Dune

With his silly high pitched voice ! What was even the point of that ?

He's deaf so the Voice doesn't affect him, which is why Jessica and Paul have to manipulate the other Harkonnen (Scarface in the book, although they made the Deaf one Scarface in the film as well, so it's confusing).

Verbal Deaf people often have unusual voices, so I guess they were trying to be realistic. I can't imagine Deaf Harkonnens last long though in their society. Or maybe they're really progressive, who knows?

And the guy that plays him

advocate.agency/project/stephen-collins/

is profoundly Deaf.

Do you feel bad yet? Huh? HUH?

I am profoundly unapologetic.

I'm rewatching Lynch's Dune now (which looks gorgeous in 4K, btw).

Even Lynch, who's not known as an actor's director or particularly good at portraying melodrama, manages to set up Paul's relationship with Leto and his companionship with Gurney, Thufir and Yueh soooo much better than Villeneuve.

He also sets up the Atreides knowing they're walking into a trap but being overconfident in that knowledge. I don't know, the more I think about the new one the less I like it. It's a big empty spectacle.

THE SLEEPER MUST AWAKEN

I had a little laugh at the bagpipes. Some people think they were supposed to be intentionally funny. I don't think Denis Villeneuve does intentionally funny.

I swear they used a chunk of it at the end. 

I do like the new version but I do think it recontextualises the 1984 version as actually being quite a decent stab. It does go south when he meets the fremen with the montage and him actually being space Jesus but, with the material covered in both movies, they are tough to separate. 

I do love the Lynch version, though. Like properly love it. 

I love the Lynch version. I love the game of the Lynch version too, which manages to hugely expand on the lore, or at least the Arrakis side of things (as well as having an amazing soundtrack in its own right). I love most of the books.

I definitely like the new movie but I’m not sure I love it. For better or for worse, it’s Villeneuve first and Dune second, which you could argue is the same for Dune 84, but Lynch’s seems more Dune-ian in its aesthetics, and I read the first book many years before I even knew the Lynch film existed.

Part 2 officially given the green light.

The second half is, presumably, Studio Notes:The Movie. I do find it hard to believe Lynch would make him literally space jesus unprompted since he's never been literal in any other movie but then the modules and all that are pretty on the nose so maybe he just decided 'this is bullshit' and did what he wanted.

I'm doing bad things and comparing like for like scenes between the two films. The gom jabbar scene in the original is way more effective with the internal monologue. Jessica reciting the litany in the new one just didn't feel quite right, especially the way she expresses it, it doesn't feel particularly Bene Gesserit, and the short "my son lives" in the original accomplished the same effect.

In fact, I think leaving out the internal monologuing in general is kind of a bad move. I appreciated the odd moments they did it in either throwaway lines or making it something said in the Fremen language, and I get that voiceovers are considered poor form in modern movies, but still.

Lynch's final script has it raining on Arrakis, it's not ambiguous. What is a shame (that was cut) is Paul at the end saying he'll marry Irulan for lineage purposes but Chani is his concubine, and the famous line from Jessica straight from the novel telling Chani 'history will call us wives.' It was all filmed and is available as a deleted scene, and in the spicediver fan edit.

Interestingly, Lynch thought he'd get multiple films, because the plot is so dense, and his first script, which would have been about two and a half hours long, ends right after Paul and Jessica escape from the Harkonnen but before they meet the Fremen, so almost right where Villeneuve sliced it in half. By the time he gets to his third or fourth draft, the second half is massively compressed because De Laurentiis had told him 'NO DAVID ONE FILM ONLY'. And only by the last, final draft do we get it raining on Arrakis.

Obviously, Lynch used elements from the later novels because we have the third-stage guild navigator etc. Lynch was ready to do sequels, had the first one been a hit, they had the rights.

At what point do the books go shit? I meant to read the first early in the year but am going through it now.