Dune

Was gonna IMAX it last week, but was crazy busy and so it was impossible. Maybe this week if things settle down a bit.

Got my ticket booked for 10am this morning! Hoping for a quiet cinema. Quite looking forward to this!

Hmm, my adrenalines have dissipated slightly.

I'd give this a 7 or an 8 out of 10. I wouldn't necessarily say I even prefer it to Lynch's version.

The good things:
Timothee Chalamet is surprisingly good. I had no problems with him whatsoever. Same with the rest of the cast, even Moam. I warmed to his Duncan quite quickly - at least he had some humanity to him and you can see why Paul would idolise someone like that. I also had no problems with Isaac is mostly wasted as Leto though.

It looks mostly great, but in a very Spartan, empty way, in fact I probably had more problems with that than passion for. Caladan just seems like big empty rooms with nothing in them.

Zimmer's score is noisy but has no real themes. It's decent mood music, even if leans on the atonal a bit too often. When composers start referencing Ligeti, it's because it's lazy shorthand for LOOK IT'S WEIRD SCI-FI.

The Harkonnens are alright. They don't do much other than the obvious and have no real dialogue scenes.

What really irritated me:

Complete lack of imperial Lansraad shenanigans and an absent emperor.

The dialogue is banal and forgettable. I think they did this to distance themselves from the Lynch version since he used so much of Herbert's dialogue verbatim. It's a poor decision: it's mostly naffer, banal versions of it.

Really poor set-up of

Same as Lynch, all the background flavour and characters of Arrakis and Arrakeen are lost. Apart from the crowds when the Atreides arrive, it might as well be a ghost town.

Villeneuve does the big story beats well enough I suppose but even the big battle is a bit of a letdown. It's alright I suppose, but it's over and done with very quickly and there's no real personal stakes shown, apart from Duncan. And where are the fucking pugs!?!

I dunno, I was a bit disappointed. I'm fairly confident now this should have been a big-budget TV series with the length to get almost everything in, they finance much shitter things with tonnes of money.

I enjoyed BR2049 much much more.

So, 7 or 7.5 out of ten.

This this and absolutely this. It's like Dune Lite®.

They do at least try to foreshadow the golden path/jihad is an abomination really, so they get plus points for that.

Timotheeeeeee Chalamet I thought was great as the fish out of water fairly naive Paul but I’m not sure I buy him as a great strong leader . Towards the end he gave me big Hayden Christensen in Revenge of the Sith vibes.

Also then I also don’t see that plying out well with current casting.

The more I think about the more I go full binary on the new version. It’s got some nice incidental details for the fans (Gurney reading an Orange Catholic Bible!) but also occasionally has something that makes my inner lore pedant twitch (Mapes unsheathes a Crysknife and puts it away without drawing blood, and letting Jessica’s guards see it, the lack of detail about why , the lack of stained lips for the mentats)

Didn't Mapes nick herself under her sleeve before she put it back? I'm sure I remember that.

I imagine there's a tonne of deleted scenes, there's certainly gom jabbar dialogue in the trailer Gauis Helen says that's not in the final cut.

I just rewatched the scene to check and she definitely doesn’t. The fremen in the desert do though, which makes it absence more notable.

And to be clear I did really enjoy the film,
I’m just being super pedantic as I’m a super fan of Dune. I’ve re-read one or more of the proper books at least once a year for nearly 30 years.

I didn't mind the yueh thing. As it seems half arsed in the book.

Yeah, it’s heavily suggested that

I keep spelling spoiler, spolier so maybe my reasoning ain't what I think it is

It’s this sort of nuance that’s obviously hard to do in a two and a half hour movie, though Piter is barely a character in this - is his name even mentioned?

The TV series, for all its faults, does all the Machiavellian stuff really well and the Baron constantly fretting about being assassinated by his own heirs.