I just saw the movie today and I don’t remember seeing one either. IIRC, in the book it’s implied to be something like three or four months between when the Atreides arrive on Dune and the Harkonnen attack.
I’d say this is probably the most faithful of the Dune adaptations, and I’d like to have seen more of the subtle intrigue between the factions and more detail on the Mentats and the Guild, but that probably would have made the movie twice as long. I did like that they gave Kynes a more heroic death than her book counterpart, and that they used the entirety of the Litany Against Fear, but having Jessica recite it instead of Paul felt off to me.
The biggest omissions that I noticed was that they left out Leto’s “the sleeper must awaken” monologue, and the reveal that Kynes and Liet are one in the same is left out entirely. Also, I believe that it’s during their campout in the stilltent that Paul finds out about Jessica’s true ancestry.
I also noticed the similarities between Harkonnen and Marlon Brando.
The only subtitles I remember were for the locations. Though the whole story does take place over a decent amount of time, I’d say months rather than years, and most of what happens on Arrakis itself is all within a week.
Ok I just watched that section again on HBO. The worm eats the damaged spice rig, then we go to the Harkonnen planet where they are planning the attack, then we get Paul having a vision and then the attack. It’s at most a couple days later. There is no “2 years later” subtitle.
I’ve made a lot of comments in this thread, but I haven’t said anything about liking the movie.
I liked the movie, a lot. The big set pieces are there from the book, connected together by a substantially simplified plot. As I was watching I was wondering how someone who didn’t know the book could follow, since there was so much simplifying of the plot. The first time through the missing pieces seemed like holes. I guess they did a good job with the simplification since so many non-readers of the book have said that they could follow no problem.
They needed some mechanism to indicate that some time had passed before the invasion. Maybe they could have show the spice storage facility filling up or some such thing. Maybe pieces on the cutting room floor will be added in in an extended edition.
One thing that about the Guild Navigators: I thought there was mention in the movie about how the Guild needed spice-induced prescience to safely navigate interstellar distances. A major point in the book is that only the Guild knows that until after Paul changes the Water of Life, after which he uses that knowledge to force the Guild to side with him against the emperor. Did I imagine that mention?
Did they? I’ll admit to having a sense that the timeline was compressed, but only because I’d seen the SyFy miniseries and knew there were other scenes, with certain interactions among characters, between arrival and invasion.
But I honestly can’t say that the plot “needed” to be drawn out over months or years. I expected it to, and was a bit confused when it seemed to pass so quickly, but I can’t say how much of that is because of an actual problem with pacing and storyline development, and how much is just because of my preconceptions based on the miniseries.
It was mentioned in one of Paul’s filmbooks, but there’s no more detail than that; I believe the line was something like “The Guild Navigators use the spice to find safe routes between the stars”, and there was certainly no mention of prescience. Given the secretive nature of the Guild, I can see how they’d let it be known that they need spice to do their job but not reveal the reason why. Thufir is aware that the Emperor’s Herald needed three Navigators to make the trip to Caladan, so he probably knows that there’s something special about them even if he hasn’t reasoned out what it is.
I read the book… Maybe 40 years ago, and don’t remember it well. I found the movie easy to follow. I did remember bits and pieces, including a few things that are revealed later. But i had entirely forgotten about mentats, for instance (my husband reminded me) and the movie moves along fine without that. I did notice that a lot of people have tattoos that are obviously a mark or office. They seem to be the mentats, so that will be easy to bring up later, when it becomes important.
The movie did mention the importance of spice to navigation.
It is a little wonky that Harkonnen sabotages the spice collecting machinery when they are about to retake the planet by force. That’s effectively hurting their future selves. I think that could have been better done.
But mostly i thought they did a really good job of streamlining the story to make it fit into a pair of movies.
I did also see the movie version that came out decades ago, but didn’t remember anything except that i thought it was a lousy movie. My comment at the time was that it was a decent illustration if you knew the story, but failed as a stand-alone piece. Whereas i think this movie succeeds as a movie.
In the book, the Guild’s need for spice for any reason is a deeply guarded secret. They get nearly all of it from the Fremen, who are bribing the Guild to prevent anyone from putting up a satellite and observing their experiments and settlements in the deep desert. They’re not buying on the open market or anything like that. Guild representatives even wear contact lenses to hide their blue-on-blue eyes.
The readers don’t even find out about it until more than half-way through.
But did they do that in the movie? Did the Harkonnen actually sabotage production? Or is it just the reality that the desert is hard on machines?
…and people.
Or words to that effect.
