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Thread: Denis Villeneuve's Dune

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    Default Denis Villeneuve's Dune

    I feel like we should have a Dune thread. It's probably going to be the biggest movie of the year, and it's only part one of an epic, plus there will be an HBO spinoff series. So...

    https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood...alamet-in-dune
    The first step of a hero’s journey sometimes begins with a push.

    At the start of Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic Dune, the young royal Paul Atreides prepares to leave the comfortable life he knows for a desolate, dangerous mining planet known as Arrakis, where his wealthy family will oversee extraction of a spice vital to the galaxy.

    If he only knew the chaos and death that awaited him, he might be even more sorry to leave.

    This is the first look at Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides on his native planet of Caladan from this December’s film version of the novel, directed by Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. The 1965 book was so seismic in its influence that its echoes still turn up in sci-fi and fantasy storytelling half a century later. Still, it has stubbornly defied appropriate adaptation itself.

    Tomorrow, Vanity Fair will provide an even more expansive exploration of Villeneuve’s quest to bring Dune to the screen, but today we begin with the central hero: Paul Atreides, a child of privilege raised by a powerful family, but not one strong enough to protect him from the dangers that await.

    As the Atreides family leaves the oceanic world of Caladan to take over scorching Arrakis, they are also becoming prey to the brutal rival House Harkonnen, which seeks to exploit the desert world they are about to inherit. House Atreides is just one more part of the landscape to annihilate.

    “The immediately appealing thing about Paul was the fact that in a story of such detail and scale and world-building, the protagonist is on an anti-hero’s-journey of sorts,” Chalamet said.

    In other words, he’s not dreaming of adventure. He’s resisting it. Afraid of it.

    “He thinks he’s going to be sort of a young general studying his father and his leadership of a fighting force before he comes of age, hopefully a decade later, or something like that.” Chalamet said. But fate has a different timetable for him. And he may possess powers even his trainers could not anticipate.

    In the shot above, the transport ships descend to take the Atreides leadership to their new destination. At this point, Paul is being taught the ways of war by a veteran soldier named Gurney Halleck, played by Josh Brolin. Paul’s parents, Duke Leto and Lady Jessica Atreides (Oscar Isaac and Rebecca Ferguson), must not only manage the spice mining on Arrakis—but also the politics at play in the broader galaxy.

    Beyond the fortifications on Arrakis, giant carnivorous sandworms rule the landscape, while a tribe of indigenous humans known as Fremen, led by Javier Bardem’s Stilgar, somehow survive in the crevices, fearful that their world is about to be turned inside out by those they see as invaders.

    Dune, still set to open on December 18, is one of the blockbusters that hasn’t yet shifted back due to the coronavirus outbreak. “Dune was made by people from all over the world. Many of these people are like family to me, and they’re very much in my thoughts,” Villeneuve said. “I’m so proud to showcase their hard work. I look forward to a time when we can all get together again as Dune was made to be seen on the big screen.”

    For more on Dune, see Vanity Fair on Tuesday.

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    Was wondering why this had not hit our forum yet. This dude can direct too.
    Bladerunner 2049
    Prisoners
    Arrival
    Enemy
    Sicario

    His early film Incendies is excellent as well.



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    I have not read the Dune saga but have heard great things about it. Isn't it more than one book? I wonder if it will be more than just one movie and one season on HBO. I am interested in this a lot.

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    His other earlier film Polytechnique is really great as well, so well done and disturbing. And I think his first film, or one of, is August 32nd on Earth, and it's very good too.

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    Very exciting!

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    Quote Originally Posted by MikeDuke View Post
    I have not read the Dune saga but have heard great things about it. Isn't it more than one book? I wonder if it will be more than just one movie and one season on HBO. I am interested in this a lot.
    I have the same question; I heard the movie only covers the first half of the book. Is that true? Will there be a second movie, or is there a minseries to complete the first book.

    (And Mike, yes, there are six books in the series, although they could be filmed as separate "arcs". The first three form one arc, volume 4 stands on its own, and the last two are closely linked. There was to be a 7th, but it was never written).

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    Thanks Peter. I am interested to see how this plays out.

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    From my understanding this upcoming film is the first half of the first novel, and there will be a second film. Whether they keep going I suppose depends on its success and if they want to keep going. The HBO series is not directly based on the Dune books, but I could be mistaken: https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/dun...ce-1203238799/

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    Thanks Mae. So the movies will be from the books and the HBO series is set in "the Universe of Dune". I like the casting that was already announced for the film. I don't know them all but I know enough to say that
    they are taking this seriously.

