A thread about the Denis Villeneuve-helmed reboot of DUNE

SPICE

MUST

FLOW

coming summer 2019

Uh.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-new-dune-movie-is-being-written-by-the-man-who-wrot-1794046167

Variety reports that Eric Roth, who won an Oscar for his adapted screenplay for Forrest Gump, has been hired to adapt the Frank Herbert novel Dune for director Denis Villeneuve. Roth also wrote The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Insider, Munich, Ali, and many, many more. So even though you say the words “Forrest Gump” and some people get nauseous, Roth is still a writer who is respected and has worked with some of the best filmmakers of all time: Fincher, Mann, Spielberg, and Zemeckis, just to name a few.

This is good news.

Is it now.

Even if Roth has previously only written one science fiction film: Kevin Costner’s The Postman.

IS IT GOOD NEWS NOW.

to be fair, i suspect most of the problems with the postman were caused by costner's ego

i'm more concerned that this guy's track record suggests we'll end up with a solidly middlebrow dune which won't satisfy anyone. what's the point in a dune which isn't batshit?!

"...and Brad Pitt as Leto."

when I think of the best guy to helm a mushroom fueled sci fi epic I think of the dude who wrote forrest gump

nerds everywhere increasingly ambivalent

we're talking Robocop remake ambivalent

I note that this fellow, who is indeed an industry pro (to a fault, perhaps) also wrote The Horse Whisperer and The Concorde...Airport 79.

I feel like if Blade Runner 2049 bombs maybe this doesn't have to happen

At least not with that screenwriter either.

Well, it's still happening and...this is actually a smart idea.

https://www.avclub.com/denis-villeneuve-says-hes-now-making-two-dune-movies-1823660070

this guy started out so promisingly, and now it's nerdstuff til he's done

Gotta get paid. To be fair this is top tier nerd stuff, imo.

nertz to that, other filmmakers alternate lucre with arthouse

Kinda having it both ways simultaneously now. As much as you can for Mega Budget sci fi. I’m glad he’s around and doing these things.

LONG LIVE THE CHALAMET

Timothee Chalamet (@RealChalamet) in talks to star in Denis Villeneuve's 'Dune' https://t.co/CLKsqLD7jV pic.twitter.com/k6r8WvadDU

— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) July 16, 2018

I'm trying to think of who they could cast to plausibly lose a duel to T.C. Paul Dano?

Smart move

I have just received Draft #4 of the DUNE screenplay from Legendary Pictures. This is for the first movie, covering approximately half of the novel DUNE. I'm very excited and pleased about this, and I'm beginning to burn the midnight oil. pic.twitter.com/nIfgb2zJ2J

— Brian Herbert (@DuneAuthor) July 23, 2018

Feel like Brian Herbert being very excited and pleased about the dune screenplay is a bad sign.

Oh my god yes, get him away from it!
"DuneAuthor" as his Twitter handle, what a nerve.

If I wanted to read the Dune series should I stop at Chapterhouse or are their post Frank Herbert books worth reading?

The consensus is that the post-FH books are pretty weak fanfic at best. Certainly when I picked one of them up in a bookstore I found the writing cringeworthy, and apparently the stories are not much chop ("you know how they ended up banning thinking machines? well here's a story where a thinking machine went bad and t was bad for humanity so they fought back and outlawed them").

Ok so basically like ‘Solo’ then, got it, thanks.

I never got further than ‘Children’ and that was years ago. I wouldn’t mind revisiting them.

I think I have about 150 pages or so left to read in Chapterhouse Dune. I stopped reading it about 20 years ago, every once in a while I have the urge to go back and finish it. I still have the book on the bookshelf with the bookmark where I stopped.

Dave Bautista as Beast Rabban

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/dave-bautista-joins-timoth-e-chalamet-denis-villeneuves-dune-1174273

(Kinda brilliant, really -- that was the only role I could guess would work for him and behold. Also enough of a blank slate character in the book that they can really go to town.)

And Stellan Skarsgard as Baron Harkonnen

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/stellan-skarsg-play-villain-legendarys-dune-1174870

This cast is getting more and more interesting by the day. Charlotte Rampling as Gaius Helen Mohiam.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/charlotte-rampling-joins-timothee-chalamet-dune-1176429

I saw the Lynch version for the first time last year and was surprised to find that it was a faithful and fairly straight-ahead adaptation of the book, hampered by apparently not having shot enough scenes, or else having had the connective tissue edited out by the studio and replaced by voiceover in a panic

anyway I'll watch this for Timothee

Herbert’s characterization beyond Paul and Jessica is pretty light,- even everyone’s favorite character, Duncan Idaho is barely in the book, so there’s a lot that casting can bring to the table. I like it so far.

somebody should write this up

Oscar Isaac potentially in as Leto.

https://variety.com/2019/film/news/oscar-isaac-dune-reboot-1203109822/

the first mildly enticing detail of this farrago tbh

Οὖτις in as a Sam Elliottesque narrator.

“Now this big ol’ dusty planet wasn’t the kind of place folks were fit to survive on...”

Sometimes the you ride the warm, and sometimes the warm rides you.

I saw the Lynch version for the first time last year and was surprised to find that it was a faithful and fairly straight-ahead adaptation of the book, hampered by apparently not having shot enough scenes, or else having had the connective tissue edited out by the studio and replaced by voiceover in a panic

There were a lot of scenes filmed that were cut from the theatrical release - the wiki page gets into some of the details. Of all the cut scenes I've always been hoping that the banquet scene would resurface. It's somewhere out there sitting in a vault - I saw some stills at the 1984 Worldcon promo presentation about three months before the release.

with Count Fenring and the rest of that? that'd be great- i reread the book recently and forgot all about that part of it.

in the book paul is like some suburban white kid's wet dream, total mary sue, and harkonnen is so cartoonishly evil that he comes off as parody... with that being said, the world building is fantastic enough to justify adaptations. i think this movie could really be great if the characters get fleshed out. cast is promising, fingers crossed

Not confirmed but...interesting rumor.

http://collider.com/zendaya-dune-reboot

all the stunt casting that’s engineered to elicit a twitter response isn’t going to change the fact that Villeneuve is gonna make this movie with all the personality of a loaf of Wonder Bread https://t.co/Md8VsfoBbR

— Awards Tse-son (@CarmanTse) January 30, 2019

Kinda true, that.

