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I think if you've read the book, it's a good watch. But the movie does very little character building, or maybe it tries to do too much of it too fast. Without
by kgwxd 5y ago
I think if you've read the book, it's a good watch. But the movie does very little character building, or maybe it tries to do too much of it too fast. Without the preset idea of what the characters are about, I could see how the movie might be a bit flat.
- dylan604 5y agoToo fast? The movie is longer than the original and only part of the story is included. How much slower can they make the story playout?
- dragonwriter 5y ago> The movie is longer than the original and only part of the story is included The original is a dense 200,000 word novel, not the 1984 movie you seem to be referencing, which itself a cut a lot.
- dylan604 5y agoSure, at this point I'm just hoping it doesn't get Hobbit-ed by making shit up to pad the time and introduce characters not in the original material.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> I'm just hoping it doesn't get Hobbit-ed by making shit up to pad the time and introduce characters not in the original material. Well, its being made into two movies instead of The Hobbit’s three, and the source material is about twice as long as The Hobbit, so I think the risk of that is a lot lower. 3-4 hours film per 100K words is probably reasonable [0], the cureent Dune is still very squeezed where The Hobbit trilogy was...very much not. [0] E.g., the first season of Game of Thrones, roughly covering the plot of the book A Game of Thrones, and which hewed pretty close to the source but still cut a fair amount, was 9.5 hours for ~300K words of source material.
- cygx 5y agoThe rough cut of Lynch's version clocked in at over 4 hours, and the intended cut (which never saw the light of day) was supposed to be almost 3 hours long.
- alistairSH 5y agoThat was my one major complaint. Many of the secondary characters don't get the screen time they deserved. But, I assume doing so would push play time from 2.5 hours to 3+, or cause a split into 3-4 parts instead of 2. Worthwhile sacrifices, I suppose. After all, for anybody who wants more, there's always the book.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago> or cause a split into 3-4 parts The first novel is already split into 3 well-defined acts. I think it would've made sense to make 3 films. It would have given them some breathing room to build up the world and the establish the characters in the first film, and it would have ended with a tremendous climax.
- handrous 5y agoThere are lots of little bits of subtle characterization and character-arc work in it to pick up on, though some of them require some connecting-the-dots and lateral thinking. Which, in a way, lets you, the viewer, play the role of a Dune character, picking out little hints and signs and extracting meaning. This isn't to defend the movie if people find that this doesn't work for them (it may, indeed, be a failed effort—I don't know, I can't view it as a version of me who hasn't read the book and seen the two previous screen adaptations) but it does have a lot of character-building, much of it's just blink-and-you'll-miss-it or requires the viewer to take an extra step or two in their head to put it together.
- kgwxd 5y agoI noticed the subtle bits but, personally, I doubt I would have been able to notice them in the first place, let alone extract much meaning from them, without being primed by the book.