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A few decades from now, I think Lynch's Dune will be looked upon more favorably than the recent films. They simply have more character and vastly more interesti

A few decades from now, I think Lynch's Dune will be looked upon more favorably than the recent films. They simply have more character and vastly more interesting set design, whereas the recent ones are visually indistinguishable from most other sci-fi films made at the same time.

lproven 3y ago
Agreed. One of the few uses of ever-improving "AI" bot generation of characters, faces, blending images, etc. I can imagine is the ability for fans to remix films and TV. For example... * to edit together the original BBC TV Hitch hikers' Guide to the Galaxy with the better SFX of the otherwise poor film. * to create extra episodes or installments of beloved serials where the text exists but the actors are dead * Or, in this instance, to mix Lynch's visuals and characters with Villeneuve's less scenery-chewing version which sticks closer to the text. One could even imagine editing Villeneuve's Arrival to stick closer to the text of Ted Chiang's sublime "the Story of your Life", where the way the aliens write is pivotal to the story but the screenwriters didn't understand.
- adastra22 3y ago
  It’s already being used to upscale Star Trek and Babylon 5. In 10-15 years, hopefully we can just input this script as a prompt, and get a full film in the style of David Lynch.
  - low_tech_love 3y ago
    If we keep on praising uninteresting, soulless movies like Villeneuve’s Dune while shooting down more artistic (but weirder) views such as Lynch’s one, then I think we might end up with the opposite: human crews making films based GPT’s scripts. The same thing happened with Society of the Snow: a technically beautiful movie with nothing to say other than being more “faithful” and using native actors. All that is appreciated but Alive was a flawed but much more exciting telling of the story.
    - adastra22 3y ago
      Well what I mean is that maybe a decade or so from now any one of us can create such a thing on our home computers.
- darkerside 3y ago
  > the way the aliens write is pivotal to the story but the screenwriters didn't understand Can you expand? I've read and watched, but don't recall anything similar. I watched the movie first, could be why.
  - stoneman24 3y ago
    If I remember correctly (can't find the book), the novel describes the aliens writing as a intricate multi-level rectilinear ideogram where in order to start drawing the design, you needed to know the exact ending of the entire message. Each ideogram was an entire complex reply. This implied that the aliens had a different sense of time. Whereas the movie, the writing was a simpler circular design with slight filaments hanging off and no mention of the encapsulated message as a whole IIRC. The movie design reminded minded me of the Lucent Technologies logo [1] (worked for them a short while, back long ago). I really liked the story and the movie but different media formats have different aims and constraints so it's hard to compare. I wish the movie industry would tackle more original content (like Arrival) rather than endless sequels. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent
    - lproven 3y ago
      This is correct. In order to learn to write the aliens' script, the interpreter must learn what Douglas Adams called "defocussed temporal perception". To write the language you need to be able to see into the future. Learning the script teaches her to do this. Seeing into the future she watches her own daughter die and there's nothing she can do to stop it. The scriptwriters didn't understand any of this so they made the aliens spray-paint stencils on glass and inserted a terrible irrelevant subplot about stopping a war.
      - darkerside 3y ago
        I don't think it's that they didn't understand. They movie just focuses on something different from the book. Where the book is highly conceptual and philosophical, the movie applies this in a very personal way. I walked away thinking about how every story ends in sadness and despair. Even though we can't see the future in this much detail, we all know how every human story ends. And yet, we engage with hope, and I think life is still worth living.
- low_tech_love 3y ago
  About Arrival, another one of the soulless, empty outings by Villeneuve, it has 7.9 on IMDb and 94% on rotten tomatoes. Obviously, nobody really cares about the details (unfortunately). If anyone is interested in the ridiculous amount of potential that Villeneuve threw away by becoming Hollywood’s generic sci-fi director, watch Incendies.
  - pier25 3y ago
    Couldn't it be possible that you just have a different taste? I'm not a huge fan of Arrival but I would not have said it's empty and soulless. I do think it's a good movie though.
