is it really possible that we don't as yet have a thread about DAVID LYNCH'S DUNE?

there's a scene with gurney playing it in the extended version and it sounds like a steve hackett instrumental

the new, extended Dune ultimate edition, featuring a 16-minute chapman stick solo by Tony Levin

Don't try your powers on me. Try looking into that place where you dare not look. You'll find Tony Levin there, playing a 16-minute Chapman Stick solo.

LOL

I'm a lynch stan but both times I watched this I fell asleep. Just has that effect on me for some reason. I don't hate it or anything, maybe it would help to read the book so I start off already invested and knowing all of the many names given to each thing. Paul who is the moaddib who is the quidditch haddock (I find it funny that his actual name is "Paul", not sure if it's supposed to be funny). I love the simple fact that all these people are in a film together anyway

btw I know I keep missing the whole middle of the movie but I always find the last line a little weird: "he IS the quiznos hatchback!" It's like... we know. You told us at the beginning?

it's a callback to John Wayne in The Greatest Story Ever Told

Lol mebbe

The acting does feel to me like it's from an earlier era at times

Lynch seems to find the whole experience painful to think about but if anyone were ever able to coax him into making a long directors cut id def watch

can't believe it's taken me this long to realize the baliset is really a modded Chapman Stick

― Moodles, Monday, March 6, 2017 9:09 PM (yesterday)

there's a scene with gurney playing it in the extended version and it sounds like a steve hackett instrumental

― clouds, Tuesday, March 7, 2017 4:38 AM (five hours ago)

There's a reason I made a Pat Metheny crack a few months back!

yeah it's pretty deliberately arch i think

nostalgia for old movies is a big part of a lot of SF movies in the post Star Wars era

sadly I think Lynch has said that the rumour of hours of unused footage aren't true

A few years back I attended a lecture by Lynch -- it was on his TM stuff rather than film but I figured 'eh, it's Lynch, it'll be weirdly entertaining' -- and he was introduced by the MC who ran off a list of all his films in order, except Dune. So in the Q&A someone had to ask about that, and there was both general applause from the audience and Lynch seemed pretty comfortable talking about it. It's kind of a comfort-zone botch now.

i think a bunch of ilxors have been to one of those TM lectures! mine was in Philly i'm almost positive.

Reading through the thread mark s's review seems about right (maybe it's the whispering that's lulling me to sleep) - I thought of the keep as well, another interesting "butchered" film that almost certainly doesn't make any more sense in the 4-hour cut

For that matter, Patrick Stewart is really just a modded Tony Levin:

https://img.discogs.com/z5RU0QNghN4msT9GMSV92Xhfnrw=/fit-in/300x300/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(40)/discogs-images/A-256225-1144684281.jpeg.jpg

I wish Lynch would make more SciFi films

Reading through the thread mark s's review seems about right (maybe it's the whispering that's lulling me to sleep) - I thought of the keep as well, another interesting "butchered" film that almost certainly doesn't make any more sense in the 4-hour cut

― wins, Tuesday, March 7, 2017 1:15 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

man i want 4 hour keep so bad

I want a 4 hour cut that has literally no expository dialogue or narration

but would settle for 90 minutes

highly recommend the book wins, much superior work

the best thing about dune (the novel) is the deep-ecology philosophy but that doesn't really carry into the film

Yeah I need to read it

Love these:

https://68.media.tumblr.com/c6d0423d60034645a7e24f51baa34845/tumblr_op2re29zEX1tvemm6o2_500.jpg

https://68.media.tumblr.com/441e22399b529c2e8dc50acea9a96594/tumblr_op2re29zEX1tvemm6o3_500.jpg

https://68.media.tumblr.com/28c979094c349feb4c7977f117b9e872/tumblr_op2re29zEX1tvemm6o1_500.jpg

omg yes

nausicaa meets dune!

The third one especially

Sign me up for the HideakiAnno-directed anime miniseries.

Just watched this for the first time in like fifteen years last weekend. I still love it for all it's flaws, but good gosh the last 45 minutes is so rushed. You can just tell it was ruthlessly cut to get it under two and a half hours.

Also the triumphant ending with a noble race of warriors rising up out the desert to conquer civilisation can't help but feel a little uncomfortable in light of more recent world events. I understand Dune Messiah deals with the consequences of the Fremen jihad getting out of control but as Lynch never got to film a sequel, what we get is "PAUL IS GRATE AND SOLVES EVERYTHING the end."

Now I'm watching the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries from 2000. God, it's so threadbare. Awful costumes, cheap looking sets, lousy CG special effects. At least the new film, if it ever happens, couldn't possibly look this shabby.

I always thought of that version as essentially a stage play that was filmed.

the "non-director's cut" three-hour version is p much just as rushed in the final hour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxgDk2I_bSc

relive ALL the excitement and adventure

Isn't the book like that? It's been decades now (oh god) but I remember a huge amount of Paul's edification followed by womp bam boom insurgent takeover

Maybe the film colored my memory of the novel - but it certainly didn't ruin my idea of what an ornithopter should be (but by god, they tried)

the book (which as you recall is VERY LONG) spends quite a long time on the desert stuff where the film has already begun to hurry

also iirc one of paul's principal dilemmas/heroic struggles is with how to overturn the existing political status quo without unleashing a "jihad" that would bring violence and destruction to the universe at large. though i can't really remember why that would have seemed so likely a proposition. kinda interesting in that it was written a decade and a half prior to the iranian revolution which to my limited understanding sorta took the global powers-that-be by surprise...? idk

also btw just gotta say i am very very late to the party on this but for those who appreciate the long-term terraforming aspects of Dune the novel, i am finally reading RED MARS, the first part of kim stanley robinson's MARS TRILOGY and it is fucking incredible on this and several other points.

