A thread about the Denis Villeneuve-helmed reboot of DUNE

this guy is a menace

it's gonna end up playing like Gods of Egypt.

This seems v unnecessary

Last (necessary) movies you saw [Started by Nordicskillz (Nordicskillz) in January 2003]

I guess I'm ok with this. I'm sure Villeneuve will make a visually interesting movie. The real problem is making some kind of good and coherent script out of Dune.

I'm not sure what qualities a movie needs to have to be necessary.

Dune is maybe the worst novel i have ever finished aside from The Hotel New Hampshire

ambivalent or full of loathing, nerds will show up

(also i wd probably watch for free at home to see who inherits the thong from Sting and Matt Keeslaar)

baron harkonnen is currently occupying the white house so there's plenty of latitude for villeneuve to play with heavy-handed allegory

could be watchable, but they'll probably need to make it a trilogy to capture everything. Also, please do not go overboard on CGI -- Dune is mostly talking and getting insight into what people are thinking, so if they do this right, more than billion dollar FX, they need good actors, screenwriter, and yeah the director.

like if they say "we wanted to make sure we got the sandworms juuuust right", it's gonna suck, badly

let lynch do it again

trailer better have exactly zero BRAAAAMMMMS in it
if there's a BRAAAAAMMMM with sandworms coming out of the ground trying to eat an ornithopter then basically, fuck everything

haha you know that's exactly what it's going to be like

It'll be told from the sandworms' POV

ryan gosling running towards the screen, jumping, the sound DROPS OUT, he grabs onto a vehicle escaping, a sandworm JUMPS out of the ground behind him, jaws snapping (and a second, smaller but lengthier jaw snapping after him ever closer), and that "dying engine" sound kinda comes up on the soundtrack.

title card

DUNE

tagline -- some things were never meant to be unearthed

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.

parnassus was alright, I didn't like some of the CGI effects but I thought he worked around Ledger's death in an interesting way. Zero Theorem was dire. I never got around to watching Tideland which had awful reviews, but the one person I personally know who actually watched it really liked it.

Btw I haven't seen new Dune and I'm not really dying to, and I don't always love Hans Zimmer scores, but I thoroughly enjoyed this podcast on the process. Seems fun to have an unlimited budget to hire musicians and engineers to create bespoke sample instruments for your every whim!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI28oowy4Dc

tideline execrable in more ways than i have ever found any piece of creative work and ill never watch a gilliam movie again as long as i live after it

xpost Relatedly, a pretty good promo VF bit from here:

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

i am stoked for this to stream, so i can watch it again. i feel that i surely missed something. or i'm like, too dumb for its fine points.

The spice is oil

Coconut oil

cocaine oil

shai and muad’s trap hole

i am stoked for this to stream, so i can watch it again. i feel that i surely missed something. or i'm like, too dumb for its fine points.

lol thx. kind or mock-kind i can't say but still-- this seems like a lot of work for a heavily referential pile of-- not that much?-- that is like, very overly emphasized?

Mental oil

btw, I think I asked before, but how is this guy about to make such convincingly tactile and lived in looking FX when most movies can't come close?

I think because I've seen so many Marvel movies I kind of forgot that VFX can actually look good. It's crazy that so many other huge budget movies look so terrible when it's clearly possible to do it right.

doing it right:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GJokEW5WAAAQDtb?format=jpg

(courtesy twitter's @drawbrandondraw aka bluesky's @drawbrandondraw.com )

I suspect both Dune movies had longer post-production time than a typical Marvel movie these days, probably a big help re refined vfx. Maybe the realism of the actual muad'dib demonstrates this as well as anything.

It's not really dealing with many 'improbable' or 'magical' fx either though (Emperor's ship and the fire effect around it excepted) and nothing radical or OTT (apart from the infrared aspect Giedi Prime looks p boring). Most MCU films are trying to show actual 'magical' powers, 'aliens' and creatures etc. and with a kids appeal. Guardians 3 did all that pretty well.

Tideland which had awful reviews, but the one person I personally know who actually watched it really liked it.

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm), Monday, March 25, 2024 9:44 PM (six days ago)

Did it have awful reviews? I recall a bunch of people saying it was one of his best films (I think it is). I like Zero Theorem too

yeah, 31% positive on Rotten Tomato's critic tally

I know it was hardly a hit but I recall people being enthusiastic about it, definitely worth trying if you like Gilliam, I've cooled on it a bit but I still think it's among his better films

The plot summary for Tideland makes it sound horrifying.

There's horrible things but the naive viewpoints of the girl and young man take the edge off

nope

gilliams lens makes it worse than the plot tbh

it was horrifying and i’ll never watch it again but it was an interesting contrast to pan’s labyrinth in that both dealt with children dealing with unimaginable horrors, but tideland really felt like it was _her_ story told by herself (i don’t know if it would be tolerable told in any other way) while labyrinth felt very much like an adult telling the story.

There's some fun in it too, I recall Jodelle Ferland being good in it (she will be 30 this year, how is that possible? I'm turning to corpsedust)

Tideland is much older than I thought. Ferland has mostly been in horror films and television

Saw the first film for the first time yesterday, really liked it. It was all good and didn’t feel like it was as long as it was. Easily my favourite part was when the desert mouse is shown and our small tortoiseshell cat froze and stared at the screen and tried to get a better look. 10/10 motion capture, obviously.

Rewatched it last night in anticipation of seeing the second part. I enjoyed it more, probably in part because I watched it on a TV with good sound as opposed to my iPad with headphones. It's visually stunning, and even if it's mostly vibes, well, so is the book (which I now need to read for the fifth (?) time).

i dont mean to gripe but if ever movies needed watching at the cinema its these

Thanks be to Odeon Luxe reclining seats in respect to that.

i was hoping 1 would have gotten a general theatrical re-release but if it did I missed it. I would not mind wasting an entire day watching these back to back in a theater.

otm. they did put part 1 back in theaters briefly, but at least in my area it was over & done with a week or two before part 2 came out, so there was no chance to double feature them, which was frustrating.

I finally saw Dune part 1 on an airplane, surely not the ideal viewing configuration, but it exceeded my somewhat modest expectations. I loved the book as a young sci-fi fan, and enjoyed the Lynch film. This version is perhaps better. It does a good job of finding the core of the story and building suspense in the right places. The pacing seemed about right. It wasn't as ponderous as I had been led to believe.

here was actually surprisingly little up-close spice-related action or even conversation

― mark s, Saturday, October 23, 2021 3:36 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

kind of weird to adapt dune and barely touch on melange

well there was a lot of different things mixed in there tbf

Melange definitely better than her sister Beyonce

https://www.nts.live/shows/the-nts-guide-to/episodes/the-nts-guide-to-inspired-by-dune-13th-march-2024

^^^ music inspired by the book

Saw the first film on Netflix a couple of days ago. Initial thought is this would've annoyed me if there was no sequel. It literally fucking stops.

Will watch the followup if it's still playing somewhere. Imagine waiting years for this. Not me mate

The music was very funny when the subs were trying to convey..

Low tense music
Tense music
Dramatic music
Loud dramatic music
Yodelling

Now forget but I wanted to make a poll on these

amazing issue to take with a movie that has sequels baked in but yeah ok

👍

The music in the first film is probably the closest I can think of to a film using the score as pure sound effects.

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.