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Foundation vs Dune
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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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I think Dune has very many themes, but the biggest one is the dangers of religion (which is not really portrayed in the movie I think)
The 2022 movie covers the first half of the first book and that theme only really comes into its own in books 2 and 3.
I mean, I feel like manipulating a whole culture's established religious beliefs to place themself at the highest seat of power and war a holy war in their name is a pretty poignant display of "religion bad, m'kay"
Yeah but if you don't know about the books it doesn't necessarily look like manipulation. That's only made overt when you read the latter books
My partner never read the books and easily caught the massive religious manipulation angle through the film. The even more massive scale of it all was obviously not revealed because of when it takes place, but it's still present
Helps that it's outright stated near the beginning of the movie.
If you haven't read the books the movie makes no sense. It's nothing but a string of half-ass book references and pretty scenery. Even having read the books the movie was still all over the place. It was a string of individual scenes with barely anything to connect them besides having the same characters.
And since I'm finally venting about it, if they were going to just focus on visuals, they could have at least gotten the scale right. They have these giant buildings and ships alluding to a mass of people keeping it operational. Then we never see more than like, 6 people. And the one scene where they pulled out all of the people at the climax, where it makes sense to show every soldier during an all hands emergency, we see, like, 50 people. They're supposed to have thousands of soldiers. Losing a dozen soldiers in the book would have been acceptable losses. The movie force we see, that would cripple them.
Also, it should have ended just after the attack. Use all that extra time to actual get you invested in House Atreides and Paul. In anything really. That movie was so bad. I've always like Lynch's Dune for it's insanity, but compared to the new one, it's a legitimately good movie. At least there's a story.
It was supposed to be a warning against following charismatic leaders
One of the reasons why the original movie was so good. Stripped out all the religious garbage and kept the worms
The original movie was good for the art direction and fantastic acting by supporting characters.
That's kinda where it ends though, comparing the two of them, the new Dune features human emotion which is pretty cool; all the main characters were kind of animatronic feeling in the old one imo.
The source material has limitations. It is difficult to make characters have depth when in the novel they have none. If you sit down and try to describe the characters of Dune you can really only do it by their job or what they did in the novel. You can't describe their personalities. Compare this to Star Wars.
But, the book characters were intentionally written to be pretty emotionally flat? The Gom Jabbar scene... Jessica showing emotion doesn't make it a bad scene, but it kind of undercuts how the Bene Gesserit work. Their whole thing is conquering their emotions and being composed and in control all the time. Jessica's turmoil is internal while her face is stoic. That's her whole character at that point in the book. she's not a very good Bene Gesserit, but she's faked it real well.
Except Duncan and Gurney. They should have had personality. That's Their purpose in the books. To be the ones who show Paul what being a real human is like beyond the Duke (laden with responsibility and the knowledge that his entire house and the thousands of people that rely on it are teetering on a knife's edge) and Jessica (basically a magic robot concubine who was raised from birth with the sole purpose of furthering a generations long genetic project her ~~captors~~ teachers were working toward). They're meant to be a breath of fresh air that give Paul the foundation to be a real boy.
Ok, either the internet can't identify a great joke or... no, I guess the only reasonable explanation is that your comment whooshed over people's heads.
It's all good, I mean I read both of the books like ages ago and those were the only things that bubbled up out of the scary dark corners of my memory when the opportunity presented itself.
You don´t mean that abomination made by Lynch that shits all over the book do you?!?
I mean one of the single best sci-fi movies of all time made by Lynch that takes out all the religious garbage and keeps the worms.