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    Cautiously optimistic for this version.
    28 in 23 (?)!!!!

    63 in '23!!!!!!!!!!









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    Quote Originally Posted by mae View Post
    From my understanding this upcoming film is the first half of the first novel, and there will be a second film. Whether they keep going I suppose depends on its success and if they want to keep going. The HBO series is not directly based on the Dune books, but I could be mistaken: https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/dun...ce-1203238799/
    Oh, thanks, Mae. That's right - I'd forgotten that the miniseries was a spin-off from the main novel sequence, about the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. It's not adapting Frank Herbert's work, and therefore less interesting, in my opinion.

    It would be interesting to see the later novels - God Emperor of Dune, for example - be given a miniseries treatment, although any visual medium for these books is pretty challenging.

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    With Vileneuve involved, there is no doubt in my mind this is going to be a slam dunk. Dude was born for this kind of large scale sci-fi epic.

    Can't wait!

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    Quote Originally Posted by Hunchback Jack View Post
    That's right - I'd forgotten that the miniseries was a spin-off from the main novel sequence, about the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. It's not adapting Frank Herbert's work, and therefore less interesting, in my opinion.
    True, but Villeneuve is directing it too, so I'm very excited for it too!

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    That’s promising, but the series will stand or fall on its writing. I am skeptical they will be able to do the original material justice - or show the necessary restraint. The Bene Gesserit cannot mind read, do magic, or fight like Black Widow.
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    Quote Originally Posted by MikeDuke View Post
    I have not read the Dune saga but have heard great things about it. Isn't it more than one book?
    http://www.howtoread.me/dune-reading-order/

    sk

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    Quote Originally Posted by frik View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by MikeDuke View Post
    I have not read the Dune saga but have heard great things about it. Isn't it more than one book?
    http://www.howtoread.me/dune-reading-order/

    sk
    Thanks. It's looks like a complex and involved story. I wonder how much of it they will really try and put on the screen.

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    Quote Originally Posted by frik View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by MikeDuke View Post
    I have not read the Dune saga but have heard great things about it. Isn't it more than one book?
    http://www.howtoread.me/dune-reading-order/

    sk
    Personally, I would recommend reading the six books by Frank Herbert, in the order stated, and ignoring the rest.

    I mean, okay, try the others if you like, but understand that they are someone else's extrapolation of Frank's work, and read like fan fiction. Really bad fan fiction.

    That's why I said that the seventh Dune novel was "never written"; Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson wrote two novels that continued the story - claiming they were based on Frank Herbert's notes - but it's obvious that their story was not anything like what Frank Herbert intended. And the two novels they wrote were just awful.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Hunchback Jack View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by frik View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by MikeDuke View Post
    I have not read the Dune saga but have heard great things about it. Isn't it more than one book?
    http://www.howtoread.me/dune-reading-order/

    sk
    Personally, I would recommend reading the six books by Frank Herbert, in the order stated, and ignoring the rest.

    I mean, okay, try the others if you like, but understand that they are someone else's extrapolation of Frank's work, and read like fan fiction. Really bad fan fiction.

    That's why I said that the seventh Dune novel was "never written"; Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson wrote two novels that continued the story - claiming they were based on Frank Herbert's notes - but it's obvious that their story was not anything like what Frank Herbert intended. And the two novels they wrote were just awful.

    HBJ
    This sounds like what I would do, assuming the next two are as good as Dune (half way through now). Whether it's Hemingway or F. Herbert I am not interested in someone taking over just because they are related.

    Does anyone know of a good "guide" to the Dune universe? I know an encyclopedia was released in 84 but anything newer/better/more complete?



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    Quote Originally Posted by kingfan2323 View Post
    Does anyone know of a good "guide" to the Dune universe? I know an encyclopedia was released in 84 but anything newer/better/more complete?
    Try this: https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Dune_Wiki

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    True story: I started reading Dune in my early 20's, but the book I was reading belonged to a girl I was dating at the time, and when we broke it off she took her book back (I was like halfway through) and I never had the urge to get back to it because it had an ominous association for me lol.

    Shit, I think I gotta read it now though.

