Denis Villeneuve’s Dune

I read half the book so far over the last month, just about got to where the movie ends.

I had a good idea what was going on, but my two friends needed a recap halfway through, who was who, why were they there etc.

The entire plot is set in motion by the emperor who is never seen, and only referred to by some exposition.

The music can be overbearing, and the dialog hard to hear at some moments, so when they start throwing in terms like bene geserit, it can get confusing to someone not familiar with the subject (what did she say? did I miss this?)

I don't really think you need more than a few minutes on the Emperor and Irulan tbh. Some of it is already planted with what Paul said to Kynes as an option and the scene on Caladan with the emperor's representative. You can do a lot of the stuff around the Emperor and his actual introduction in Harkonnen scenes.

There's a good bit to do in that film though so they'll need to just explain stuff again.

I have to admit to feeling a bit ambushed in the cinema. I went into the film not knowing anything other then what the trailers showed and who the director was and was fairly excited but also very interested on how they were going to tackle the source material this time.

So I actually swore in the cinema when the title came up and out of nowhere "part 1"

I am not against the film being intentional split

I am happy they are directly adapting more of the material and so on.

But I do feel genuinely ambushed in that the part 1 subtitle is in none of the advertising or posters or anything.

If I knew going in I would have been fine, if the film had advertised itself accordingly.

But psyching myself up for what is a fairly long film and then finding that a lot of what I was expecting is not going to be in this film (further sin to the film's advertising they abused Paul's visions quite a bit in the trailer to sell more of the events of the latter half of the story in the film)

Film itself was fine, visually great and great sense of scale and other wordly. But still my first thought out of the film was "I was tricked!" I enjoyed the trick but still f*ck you Warner Bros.

Well, it's probably 20 years since I read the novel but I was sure that the scene in the emperor's throne room was in the book, perhaps somebody that's read it more recently can clarify that. It is true that a faithful adaption isn't always a good adaption though. Literature and cinema are two very different animals, so I don't tend get upset if an adaption has to change things in order to effectively tell the story.

To that end, I think spending 5 minutes of the film on a scene like that would have really helped. A lot of the audience seemed kind of confused about the various factions and their motivations and adding that scene from Lynch's Dune would have clarified a lot of what confused people. It establishes the spacing guild, the impact of spice use and the fact that it enables prescience, because the navigator is there to question the emperor about his plans. It also established the emperor's motivation for asking the Atreides to take over Arrakis and it establishes the Bene Gesserit and their role in the politics of the novel as well as their powers (when the emperor dismissed them from the conversation fearing that they might use those powers to uncover his plotting).

In other words it was an important scene that established a lot about the universe for the audience and without it the audience might well be confused or unengaged by being merely told things in clunky exposition without actually seeing them established.

It was grand, looked and sounded good. But found a lot of dialogue very hard to understand personally.

I didn't realise this was a part one of two, so felt I didn't really get much of a payoff from this movie, it was over just as it was getting going.

The meeting between the emperor and the guild never happened in the book if that's the scene you are talking about

Saw it earlier. Had it hyped up beyond belief in my mind for the past year.

overall, it’s ok...average. There’s a lot of filler/boring scenes that could’ve been done away with.

the look of the film is good, the sand worms and technology looked the part

yer man the head of the Arkonon family was proper macabre and Dave Bautista was very scary ...

thought timmy Chalamet was ok but not very believable in terms of being a warrior - he’s like a fcekin twiglet.

brolin was v good too when he was teaching chalamet to knife fight

On the other hand a good few ppl walked out which is never a good sign

7/10 from this non-book reader. I respected it more than I loved it.

Production-wise, everything is operating at the highest level - sets, sound design, production design. And there's about an hour or so of fantastic set pieces following a very drawn-out opening hour. But overall, it's so uninvolving and lacks any energy or magic. I'll probably watch the sequel but wouldn't be rushing out to it. Bottom-line, did the movie make me care enough about its characters? Not so much.

Man that sucks. I'm lucky working shifts that I can pick the quieter times

My opinion of this movie seems to be against the general consensus. There is no denying that the visuals are spectacular but the movie as a whole left me cold. I never really got invested in the story and the characters to me just seemed quite boring.

I enjoyed that immensely and "immense" is the right word. My God it looked huge. The scale of the ships and scenery. The overall design of everything. From the very start when the Emperor's herald descends the ramp to, of course, the worms.

The casting was spot on (As we knew it would be). I was initially on the fence about Chalmet for Paul. Simply because I haven't seen much of him. I think the only thing I remember him in is as a young Casey Afleck in Interstellar (The resemblance was so striking that I knew his grown up character would be played by Afleck). I thought he would be too weak. But, as I thought more about it leading up, I thought, yeah, he's royalty on a cushy planet (Caladin) but with combat (And Bene Geserit) training so, he wouldn't exactly be pampered and preened but he also wouldn't be a hard-a$$. So it made sense. But thankfully, he was great. And, as everyone online is saying, Ferguson was fantastic too.

It has been years since I reread the book (My first time was over 30 years ago) and changes need to be made for the sake of timing and shaking up some of the casting a bit (I believe the people complaining about gender swapping Dr Leit Keynes shut up when they saw how fantastic the actor was). So it has been some years since I reread the book so I'm not sure how huch it diverges from the book but I'm OK with that: Adaptations are that - Adaptations - They will rarely be literal transpositions.

So I really liked that. Hope it makes as much money as possible given the current situation of piracy, Covid, TV release in the US etc. As someone has said, they need to be in the desert filming NOW (Initially I thought they were filming part 1 & 2 in one go. Was disappointed when I heard about 2 months ago that that was not the case).

Second film will be tough though.

Just thinking back on my first viewing of Dune yesterday

although it’s ok for what it is, I would’ve preferred if it had taken a trippier, more surreal, other worldly type of vibe.

we hardly got any sense of what the Spice (melange) does psychoactively for example.