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Dune: Book, Movie, Miniseries.
JoeCovenant:
Hi... I'm Joe and I'm a Dune non-hater....
Is it as good as the books? Not remotely.
But is it, for it's time, a decent enough crack at opening the saga? I thought so.
For one of those "Unfilmable books" I thought it did okay.
BUT, I've always been a little sad that the version with Giger's set concepts was never brought to fruition.
All that said, if ever a film needed remaking with modern tech, and "we don't much care how long it runs" mentality... Dune is it.
Case:
--- Quote from: Farideh on 28 Jun 2020, 14:42 ---
--- Quote from: Tova on 15 Feb 2019, 21:16 ---I'm interested in this, so I'll chime in for now by saying that I've read the first Dune book only.
--- End quote ---
Ditto.
I once tried watching the movie, and my father almost physically blocked me off from the screen while yelling: "No, it's a terrible movie! You'll hate it!" :D
--- End quote ---
I see what he means - I guess anybody who has been through both the book and the movie would - though that seems a bit extreme to me.
It's not as good as the book. It deviates from the book in weird, awkward ways. Sometimes weird, awkward and reallyreally bad ways. The closing scene is beyond terrible. It doesn't even try to do justice to many of the myriad philosophical themes Herbert crammed into that one monster of a book (*).
But the visual aesthetics, the feel of Arrakis, are brilliant (... except, yknow, when they're not... ) . And he does a good job transporting the sheer weirdness of the Dune-Universe to the screen, the audacity of a vision so different from everything else. It's a pretty mixed bag, IMO - the things Lynch gets right are glorious, those he gets wrong are pretty horrible.
I think it's better to watch the movie before you (re-)read the book, otherwise the 'modifications' that Lynch made are probably pretty jarring, and likely to ruin your enjoyment of the things he does get right.
And I think that while the movie isn't strictly speaking a part of the Dune canon, it does have its place in the Dune experience.
(*) Though I guess one could argue that Herbert didn't always succeed in bringing his vision to paper, either - I've been through Dune four times,, but I don't feel I ever really 'got' his vision of how clairvoyance in the Dune verse works, or all the implications he was trying so hard to convey. I guess some things were much clearer in his mind than they are on paper. Or maybe it's just me?
Farideh:
I'm terrible when it comes to 'watching movies based on books that I've already read'. I'm such a stickler for the details, to the point that I just walk away so I don't ruin the movie for my husband. He doesn't really like it when I keep a running commentary of how a certain scene isn't in the book, or is in the book and should've been included in the movie, or that they took such massive liberties with the story line (looking at you, 'Ready, Player One')
Tova:
I'm actually the opposite. I do not in general think it is to the benefit of a film to try to stuff in every detail of the book being adapted. It's the filmmaker's job to ask how each detail in a book either progresses the plot or characterisation, and ask themselves whether there is a more concise and cinematic way of achieving the same goal. The language of cinema is very different to that of a novel, and the only way that a film can be "as good as" the book is to adopt that language and play to the medium's strengths.
Farideh:
Good point, I explained myself badly.
Yes, it's impossible to put every little book detail into a movie. Even smaller books would turn into 12 hour movies at that rate, and let's not even talk about LotR. What mostly annoys me is when the movie storyline differs wildly from the one in the book, to the point where the biggest similarities are the names of the main characters. I've seen some very good movie adaptations, like 'The Hunger Games', or 'Rosemary's Baby'.
Then again, I sometimes take offense at movies for depicting things differently than the way I imagined it. That's my problem, not the movie's :)
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