Just skimmed through the banquet scene in the book. It appears to have happened around a week after the spice harvester incident; the invasion started in the early morning after the banquet. So my take is that the whole process from The Duke’s arrival to his death is less than two weeks. Kynes’ loyalty starts shifting during the spice harvester incident and continues to shift based on something Jessica says at the banquet. The shift is cemented by what Paul and Jessica say while Kynes is deciding to help them escape.
So the movie timeline is not as compressed as it seemed. Adding the cut banquet scene back in would help with explaining Kynes’ motivation.
@gdave, have no fear. I understand that my leftist interpretation of the film’s trajectory up to this point is mere head canon, buttressed less by the text of the film than the absence of text that I know was in other interpretations. At this point, I’m just… “fanwanking” as you might put it.
The idea of a legal state of low-key war between two powers where assassination is legally(?) accepted but more large scale conflict is not is interesting. It is entirely unlike our current world, as our politicians/leaders are willing to spend other people’s lives easily but would never create a state of affairs in which their own lives were in danger.
That didn’t really bother me. I can see why some people would think she was just playing Spiderman’s MJ…IN SPAAAACE!, but I think her demeanor made sense in both an artistic and narrative sense.
Save for a brief shot of her watching a Fremen attack on a harvester at the beginning, all we see of her prior to the end of the film is the smiling, gauzy figure in Paul’s dreams and visions. Her aloof reserve when they actually meet emphasizes that this is finally the real woman, not the girl of Paul’s literal dreams.
It works in the story, too - Chani is a Fremen, a reclusive, xenophobic people. Paul and Jessica are just soft offworld colonizers trespassing on Fremen land, of no value beyond the water in their flesh. Why would she help him kill a member of her sietch, a man she’s probably known all her life? She gains some respect for him after he defeats Jamis, and of course she later becomes his partner and lover; but at their first meeting, Paul is nothing more to her than a representative of the outlanders who are ravaging her home.
I’m reserving my judgment on most of the desert Fremen actors until the second movie, when we see more of them. But I was pleasantly surprised by Javier Bardem’s Stilgar.
In the book, IIRC, a big deal is made of the spice harvester incident, with Liet-Kynes realizing that, as mad as the Duke is about the harvester, he’s more worried about the men - to the point of risking both his and his son’s lives to save them. Something no Harkonnen would have even contemplated at all.
I took my husband to see this last night for his birthday. It’s not my preferred genre, and I knew very little about the story ahead of time. I looked up a plot summary on line, and he tried to fill me in based on the 1984 movie. (I’d seen bits and pieces of that one, but again, not to my taste.) I even read some of the beginning of this thread, but that didn’t help either.
With that background, I have to say I was pretty much bored by the whole thing. Trying to keep up with the names of the groups/families/races/whatever, trying to figure out how the various characters were related, trying to understand a lot of very indistinct dialog, and trying not to go deaf with the ridiculously loud volume in the theater.
Even afterwards, when he tried to explain to me what had gone on, there was still a lot I didn’t get. He wants to see the second half (assuming it gets made) so I’ll go with him, but I’m not looking forward to it.
I had promised my husband ahead of time that I wouldn’t snark on the movie, but it hurt not to comment on the dragonfly aircraft. And 9000 years in the future, knives are the weapon of choice? OK. Whatever.
They only explained this very briefly in the film. In Dune, personal forcefields (called shields) are cheap and readily available. They repel anything going too fast. Bullet-firing guns do exist but are useless against a shield. A slow-moving blade will get through a shield. IIRC A laser fired at a shield will cause a nuclear explosion of both the shield and the laser. I don’t remember why Herbert said this wasn’t common. Certainly, the Attreides had men willing to sacrifice their lives to kill Harkonnens- and the Harkonnens had ways of getting their soldiers to undertake suicide missions.
Lol, the whole ‘lasers and shields create atomic explosions’ rule is best not thought about too deeply. Think about the scene where the Sardaukar is using the laser to cut through the door… the laser just continues merrily in a straight line. But what if Paul had his shield on? What about accidents? I would assume accidents alone would cause 1 atomic explosion per city per planet per year.
Slight nitpick; it’s actually about 20,000 years in the future. The year 10,191 isn’t based off of the Gregorian calendar, but the Guild calendar, where Year Zero is the establishment of the Spacing Guild, which (depending on what you consider to be canon) happens roughly somewhere around 12,000 AD.
There’s a lot of subtle detail the movie doesn’t address, and which it probably would’ve been impossible to cover in a feature film format. I’ve been having a series of conversations with a coworker of mine who’s seen the movie and loves it but has never read the book, which have largely consisted of me explaining a bunch of the things from the book that the movie doesn’t cover, and it’s largely left me feeling like the narrator of this Youtube clip;
My degree is in Aero Engineering, and altho I graduated in 1979, I remember enough from my propulsion class that I started twitching when I saw the dragonflies…
I liked the movie, but they had to cut so many things that it just felt like a less campy version of the 1984 movie. Much of the political and human complexity of the original story just isn’t there, so it becomes just a beautiful modern action movie, not an epic tale. I liked that they chose not to include narration, but we’re missing a lot of context by not hearing the characters’ thoughts. The banquet scene would have helped, and a more explicit way to mark the length time the Atreides spent on Arrakis would have deepened the story. Casting is spot on, including Timothée Chalamet. (I don’t know about the mumbling, I saw the French translation.)
I really don’t see how people think Timothy Chalamet was good. He hardly ever emoted, even when his hand was being “burnt” in the box; the director had to rely on images of burning hands to convey the pain, when TC’s face should’ve been doing the heavy lifting. For most of the movie he was basically Charlie Bucket with bad dreams. There was no sense from him of much character at all.
The emperor’s plot is confusing to me. If he’s trying to hide his involvement, what’s his next step? “Oh, I pulled Harkonnen from the planet and sent Atreides. But Harkonnen all on their own defied my command and slaughtered Atreides, so, spiffy keen, everybody, let’s have a drink!” I’m missing something here.
Good god was the volume turned up too loud. It was cool when the sandworms made our theater seats rumble; but when random soundtrack wails and squalls were making us rumble, it’s too much. And TC doesn’t enunciate clearly enough to be understood over a horde of trumpeting elephants in the background, y’all.
That said, I really really liked most of it. It was freaking gorgeous. The almost monochrome palette really emphasized the textures on all the surfaces, from the wrinkled waves of the sea to the rippled dunes to the omnipresent brocades and bas-reliefs, and that was visually fascinating. The slow pace was exactly to my tastes: I hate movies that just whip from scene to scene without taking moments to linger on dialogue or visuals. The slow buildup could’ve been even slower, for my tastes.
I’m definitely excited by the second installment, but I hope Timmy gets some acting lessons before then. Maybe Mark Hamill’s available to teach him how to be a young science fiction messiah from a desert planet?