Maybe there was a line of dialogue that made Harkonnen sabotage explicit in the movie, but then maybe not. It’s one of the elements of the plot that seemed noticeably different to me (by contrast with the miniseries, having never read the books), along with the compressed timeline on Arrakis.
And I also want to add that I kind of liked the extent to which the awesomeness of House Atraides was downplayed. Whether that was an unintended side-effect of the collapsed timeline on Arrakis, or a conscious decision (and perhaps the reason for the collapsed timeline on Arrakis), I think that’s a plus. Sure, they’re (still) not nearly as bad as House Harkonnen, but lest we forget, feudalism is… problematic, to say the least. Ditto with hereditary titles and offices. I’ve reached a point in the political spectrum where I would find it difficult to root for anyone purporting to favorably represent such a system, no matter how fine an individual they may be.
In the book, is the Gom Jabbar like one of the very first scenes with Paul? I actually thought it was more or less chapter 1 of the book. Then again, I am relying on my reading from about 2001 or so.
House Atreides certainly seems to think so. One of the advisors (I think it was the Mentat) explicitly tells the Duke that House Harkonnen sabotaged the Spice processing facilities when they left, and shows him a mostly empty container yard, and says all of those empty container slots are supposed to be filled with Spice containers.
The carry-all’s grapnel failing is maybe sabotage, maybe the desert is hard on machines, but the way the Imperial Adjudicator simply dismisses the possibility of sabotage out of hand, and the way the Duke and the other Atreides folk react to her pronouncement, sure as heck played to me as if it were supposed to be clear that the fix was in, and that the Duke and his advisors realize it.
If there weren’t deliberate sabotage, then the “we’re not going to make the quota!” scenes make even less sense.
Given what we actually see in the movie, my best fanwank is that the sabotage is actually a feint. Baron Harkonnen wanted to distract House Atreides, and force them to divert resources to fixing the sabotage and restoring Spice production rather than shoring up their defenses, and maybe lull them into thinking Harkonnen was just continuing the status quo of low-intensity “war of assassinations” conflict. If Atreides is expecting sabotage, assassinations, and political maneuevering, they may be caught completely flat-footed by an all-out invasion (as, indeed, they were).
Yes, of course they think so. And while the “feint” theory is certainly plausible as far as the compressed timeline, I might hope, in the alternative, that the difficulty in reaching production quotas says something about the nature of power as wielded in the Dune-verse. Sure, maybe the right leadership from the right house of hereditary lords might meet or exceed quotas without the brutality of the Harkonnen system.
But maybe, just maybe, the system is inherently brutal, and the only way to grease the wheels of commerce according to the feudal system the wider society lives under is through brutality. The right sort of noble lord isn’t going to fix the system. The system cannot be fixed. Only broken down and replaced by something better (hopefully).
I mean…sure, I guess that’s possible? But I don’t recall anything from the movie that would support that interpretion, other than the Adjudicator’s off-hand comment about the desert being hard on machines, which, again, I thought was supposed to be a clear indication that the fix was in, not that House Atreides was imagining sabotage to self-justify their own ineptitude.
Absolutely. In the book Kynes is definitely under instructions from the emperor to look the other way.
It is made clear from the beginning of the book (and I believe the movie as well) that Arrakis is a trap for the Atreides enabled by the emperor. The Duke enters the trap fully aware (the alternative is to escape to the periphery of the known universe as a “renegade house”) because of the promise of untold wealth if he can survive. Key to survival is to recruit the Fremen as a fighting force, but the timing and sheer magnitude of the Harkonnan invasion (as well as military support from the emperor) prevented that from happening.
I think so, parts of the story don’t make sense if the invasion is just days after the Atreides take over. Most importantly it takes some time for Kynes to come over to the Atreides’ side based on her (him in the book) interactions with the Duke and Paul and the realization that the Atreides intend to use some of their spice wealth to make Arrakis more inhabitable (which is Kynes’ long term goal as well). There is a key banquet scene in the book which moves Kynes in that direction (I’ve read that the banquet scene was filmed but cut - here’s hoping for an extended edition).
Kynes’ transition from imperial toady in the morning to Paul and Jessica’s savior that night makes no sense.
For me that makes the compressed timeline work. In the movie they send Duncan Idaho ahead of them to start the process of getting familiar with the Fremen as a first step to forming an alliance. When they arrive, he at least has some knowledge of them to share. They are barely settled in and starting to get the spice production back on track when the Harkonnen invasion hits. That gives them no chance to form an alliance, and Leto is slain. That leaves that job up to Paul as heir, which you see starting to happen at the very end of the film.
I know that all happens over a much longer period of time in the book but I think it works just as well in a shorter period of time, at least in the film.