    - low_tech_love 3y ago
      Absolutely; all my expressed opinions are my own.
      - darkerside 3y ago
        I loved the movie Arrival and can't agree it is soulless. Don't get so focused on what it lacks from the short story that you don't see what it does have that the short story does not.
        low_tech_love 3y ago
        I haven't read the original text, I just couldn't find anything interesting about it. I understand that there is a plot twist which I should've become interested in, and apparently some of the characters are supposed to have some kind of emotional depth, but it just totally missed me.
    - bawolff 3y ago
      I really like the movie, but i think it did lose some of the soul of the short story. The short story is essentially a story about grief using time travel as a metaphor but not actually having time travel in it. The movie has the character changing the past in a critical moment which kind of undermines the whole soul of the story imo. To be clear, i still think arrival is a great movie, just rather different from the source material in terms of meaning and "soul"
- hkt 3y ago
  What I immediately thought was "seasons 8 to 100 of deep space 9" Strange what we can learn about ourselves through association
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Krasnol 3y ago
I already do. There are some ridiculous changes to the story, and the end is so weird that it's funny, but the dialogues are so much better, the characters have substance. The scary ones are scary, the glorious ones are glorious. There is actual development in Leto. The whole world feels deep. Altogether, it feels like it was aimed at a more mature audience. The same audience that would also buy the books afterward if they didn't already read it. New Dune however feels more like Young Adult Entertainment. It looks fantastic, but the rest doesn't really matter. I didn't feel anything for any of those characters. Some of the dialogues were really cringe worthy (the Hangar dialogue for example) I went there with someone who never read the books. They were confused also didn't bother with most of the characters or what has become of them. I will go and see the second one though since it's Dune and I love Dune and this might also be the reason why this way of making movies works...the nerds still go in even if they complain and the "normal audience" gets something which won't be too challenging.
- k__ 3y ago
  I had the exact opposite impression. The old movies felt like a caricature of the books. The evil characters were ridiculous. In the new movie, I only disliked Momoa for playing himself again.
  - wincy 3y ago
    I thought the new movies were absolutely awe inspiring. I bounced off the old movie pretty hard and thought it was some weird joke I hadn’t been invited in on.
  - Fricken 3y ago
    Portraying the bad guy as a raving orange fat man was on point. The world just didn't know it yet at the time.
    - csa 3y ago
      Not op, but I thought that the roles for Rabban and Feyd were absolutely ham-fisted acting in the Lynch version. Maybe there was a goal to communicate complex character elements in a highly condensed way, but it just comes across as clumsy to me. Baron was fine if not better in the Lynch version. Note that I watched the Lynch version in a theater in the 80s and recently rewatched it, and my feeling about the acting portrayal of these two characters was the almost exactly the same then and now — painful to watch.
throw0101d 3y ago
> A few decades from now, I think Lynch's Dune will be looked upon more favorably than the recent films. By whom? Lynch's has been out for decades and is at 6.3: * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087182/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087182/ Villeneuve's is currently at 8.0: * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1160419/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1160419/ The RT for each are at 44% and 83%: * https://www.rottentomatoes.com/search?search=Dune https://www.rottentomatoes.com/search?search=Dune Even with recency bias, do you think their scores will change much in 20+ years? The recent one was so "indistinguishable" from recent sci-fi movies it won Best Original Score, Sound, Film Editing, Cinematography, Production Design, and Visual Effects: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accolades_received_by_Dune_(2021_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accolades_received_by_... How many other sci-fi films even get nominated (including Best Picture and Screenplay), let alone win? What were the accolades for Lynch's movie? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(1984_film)#Accolades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(1984_film)#Accolades
- djoletina 3y ago
  People tend to project their personal preferences with an aura of superiority to the unknown future when everyone will ascend to their level and reach enlightenment.