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    Quote Originally Posted by mae View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by kingfan2323 View Post
    Does anyone know of a good "guide" to the Dune universe? I know an encyclopedia was released in 84 but anything newer/better/more complete?
    Try this: https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Dune_Wiki
    Thanks. Sorry, I meant a book about the book series universe.

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    https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood...ya-oscar-isaac
    Timothée Chalamet remembers the darkness. It was the summer of 2019, and the cast and crew of Dune had ventured deep into the sandstone and granite canyons of southern Jordan, leaving in the middle of the night so they could catch the dawn on camera. The light spilling over the chasms gave the landscape an otherworldly feel. It was what they had come for.

    “It was really surreal,” says Chalamet. “There are these Goliath landscapes, which you may imagine existing on planets in our universe, but not on Earth.”

    They weren’t on Earth anymore, anyway. They were on a deadly, dust-dry battleground planet called Arrakis. In Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 sci-fi novel, Arrakis is the only known location of the galaxy’s most vital resource, the mind-altering, time-and-space-warping “spice.” In the new film adaptation, directed by Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, Chalamet stars as the young royal Paul Atreides, the proverbial stranger in a very strange land, who’s fighting to protect this hostile new home even as it threatens to destroy him. Humans are the aliens on Arrakis. The dominant species on that world are immense, voracious sandworms that burrow through the barren drifts like subterranean dragons.

    For the infinite seas of sand that give the story its title, the production moved to remote regions outside Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, where the temperatures rivaled the fiction in Herbert’s story. “I remember going out of my room at 2 a.m., and it being probably 100 degrees,” says Chalamet. During the shoot, he and the other actors were costumed in what the world of Dune calls “stillsuits”—thick, rubbery armor that preserves the body’s moisture, even gathering tiny bits from the breath exhaled through the nose. In the story, the suits are life-giving. In real life, they were agony. “The shooting temperature was sometimes 120 degrees,” says Chalamet. “They put a cap on it out there, if it gets too hot. I forget what the exact number is, but you can’t keep working.” The circumstances fed the story they were there to tell: “In a really grounded way, it was helpful to be in the stillsuits and to be at that level of exhaustion.”

    It wouldn’t be Dune if it were easy. Herbert’s novel became a sci-fi touchstone in the 1960s, heralded for its world-building and ecological subtext, as well as its intricate (some say impenetrable) plot focusing on two families struggling for supremacy over Arrakis. The book created ripples that many see in everything from Star Wars to Alien to Game of Thrones. Still, for decades, the novel itself has defied adaptation. In the ’70s, the wild man experimental filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky mounted a quest to film it, but Hollywood considered the project too risky. David Lynch brought Dune to the big screen in a 1984 feature, but it was derided as an incomprehensible mess and a blight on his filmography. In 2000, a Dune miniseries on what’s now the SyFy channel became a hit for the cable network, but it is now only dimly remembered.

    Villeneuve intends to create a Dune that has so far only existed in the imagination of readers. The key, he says, was to break the sprawling narrative in half. When Dune hits theaters on December 18, it will only be half the novel, with Warner Bros. agreeing to tell the story in two films, similar to the studio’s approach with Stephen King’s It and It Chapter Two. “I would not agree to make this adaptation of the book with one single movie,” says Villeneuve. “The world is too complex. It’s a world that takes its power in details.”

    For Villeneuve, this 55-year-old story about a planet being mined to death was not merely a space adventure, but a prophecy. “No matter what you believe, Earth is changing, and we will have to adapt,” he says. “That’s why I think that Dune, this book, was written in the 20th century. It was a distant portrait of the reality of the oil and the capitalism and the exploitation—the overexploitation—of Earth. Today, things are just worse. It’s a coming-of-age story, but also a call for action for the youth.”

    Chalamet’s character, Paul, thinks he’s just a boy struggling to find a place in the world, but he actually possesses the ability to change it. He has a supernatural gift to harness and unleash energy, lead others, and meld with the heart of his new home world. Paul comes from a powerful galactic family with a name that sounds like a constellation—the House Atreides. His father and mother, Duke Leto (played by Oscar Isaac) and Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), take their son from their lush, Scandinavian-like home world to preside over spice extraction on Arrakis. What follows is a clash with the criminal, politically connected House Harkonnen, led by the monstrous Baron Vladimir (Stellan Skarsgård), a mammoth with merciless appetites. The baron, created with full-body prosthetics, is like a rhino in human form. This version of the character is less of a madman and more of a predator. “As much as I deeply love the book, I felt that the baron was flirting very often with caricature,” says Villeneuve. “And I tried to bring him a bit more dimension. That’s why I brought in Stellan. Stellan has something in the eyes. You feel that there’s someone thinking, thinking, thinking—that has tension and is calculating inside, deep in the eyes. I can testify, it can be quite frightening.”

