I saw it on Saturday and like some others, have not read the novel (or any of the sequels) but I did see the David Lynch movie, years ago. One question; I don’t think we ever saw the emperor on screen. Was that consistent with the novel? It seemed odd to me.
Am I the only one that pictured Ian McDiarmid every time the emperor was mentioned?
Yes, in the novel the emperor doesn’t show up in the time period that’s been covered so far.
Yes, but then you get Star Wars: The Phantom Menace with its treatises on tariffs, blockades, etc. 
It may be an intractable problem.
That is just silly. Adaptations routinely make much bigger changes than in just terminology. This would be a trivial change, along the lines of changing “philosopher’s stone” to “sorcerer’s stone.”
Make up some other term. Or even translate it to English, “little mouse” or some such. It would even be a benefit to aiding people unfamiliar with the story to give them fewer vocabulary words to learn.
Oh, and of course a lot of the dialogue was so muted that it was incomprehensible.
Well, yeah, that would be a possible change that would accord with what I suggested, but not the only possibility. Are you somehow reading my comments to mean that the Fremen should be portrayed as white Europeans? Because that’s not at all what I said.
Pretty much spot on. It’s a story that’s prime material for a TV series not a feature film.
Obviously that’s not true, but even the book ignores it. How did humans get to Arrakis in the first place, without FTL travel?
And who was the first person to change water of life? Since drinking it without being a bene gesserit kills you, who was the first person to develop this ESP power, and how did that person convince someone else to do it?
The Fremen aren’t the good guys. They’re all just different flavor of bad guys.
Not always. But it fools you into thinking it does.
No, I am not and I’m sorry if I failed to express myself clearly. I don’t like the idea of taking away similarities between fictional protagonists and real-world non-white peoples.
Why not Chani = scarlet? (Depending on the pronunciation…) [An online Dune wiki says she has “long tawny-red hair”, but no reference as to where they got that from.]
Not for the film, of course, but if anything the vocabulary section at the end of the novel needs to be expanded. For example, “mu’addib” [educator] and “jihad” [struggle] are not “Arabic-sounding” so much as genuine Arabic words that mean something, “Fremen” refers to real Sahara-dwelling Muslim nomads, etc.
Slowly, presumably.
Even worse, I think.
How did humans get to Arrakis in the first place, without FTL travel?
I am firmly of the opinion that the AI rebellion was probably what led to the need for Spice as a navigational tool. I posit that AI piloted ships for a very long time before the rebellion, spreading humanity throughout the Universe.
Remember that the whole “folding space” thing was made up for the 1984 movie (and then co-opted by the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson Abominations). In the novel, navigators used spice to dimly predict the immediate future, to travel as safely as possible. It’s even stated they used to use other drugs before spice was discovered, but spice is much better. So you don’t need spice for FTL travel, you need it for safe, reliable FTL travel.
Why is it “worse” to have real words from a non-White culture in a major film? Why do you want to replace everything in the film that is “non-White”?
That’s what happened in the books. Without AI they needed some other way to navigate FTL ships and that was with Spice.
And also that once the Guild Navigators used the spice nothing else would work so they kinda got themselves painted into a corner with that. The question of whether or not they could train up a new crop of navigators who DIDN’T use the spice was never addressed.
Yup. Both mentats and the SG are work-arounds for the prohibition on “thinking machines”. Before then they had computers to do that stuff.
The broad outline of the Dune universe is
- Slow interstellar travel spreads humanity across the galaxy. No galactic polity.
- Fast interstellar travel made possible by computers. War unifies galactic polity.
- Religious crisis destroys computers and stops interstellar travel.
- Fast interstellar travel made possible by augmented humans. War again unifies galactic polity.
- Secret of Spice with respect to interstellar travel discovered; triggers new crisis. (Events in Dune series.)