that this movie deserves, is what I'm saying.
But that wasn't really the issue. Ironically, the fact that the movie was quite faithful to the book was a big part of the problem. One of my favourite things about sci-fi movies is seeing new and fantastical things, exploring strange new worlds. But it turns out I do remember quite a lot of the important events in the first half of the first book, so the movie ended up just being a fairly straight retread of events that I already knew, with very little new added. It was... kind of boring.
I basically spent the whole movie going "Yup, that's the way I remember it. Yup, that's pretty much right. Are they going to explain that little technical detail? Guess not, oh well.". It didn't help that it's a bit of a slow movie. Nothing wrong with that, I'm just saying that I personally didn't find very much to keep me interested. The story and characters were familiar and there wasn't exactly all that much action, at least not until quite late in the film's fairly long runtime.
To be honest I didn't find all that much to look at either. The costumes, locations, vehicles, weapons; they mostly quite very... normal. Grounded and believable perhaps, but not terribly interesting. Yeah, some of the costumes were a bit fancy, but most of the time people wore clothes that wouldn't look out of place on Earth right now. People mostly just fought with knives, for reasons that the movie doesn't really explain very well. Some of the vehicles were interesting, so that's something.
Surprisingly most of the locations were rather boring. Most of the movie takes place on the planet Arrakis; Dune itself. Which is a desert. Now, I'm not exactly a stranger to deserts myself, so I can tell you that deserts can be interesting to look at. Arrakis was not. It was just sand and a few rocks, and EVERYTHING was the same colour. The sand, the stone, the buildings, the vehicles; everything was, well, sand-coloured. We get these panoramic views of a city, that's all just a bunch of basic shapes in pretty much the exact same colour as the surrounding sand and rock.
They could have at least made the city look a little interesting! I enjoyed the shots of Knowhere - even the interiors - in the last Guardians of the Galaxy, and just the views of the city in the Total Recall remake felt worth the price of admission to me. But the city here was just boring; it looked abandoned, with no signs of life. Like a ruin, except without the visual interest of actually being ruined.
It was strange, but there were events that I found harder to accept in the movie than in the book. For example, everyone uses knives; this is weird when guns exist and are shown to work, at least to some degree, and seeing entire armies armed only with knives just felt wrong.
Obviously most of these criticisims are extremely subjective. For the most part I thought the film was objectively very good; it was atmospheric, the acting was great, VFX were perfect, the cinematography was effective, and there were a couple of good action sequences; I liked that the knife fights were cleanly shot, well choreographed and not overly-edited, for example. I also really liked the visual implementation of the shields, and the ornithopters looked great.
Some of the editing did feel a bit weird to me at times however. Scenes would end at what felt like awkward moments, without reaching what I felt was a natural point to stop. Shots would cut back and forth between two scenes that weren't related and didn't need to be shown simultaneously, which I found a touch confusing. None of this was a big deal, it just felt a little strange to me at times.
Objectively I think Dune earns an 8/10. It's a well-executed and faithful adaptation of a very highly regarded novel, if you love the book or you've never read it you will probably like the movie. At least if you have a big screen and a good sound system...
I was surprised they never explained how the shields work. That's kind of central to a lot of events; for example in the book Baron Harkonnen's shield is credited with being partially responsible for him surviving the poison gas. They kind of respected it, but never actually explained it.
I wonder how most people interpreted the shields, the blue and the red, the way they sometimes stopped knives and sometimes didn't? I'm pretty sure in the books, when Paul is in the duel and the Fremen ask if he's toying with his opponent, the book explained that he was used to slowing his blade to try to get past the shields his usual opponents had, and that was giving his opponent just enough time to slip away. In the movie, they instead say "he's never killed before". So the makers assumed the audience might not understand about the shields not stopping slow movements.
It might sound weird, but I felt like the movies didn't really capture how valuable water was made out to be in the books. At least I didn't feel it to the same extent that I did in the books.
The scene where the Atreides were betrayed felt rather hard to believe. Like, they all jumped up, grabbed their knives, and ran to their ships? There was no-one on the ships, but the shields were on? The doctor was able to defeat their entire security himself? Again, I never questioned it in the book, but the way it was portrayed on-screen made it seem quite contrived.
I was a bit confused that we never saw Lady Jessica with Duke Leto until quite late in the film. It just felt weird, Paul's parents never being together. I was starting to wonder if they didn't get along or something.
I don't remember if Paul had visions of Chiani in the book, or at least as many as in the movie, but it felt weird that they showed so much of her in visions when she actually ended up doing so little in the movie itself. Also I really don't understand why Jamis was acting as Paul's... "spirit guide" I guess, nothing about him or his relationship to Paul while he was alive would seem to justify it. I mean, he never came across as particularly wise or nuturing - quite the opposite I would say.
I didn't understand why Kynes said the Shai-Hulud, the sandworms, were her master. I don't recall the movie ever saying that the Fremen looked at the sandworms as their masters, or that they serve them, or anything like that. If anything, the fact that they ride the worms, use them as transport, would imply that they don't view them in that way. It felt like a lame attempt at a one-liner to deliver as she died.
Some of the dialogue that was delivered in other languages had subtitles. Some didn't. I assumed the subtitles meant that Paul understood what was being said, but I'm not really sure. Was some of the dialogue translated for our benefit, and he didn't actually understand what was being said?
So Paul's not-yet-born sister is able to have intelligent conversations about current events? Really? Was... was Lady Jessica just talking to herself and saying it was the baby? Because that makes far more sense to me than the idea that the still-developing unborn child suddenly developed an adult-level intelligence and understanding of the world, poison or no poison.
OK, I have to ask: if the spice is so important for space travel, and it only comes from Arrakis, how did they discover Arrakis, and space travel itself, if they couldn't travel through space without it? I assume the spice is necessary for safe space travel, and before it was discovered space travel was extremely dangerous, but that assumption not based on information I picked up from the movie.
I... REALLY hated the expression "Desert Power". And I hated that they kept using it.
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