    The director has also expanded the role of Paul’s mother, Lady Jessica. She’s a member of the Bene Gesserit, a sect of women who can read minds, control people with their voice (again, a precursor to the Jedi mind trick), and manipulate the balance of power in the universe. In the script, which Villeneuve wrote with Eric Roth and Jon Spaihts, she is even more fearsome than before. The studio’s plot synopsis describes her as a “warrior priestess.” As Villeneuve jokes, “It’s better than ‘space nun.’ ”

    Lady Jessica’s duty is to deliver a savior to the universe—and now she has a greater role in defending and training Paul too. “She’s a mother, she’s a concubine, she’s a soldier,” says Ferguson. “Denis was very respectful of Frank’s work in the book, [but] the quality of the arcs for much of the women have been brought up to a new level. There were some shifts he did, and they are beautifully portrayed now.”

    In an intriguing change to the source material, Villeneuve has also updated Dr. Liet Kynes, the leading ecologist on Arrakis and an independent power broker amid the various warring factions. Although always depicted as a white man, the character is now played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster (Rogue One), a black woman. “What Denis had stated to me was there was a lack of female characters in his cast, and he had always been very feminist, pro-women, and wanted to write the role for a woman,” Duncan-Brewster says. “This human being manages to basically keep the peace amongst many people. Women are very good at that, so why can’t Kynes be a woman? Why shouldn’t Kynes be a woman?”

    As fans will know, there’s a vast menagerie of other characters populating Dune. There are humans called “mentats,” augmented with computerlike minds. Paul is mentored by two bravado warriors Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck, played by Jason Momoa and Josh Brolin. Dave Bautista plays a sinister Harkonnen enforcer Glossu Rabban, and Charlotte Rampling has a key role as the Bene Gesserit reverend mother. The list goes on. In the seemingly unlivable wilds of Arrakis, Javier Bardem leads the Fremen tribe as Stilgar, and Zendaya costars as a mystery woman named Chani, who haunts Paul in his dreams as a vision with glowing blue eyes.

    The breadth of Dune is what has made it so confounding for others to adapt. “It’s a book that tackles politics, religion, ecology, spirituality—and with a lot of characters,” says Villeneuve. “I think that’s why it’s so difficult. Honestly, it’s by far the most difficult thing I’ve done in my life.” After finishing this first movie, he’ll just have to do it all over again.

  23. #23
    Oz the Gweat and Tewwible mae seldom gets put on hold mae seldom gets put on hold mae seldom gets put on hold mae seldom gets put on hold mae seldom gets put on hold mae seldom gets put on hold mae seldom gets put on hold mae seldom gets put on hold mae seldom gets put on hold mae seldom gets put on hold mae seldom gets put on hold mae's Avatar

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  24. #24
    Servant of Gan DanHocker is a splendid one to behold DanHocker is a splendid one to behold DanHocker is a splendid one to behold DanHocker is a splendid one to behold DanHocker is a splendid one to behold DanHocker is a splendid one to behold DanHocker is a splendid one to behold DanHocker is a splendid one to behold

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    I've always been fascinated with Dune. Loved the SyFy mini series, played the real time strategy video game, but always had some false starts with the novel. Every time I'd start it or think about starting it, I'd either get distracted by something else or just kinda be bored of it. It's been years since I've given it an attempt. Maybe I'll have to give the audio book a shot one of these days.

  25. #25
    Can Toi WeDealInLead has a brilliant future WeDealInLead has a brilliant future WeDealInLead has a brilliant future WeDealInLead has a brilliant future WeDealInLead has a brilliant future WeDealInLead has a brilliant future WeDealInLead has a brilliant future WeDealInLead has a brilliant future WeDealInLead has a brilliant future WeDealInLead has a brilliant future WeDealInLead has a brilliant future

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    Ooh, the Dune audio is one of my favourite audio books. It's multicast and there are atmospheric interludes between chapters. Well, on the one I listened to years back, at least.

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