Neither Thufir or Piter dressed like their House leadership. Even if they don’t have a uniform, they seem to stand apart in both cases. Thufir is old and very seasoned, perhaps the best Mentat there is, so maybe his uniform is just an old relic of former wars. Or maybe he’s just stodgy and likes to dress in more formal “Mentat dress” attire while Piter is a bit of a outcast or renegade relatively speaking and shirks tradition.
Similar experience when I explained it to my wife. But I’m not sure it’s reasonable to expect anyone to have a “woah” reaction anytime you need to educate them on the ride home. I don’t agree that this somehow validates the lack of importance on screen. World building is always a fickle beast. I think it sometimes tires a lukewarm viewer, but once they get into the meat of the story it’s the special sauce that brings them back over and over again instead of it just being another story they kinda enjoyed that one time.
ISTR that in the book Piter is described as a “Twisted Mentat” who the Tleilaxu have conditioned to operate without concern for ethics or morality. Perhaps that’s what his differently styled uniform is meant to represent.
I’m pretty sure the Feyd marrying Jessica’s daughter was a BG secret. They would get the emperor to order such a marriage under the guise of making peace between Atreides and Harkonnans, while meeting their goal of solidifying a genetic line since Jessica is the Baron’s biological daughter.
What bothers me the most about the movie is the completely unnecessary complication of multiple languages. In the books it is clear that everyone in the Imperium speaks some dialect of Galach, except for very fringe groups. The way it is presented in the movie, with different languages for the Harkonnans and the Sardaukar, and with conversations with two sides each speaking their own language but with perfectly mutual intelligibility just made me think everyone has a Babelfish.
I’m pretty sure the Atreides are described as having a “battle language” that they use to communicate secret info among their legions. It only makes sense that the Sardaukar would have something similar. Moreover, aside from the Fremen, we don’t really see much of the day-to-day lives of commoners in any of the books or movies, so we can’t rule out that they speak vulgar languages and Galach is something spoken exclusively by the elite, a la Latin in medieval/Renaissance Europe (which fits with the Imperium being modeled after the Holy Roman Empire with a smidge of Byzantium mixed in).
The conversation between Piter and the Sardaukar general makes perfect sense, IMO - Piter is a Mentat and is likely fluent in dozens of languages, whereas the Sardaukar general is accustomed to being a liaison between his troops and the Imperium and so would be familiar with Galach, but insists on speaking his own language either out of pride or obligation.
I actually really liked this aspect. It helps emphasize that this is a big world with distinct cultures. Paul was educated enough to know Yueh’s language and Jessica’s sign language. The Fremen and Sardukar are more than just savages or just disenfranchised poor. They are a race with a fully developed culture.
It basically just says to me that in the future with space travel being common people will need to evolve to flow between languages. That make sense and I didn’t have any issues with following along. Hell, the subtitles for the foreign languages tended to be easier to follow than the whispered English.
Yeah, I definitely liked that part. Too much science fiction elides over language, and ends up flattening culture. I wish the English had better sound-mixing, but was fine with the other languages.
Yes, Feyd-Rautha marrying Jessica & Leto’s daughter was supposed to produce the Kwisatz Haderach. Jessica defying her orders and birthing a male screwed all that up - and even from the beginning of the book, Reverend Mother Mohiam suspected Paul could be the KH, but didn’t have enough evidence to be sure.
Yes, in the book everyone has their own battle language - Atreides, Harkonnens, & Sardaukar. So it’s a perfectly useful thing to use when you don’t want to be overheard. The Fremen had their own language as well, which they used a lot more casually than battle language.
My take isn’t all that interesting, but since a few here have wondered how much someone who read none of the books or saw any prior adaptations could follow along, here it is. I somehow managed to be completely unaware of the books/movies until this movie came out, and all I’d heard about it when I sat down to watch it at home with my husband was that it was like Game of Thrones meets Star Wars. I liked GoT; meh on SW, and I’d say I gave this a meh plus. I felt like I was mostly following along, thanks in large part to turning on closed captioning. But having read this entire thread now (including the spoilers, which tend to enrich rather than spoil my experience) I now feel like I actually missed a lot, and might have liked it better if I’d gotten more.
A lot of the plot felt like stuff I’ve seen before. And maybe some of it was, even if the stuff I’d already seen was written after this book. I also agree with the “flat” characterization. It didn’t really grab me, or make me care. The spice = oil and desert planet = Middle East symbolism seemed obvious and forced. I rolled my eyes at the religious stuff. Leto’s death seemed foretold from the first few minutes and not like quite the crisis they were trying to make it. The ugly bad guy seemed over-the-top ugly and bad. The intense emotion of mom and son (at everything but Dad’s demise) felt unearned. I saw Chekhov’s gun go off several times and understood what was happening, but I didn’t see the pistol until it fired.
Still, interesting premise. I’d be willing to watch part 2.
I’d say it does, to some degree, suffer from the “Seinfeld Is Unfunny” phenomenon. We probably wouldn’t have Star Wars or Game of Thrones if there had not been Dune to inspire them, but because those franchises have proven more popular and profitable, they tend to define the genre more than the original did. The friend I mentioned upthread said to me that the Bene Gesserit Voice just felt like a ripoff of the Jedi Mind Trick and I had to remind him that Dune was published 12 years before Star Wars came out. We had a similar exchange when I was explaining the Butlerian Jihad to him and how it totally wasn’t stolen from Terminator.
It blows me away that Dune is only 12 years older than Star Wars. It feels much older than SW to me, but it’s really that I just haven’t accepted how old SW is since it came out during my life.
This is so true about things in general. I was talking to a friend and told him that The Matrix and the Phantom Menace are now the same age Star Wars was when they came out in 1999. Star War was (only) 22 years old at that point but I was born in 1978 and grew up seeing it on TV, so it seemed eternal to me. Matrix and Phantom Menace seem more recent than that.
I went to see this because I’ve loved the previous films of Denis Villeneuve (especially Incendies).
To familiarize myself with Dune’s story beforehand, I read the graphic novel and watched David Lynch’s (1984) movie version.
As others have said, the visuals in Villeneuve’s film were really breathtaking. My overall impression was that this film adaptation overcame many of the flaws of Lynch’s film.
Question for Dune aficionados! Is there any justification in the book for why sand-eating worms need saber-sharp teeth?
I just saw it myself. The visuals were indeed impressive. However, I thought the film was a bit too long. Too many long shots of the the vistas. I also thought Chalamet was quite poor in the main role, though the other actors were quite good.
116, according to the Dune wiki, which is actually younger than I thought he was considering what the Spice does to the human lifespan. Miles Teg, a similarly celebrated Mentat in Heretics of Dune, is 296 during the events of the book.
they tried that in the tv version of the 1984 movie … they had a 10-15 minute history lesson that was narrated over drawings and paintings and explained the house set up … It still confused people