E Unit

I liked Chalamet a lot more in Don’t Look Up than in this.

E Unit

Anyone interested in reading the screenplay, you can download it here.

https://thefilmstage.com/download-th...byWtHIvd9umkZQ

You can also down load all 2021 screenplays for Best Nominated for the category. There’s a lot of them.

Gunde

Meh. That was my reaction to this.
Looks beautiful, even stunning at times. But there's no story for such a long movie, let alone 2!
The world building was very lacking, so was the character motivations.
It felt like it was made mainly for readers of the book and hardcore fans of the franchise.

Hokeyboy

No story? lol

story

I lost out to Momoa.

Gunde

Yes. Maybe not in the books, but this movie was basically:
Bad guy kills good guy. Good guy's son escapes. Big sandworms are dangerous. Son has visions. The end.

Jay G.

Almost any movie would sound bad if one reduced the plot to the most basic elements.

This movie isn't light on story, but it is light on exposition. Rewatching the film this past weekend, I noted how almost every line of dialogue is important, conveying critical info, but there's not a lot of explanation or of tying various lines said by different people over several scenes together within the film. A lot of lines just scratch the surface, hinting at something deeper. As someone who read the book long ago, and more recently watched the David Lynch version, I understood a lot of the references and filled in the details, but this film skips a lot of the details, at least in terms of explaining them to the audience. The details obviously informed the making of the film, but aside from Jessica explaining to Paul some of the Kwisatz Haderach project, nobody ever just sits down and explains things. It also doesn't help that this is an incomplete film, only half to 2/3rd of the story, so it can seem incomplete that way, ending before there's really resolution to the story.

RichC2

Yeah, it's definitely one you have to pay attention to or you end up with a cliff's notes version that doesn't really work so great.

I think that's the main reason I still like theaters so much, get to avoid the distractions.

Josh-da-man

I can sort of agree with Gunde about Dune lacking story.

If I wasn't already familiar with Dune, I'd probably be bored and kind of lost, too. With a story like this, where there's a lot of technical detail and backstory, it's going to be difficult to explain to the audiences who are unfamiliar with the source material what is happening and why it is happening. And then you get all of those voice-overs in the Lynch Dune that everyone hated so much.

I'd say that watching Villeneuve's Dune cold without any prior knowledge, and watching it having read the books and watched they Lynch and SyFy versions, are very different experiences. If you're in the latter camp, you can look at all of the pretty visuals without having to try to figure out what's going on and why the things that are happening are happening.

Giantrobo

Yeah but people complain all the time about films being "Dumbed Down" or how they hate "Having everything explained to them" because they feel the film doesn't give them the benefit of doubt and instead thinks the audience is too stupid to get it. Then they complain when a film needs you to pay attention, needs to you think, and needs you to give it a chance to tell its story. Seems to me, more people than not do in fact want things "handed to them" and "have everything explained".....

Hokeyboy

Dune isn't a Marvel or Fast and Furious movie. This film demands attention; there are multiple story threads being woven at once. If someone claims there was "no story", they simply weren't engaging with the movie (for whatever reason), because there was so much narrative they literally had to split the book in half. Sort of like a Reverse-Hobbit.

Jay G.

You're assuming the two contradictory complaints are coming from the same people. More likely, there's one group of people paying a lot of attention and thinking a lot about what they're watching, and are intelligent enough to construct the backstory and details without it all explicitly being spelled out. Then, you have another group of people who either don't pay as much attention, or have difficulty following, and need things a bit more spelled out, and can get a bit upset when they don't catch on as fast as others do.


Not to mention that everyone's lines between not explaining enough/just enough explanation/overexplaining is going to be different. Like, I really like the movie Primer, but that movie does not hand-hold at all, and really only offers the barest explanations for some plot points, to where watching it twice just to understand what's going on is a common recommendation.

For Dune, it throws a lot of info in a tossed-off fashion, and if you miss just one detail, the subtext can vanish. Take the housekeeper, for example. On the surface, it seems like an almost unnecessary role. Jessica interviews her for the position, where there's a tense thing with the gift of a knife, then Paul saves her from the flying assasin thing, then next we see her, Leto finds her dead, stabbed by Yueh. There doesn't seem to be much to the roll. But the interview with Jessica crams some key details that could be missed. The housekeeper, Shadout Mapes, is Fremen. She suggests Jessica may be "The One," and also asks Jessica to prove so by identifying the knife, which is a crysknife, "a maker of the deep desert." Shadout then mentions "Lisan al-Gaib, the mother and the son," and "Tooth of Shai-Hulud."

"Shai-Hulud" was stated once before this, as the Fremen name for a sandworm. The term "maker" hasn't been mentioned before this scene, and is only said one more time later by Keynes, in a prayer during the sandworm attack on the harvester. So one has to remember one new, foreign word from the time it was said before and/or work backwards from the later mention of a common word used in a new way, to figure out Shadout was talking about sandworms. Or maybe one sees the inside of a sandworm's mouth later in the film and realize that those teeth would make a good knife. At least "Lisan al-Gaib" was chanted at the spaceport and explained some then, and Paul hears it again in the next scene while investigating the palm trees, but the scene with Jessica and Shadout is the only time the movie makes it explicit that the mother of the Lisan al-Gaib is an important figure in the prophesy and religion as well.

Another example would be of the time spent on the small desert mouse in the movie. it's first shown in a holorecording Paul watches, then Paul has a vision including one, then Paul sees a real one once out in the desert. This may seem like a small detail the film inexplicably focuses on, but since I've read the book and the Lynch film, I know there's greater significance to this mouse that will only play out in Part 2. This is where the fact that this film is incomplete may lead some to the the story is lacking, since certain story elements were set up but haven't had their payoff yet.

So there's a lot of details packed into scenes, but only mentioned or shown and not explained all that much. This is something that those familiar with the book or even the Lynch film can pick up on and fill in with their previous knowledge, but it may take someone being very attentive and with a good memory to pick up on these, or possibly necessitating multiple watches to catch them all and piece them all together using just this film.

milo bloom

New collaboration announced

Dr. DVD

Having re-watched this several times, I won't deny the movie is flawed, but Villeneuve was really in a tight spot in trying to adapt this and I still think he did the best he could given the source material . I think the best change he did, even though it may have seemed to water down the material a bit much to some, is get rid of most of the dense dialogue from the book and have the characters talk more like regular people. I also think he did a great job of putting a lot of major material for later into the movie as "easter eggs" of sorts for book readers.

RichC2

This is $12.99 on Vudu in 4k if anyone cares.

E Unit

For those who dug the Hans Zimmer soundtrack, he has 3 additional hours he wrote as a companion for these. They’re on Apple Music, not sure about any other services. Overall, it’s pretty good music, and a lot of it is better than what was in the movie IMO.

milo bloom

Anywhere to buy these besides Amazon? I want to move away from the Bezos-sphere.

Dr. DVD

Surprised nobody has mentioned the many Oscar nods this movie has received , in fact, I can't even find a thread about the Oscars themselves. Granted, I think Villeneuve was screwed from a Best Director nod, but the fact that it has so many is a testament to its overall success I feel. Definitely did better than a lot of people were predicting in its earlier days. That being said , I doubt it will win the major category, but feel it will definitely get love in the technical and art based ones. While I would think it a shoo in for Visual FX, I wouldn't be surprised if No Way Home won that just because it basically saved the industry this past year.

dex14

There’s two threads about the Oscars on the first page of the Movie Forum.