If Deakins shoots it, I'll just enjoy the view.

Deakins is not involved

Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/josh-brolin-joins-timothee-chalamet-dune-1186144

he may be ugly enough, but is he lumpy enough?

josh brolin is hansy imo

Gurney NOT ugly enough and NOT lumpy enough—Dune certified rotten!!!

And Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho!

https://variety.com/2019/film/news/jason-momoa-dune-reboot-legendary-1203140272/

eraserhead is the original dune the movie

god emperor leto ii:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/603aa393a223fc1ceb1a5cf8/1622405909416-0ZCXOILXPS34DV6QDHUT/Babyraserhead.jpg

what we need is prequels

“i don't like sand. it's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere”

I finally finished this and was surprised that Feyd was not also a skarsgard, because the actor was doing a pretty good skarsgard impression, and made me wish Jessie Armstrong had adapted Dune as the next season of Succession.
Also, House Skarsgard sounds like a credible Dune faction.

Zendaya and Timothee - bad actors, zero chemistry for their great love that ends in betrayal
all the charismatic actors from the first one are dead (papa Atreides, Khal Drogo, the Dr from Strange New Worlds) or sidelined to glower and yell (Rebecca Ferguson)
the Harkonnens and Emperor just let all 500k mujahideen roll up 100 yards away from the emperor's ship because they couldn't see them over a hill?
whole lot of dragging in the middle - could have either been an hour shorter or split into three normal length movies

the gladiator scene with the lesser Harkonnen who looks like an extra from Fury Road - oh you tried to KILL ME by... not completely drugging one of the guys who's been in a dungeon for months. Seems more like changing the video game difficulty from rookie to easy IMO than a real test

Wasn’t that kind of the point tho

Lesser Harkonnen seemed pretty serious about it and that was his rite of passage to take over from Drax

It was political theatre tho, like yeah he was supposed to make a big show if it but it wasn’t a CONTEST it was a SHOW, like Barron Trump “running” in 2032.

Hard agree that Ferguson got the short end of the stick this time around. She deserves better than to look arresting & spew portents.

Zendaya and Timothee - bad actors, zero chemistry for their great love that ends in betrayal

The ending was hilarious.

"Sorry, love of my life, gotta marry this white girl for politics, you understand...you'll be sticking around for the holy war, though, right?"

*Zendaya makes her default pissed-off face, leaves to catch the bus*

I think it would be cool if they did special editions of these with extra scenes, if they exist. The second one in particular feels like it had a bunch of stuff chopped out, everything happens very abruptly.

Sure, but it'll have been chopped out at the "getting the book down to two films" stage of writing, I'd expect.

Denis says “non”: https://collider.com/dune-deleted-scenes-denis-villeneuve/

Really enjoyed the second film. This might actually get me to reread the book for the first time in like 25 years.

milo z so otm about this. what a drag! pretty to look at, but man not much there for me

Watched this last night in the cinema at a pretty well stuff screening given that its been released months ago! Its kinda impressive.

Anyway, by the end of this Chani is like an exiled communist at the end of a partially successful Islamic revolution.

Anyway while we wait for whatever third film might happen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzVHWNosS2o

Mark Strong's been busy with Warner Bros lately between this and The Penguin.

Tell me that's not Ricky Gervais at 51", jfc

it is not

but... what if it was?

We're in enough of a hellscape as it is, don't create further imaginary ones.

an endless series of Ricky Gervais clones spanning millennia, only the perfect one can rule the universe with it's off color and badly dated humor

if Paul Atreides studied Hitler in order to oversee an intergalactic genocide, then why not?

this looks like its based on the brian herbert/kja stuff right? pass

Miss Cross!

xpost Yeah it's explicitly based on one of their novels, so fanfic but presumably with more coherence than Rings of Power's farrago.

xxp

Yes, it is. I've never read any of his book because I hear that they are uniformly horrible. I'm still going to give this a chance. I like that it is very much in the same visual universe as the films. I'm willing to see what it's like and how HBO does a big sci-fi epic series.

I would say the logo, aiming to evoke or ape the films’, failing dismally but being used anyway, is fair warning. Also “I run a school for girls”, ffs.

up all night last night and finally watched dune 2 (after re-watching dune 1 -- that's a lot of dune, dawg). i have quibbles! i get that timotheee is supposed to be reluctant to seize his destiny, etc., but he's way too diffident. no one with so little presence leads a fanatical horde. the women were good. feyd was good but i don't buy his last line in the least. walken seemed mis-cast.

minor plot quibbles: at the end, paul walks alone into a room full of sardaukar, who calmly watch and do nothing as he kills the baron and orders them all to death. wtf? also leaving alia still unborn means this whole process took like six months, which is silly.

(the unheard-of power bestowed on the K.H. is also extremely nebulous -- okay, he can see possible futures, fine -- but that's a herbert issue, not a movie issue.)

nb i have not read any of the previous posts on this film, which no doubt addressed all these issues, and am only posting now as a distraction from certain events

distracting myself from current events by watching the story of the cosseted offspring of wealth and privilege who grows up to seize unimaginable power and unleash apocalyptic genocide

lol