Denis Villeneuve’s Dune

They paid for the transport, in the book the Baron or Peter explains to the nephew that 2 legions of sardaukar were to join them and complains about that cost and Thufir predicts it'd be 2 legions but then the Emperor sent 50 leading instead.

I've just watched Dune again, for the 4th time 😁

Twice in the Cinema, once at home via an OLED and surround setup.

This time, via Skybox VR my Oculus Quest and sweet Jesus it has blown me away all over again! Absolutely incredible viewing experience and even more detail and lore/fan service nods that I missed the 1st 3 times.

Besides not anticipating the lengths the Harkonnen and Emperor would go to there's another point Leto makes in the book to Paul for triggering the trap. Basically that he knew the emperor and some of the other houses were coming for house Atreides, with Arrakis he knew it was a trap and in doing so could more clearly try to counter (with the emphasis on building a Fremen army to counter the Sardaukar). He felt that if they did not spring it fully and see the full range of houses arrayed against them, by pre-emptively outing the plot for example, then they would lose sight of the threat and would be blind again. His logic was that if you can see the hand in front of you holding a knife you can plan to counter a knife strike, if that retreats into shadow you don't know what it will return with.

I also liked the controls on the ornithopter and on BSG. I actually think it will age better than glass panel displays and/or VR/AR headsets etc. I remember watching BSG spinoff show, Caprica (Interesting but dragged a bit). In it they mention that human consciousness could be downloaded and saved to about 128 Gigabytes or something. I thought that was clever because, even at the time, it was counterintuitively a small value.

Regarding dating, I'm thinking of the likes of this:

You're REALLY not going to like Lord of The Rings so...

Saw this on Monday in the cinema and thought it was fantastic.

Wanted to go again, but out of curiosity I wanted to check if it was up on Kodi and bam! The full high audio fidelity version is available there to stream.

I assume this is the risk when they launch on a streaming site like HBO Max at the same time as the cinema.

My second watch was at home and I found myself concentrating on the quieter bits much better than in the cinema.

Definitely should be seen in the cinema first though

youtube seeing me looking for new sardaukar chant but sends me in a different direction..

Damn this is well put together! Some fine use of video editing and the pipe music!

(spoilers if you haven't seen/read Dune yet)

Dune | We are Atreides

"Mood! What's mood to do with it?"

I didn’t find Dune all that bad for it. It was atrocious in Tenet. I couldn’t make out a single word in some segments 😰

Well, while the music was ear-bleedingly loud, yeah, I'll agree with L'prof. I didn't have the same problem hearing dialogue with Dune as I did with Tenet.

The dialogue needed subtitles, in several parts.

I just watched it today, a few weeks after reading the first half of the book again in preparation. A few days ago I saw the last episode of the first season of Foundation on Apple TV+, and the contrast could hardly greater. (It's not a fair comparison, since Foundation is considered un-filmable if you stick closely to the original Asimov stories from the 1940s. This is the first of several attempts that actually made it to a screen by not adhering to the stories, for better and for worse.) So I was pleasantly-surprised at how faithful Dune is to the book, though the book helps by being fundamentally cinematic.

About the only problem I have with the film is that it didn't try to explain the really big picture. (Book spoilers ahead.) We see that the Harkonnen forces are bolstered by battalions of Sardaukar, and we are told they are Imperial forces. Which means that the remote Emperor supports that Harkonnen side and set up the Atreides clan for failure. However, the reasoning behind this is not explained at all. I only heard the word "Landsraad" once, with no details, and no mention of CHOAM at all. Maybe that will come later, but for now I can imagine movie viewers being a bit unclear about why things went down like that.

There are some very very odd things related to film and taxes.

I give to you the career of Uwe Boll.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/03/game-over-uwe-boll-worst-director

In finding that old post of mine, I noticed 1 hour Sardaukar is gone. 10 hour prevails (*nods* "Just so")

The creator has added this though!

9 mins in so far (.. thump thump ..)

When you factor in marketing and other costs the "break-even" point was probably $300-400m.

Putting aside the $370m box office take, it generated great reviews, probably did a bomb on streaming, and given the strong reviews they knew there would be increased interest in a sequel, all of which ties into future streaming/distribution deals as well.

So I'd say it made a small profit but they're thinking longer term.

Look at something like Alita Battle Angel, made $400m on a budget similar to Dune but was considered an under-performer and a sequel was not approved.

Afaik digital is Xmas week.

Didn't that happen with Forrest Gump? They screwed over the author. Made it seem that it was a flob so he couldn't get his share. Then they realised they didn't have rights to sequel and tried to buy that and he told them to... ahem.... leave.

It may have been an urban legend about buying the sequel but I believe they screwed the author/estate

Probably worth mentioning that it's gonna give away a bunch of the story that Part 2 of Villeneuve’s Dune will be covering.

Can't get to the cinema at the moment to see this but have the 4k Blu-ray preordered. Have a fairly decent home cinema so hopefully I don't lose too much.

Dying to see it, i enjoyed the audiobook only listened to it last year