Do we have wormsign?🐛 #dune pic.twitter.com/Gh8Hqf4CIf

— Kyle MacLachlan (@Kyle_MacLachlan) July 16, 2017

Usul has called a big one!

Those drawings above have to be Ryoichi Ikegami (Crying Freeman, Mai The Psychic Girl, Sanctuary).

I avoided watching this for years because Lynch seemed to hate it, I thought Sting was the main character, I don't like deserts and the only clips I had seen were of the big brain creature and the baron.

Wasn't expecting much, but HUGE HUGE HUGE surprise! There's a lot wrong with it but damn, there's a lot of great looking stuff in here, Toto are surprisingly great, Kyle MacLachlan and Sean Young look amazing, most of the special effects and settings look better than sci-fi films today, the worms emerging from the sand look convincingly massive, love all the whispery and dreamy scenes.

I like this better than Bladerunner, Metropolis, 2001, Star Wars, Alien films and any big sci-fi film I can think of right now. But it's hard to experience some of those films as fresh as I got Dune, they're weighed down by their pop culture legacies.

I actually don't think Jodorowsky's version would have been better, it would probably be an even bigger mess with fewer good parts (although the soundtrack probably would have been better).

Keep thinking of Jack Nance playing an instrument. Very funny.

I recently watched the first half of this and found it pretty enjoyable; didn't understand why it had acquired such a bad reputation. Then I resumed the second half later and thought, "oh, I see."

I read the script the other day and thought to myself "this is really one hell of a stupid story"

however I do like the movie mostly for the visuals and weirdness

did you feel that way about the book's story, too?

i haven't read dune since high school. i've always thought of myself as a general "supporter of dune", but even back then, during a time when my critical radar was completely non-existent and i pretty much devoured and loved whatever i read or saw, dune was underwhelming.

(response idea: 'no you're underwhelming'

but now i guess i'm the kind of jerk who wonders if dune is the most overrated book of the 1960s

this thread is about the film, not the book (another response idea)

however I do like the movie mostly for the visuals and weirdness

same. and certain parts are undeniably gripping and unforgettable. the "fear is the mind killer" scene is so good.

The book isn't overrated. It's the first space opera that incorporated the scope of Tolkien, having an old fictional world with borders extending far beyond the present action, and ideas from the nascent science of ecology about the sandworm/spice lifecycle. However, filming it as a messiah/Muhammed story misses all of that. You might as well film Stranger in a Strange Land if you want SF spiritual heroics on a budget.

However, filming it as a messiah/Muhammed story misses all of that

There's a pretty big dose of this in the book, tbh

yes i'm unconvinced a tolkien-style epic is the best lens for "ideas from the nascent science of ecology" tho i can see how a multi-generational approach might come in handy. but it gave the ideas a good pulpy hook i guess

also, nascent? ecology p much begins with haeckel in the 1860s (when it was still called "oecology" lol), so "burgeoning" is probably a better word, bcz it was a BIG NOISE in the 60s: it hugely overlapped with my dad's job and he read dune and enthused abt it to me (age 10-ish i guess). the problem looking at it now is that the ecology is soooooooo basic. it's a one organism eco-system: does anything native to arrakis use the spice to tell the future? (the only other animal i can even remember being mentioned is the little mouse that goes "pip pop"). if not the spice only has ultra-planetary (and thus anti-ecological) function?

there are enough Dune stans around here to get into the top 10 of our spec fic poll, but I definitely prefer the movie, warts and all, myself.

idk if the scope of Dune is really that unique, although certainly it gets brought up a lot. As far as time scales and space epics go, Foundation predates it and I'd be surprised if there aren't other examples.

as far as ecology in the genre goes, I prefer the Word for World Is Forest (which, granted, was later)

for me what was eye opening about dune was that it was sci fi about human potential not technological potential

ie the deadliest person in the story wasn't the person w/ the biggest blaster gun but the female monk who had spent the most time strengthening her fingers on the digit mill

olaf stapledon also does the generational thing i think ("first and last men" was another book my dad recommended to me, but i never read it so i might be wrong)

i think sanpaku's right tho that dune is early on the tolkien-as-space-opera jag -- foundation is surely too early to have been able to be trying to be that (i think it's quite unlikely asimov had read him or even knew he existed when foundation was being written: LotR wasn't big news until the 60s). either way, foundation isn't a foray into the same kind of cosplay territory

(also it's terrible)

Foundation is def terrible in a way that Dune is not

I think I read somewhere that halfway through the film D Lynch was like "I dont care about this anymore"

Interesting to note that at the time they offered return of the jedi to lynch - now that's something id like to see
there are so many endless sequels too - the story goes on and on and on

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/patrick-stewart-didnt-know-who-sting-was-dune-1104219