  - glitchcrab 3y ago
    Yup, too many overconfident people mistake their own subjective opinion for fact and then tell others that their opinion is wrong.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    It's rife in the arts. Such a thing would never happen in my preferred field of engineering, of course...
  - sho_hn 3y ago
    For what it's worth, I think he is most likely correct that 20 years from now, any discussion of Dune and its adaptations will call Lynch's version "inventive, but flawed" and Villeneuve's "drab and lifeless, aimed at movie-goers who had freshly aged out of Iron Man and wanted to feel like it". I can practically feel this article stare at me from the screen already, too. And it probably wants to provoke a little. If anyone still cares, that is. The reception of Lynch's version will continue to be colored by his overall ouvre, and it's all just so much more interesting and charming for anyone who has to see and write about movies all week long.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Dune is easily Lynch’s worst movie. Hard for me to see it being remembered as anything other than that.
glimshe 3y ago
Lynch himself hates the movie, he had to make it due to contractual obligations. It does have a few cool moments, like the fight where they activate the barrier shields, but it's overall terrible.
- einpoklum 3y ago
  Didn't he say he hates what came out as the released film, rather than the project itself?
willis936 3y ago
>They simply have more character and vastly more interesting set design I feel the opposite. Lynch's Dune did its own thing with meandering and confused direction. Villenuve's Dune complements the book much better. It respects Herbert's intelligence and understands the world building decisions Herbert made. I'm betting that the book and Villeneuve's Dune will stand the test of time better.
- broscillator 3y ago
  It respects the source material too much. It serves the only function of being an acceptable, technically excellent version for two audiences: the purists, who care more about the book than about film as an art form; and the people who are interested in Dune because they heard about it but they will not sit down and read it. It has nothing to say cinematographically, and it has nothing to add to the messages that were written into Dune 50 years ago. It's very competent, nothing else.
  - nurbl 3y ago
    In contrast, there are many things to say about Lynch's version, but he didn't just play it safe. Although compared to the plans Jodorowski (original director) had for the movie, he was probably conservative :D
  - devnullbrain 3y ago
    Do you feel the same way about the Lord of the Rings films? The most common complaints about those are where it has strayed from the source material. Dune isn't fully pure, either. It goes against the most frequent theme of the first book simply by 'shooting' scenes outside during the day. Caladan is much more fleshed out. It introduces new Bene Tleilax lore in the first film which is notable because Herbert himself didn't introduce them until there was a second book to write, omniscience to restrict and characters to resurrect. Looking at the trailers for the next film, Feyd Rautha is bald Elvis instead of a handsome Paul-like character and I'd be very surprised if all of the Baron's proclivities are retained.
    - 3y ago
jncfhnb 3y ago
I thought Lynch’s was corny and funny. But I do think we have hit an inflection point of big movie fatigue. Small scope movies are just way more fun and interesting right now.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
A few decades from now people will be using AI to make their own versions/remixes/blends. Most of them will be trash, a few will be outstanding. Either that or most of us will be dead. It's hard to know at this point.
pier25 3y ago
What other modern scifi films look like Dune?
- broscillator 3y ago
  Thinking about it less than a second: Prometheus. Drab colors, very neat and slick sets and costume designs. Heck even Interstellar. BR2049 although that's much more interesting in having all the neon, at least there's some color and some grit.
  - pier25 3y ago
    Well BR2049 was made by the same director and probably a lot of the same crew so I'd be surprised if it didn't look similar. Prometheus and Interstellar look nothing like these movies though. The production design is completely different even though there might be similarities in the color grading. I give you that the super washed out colors has been a very common aesthetic in the past 15 years or so but I wouldn't say all scifi movies adopt it. Some examples: District 9, Avatar 1 and 2, Inception, Tenet, Ex Machina, etc.
    - devnullbrain 3y ago
      >BR2049 was made by the same director In fact, most recent well-received sci-fi films were.
    - broscillator 3y ago
      I'm aware BR was made by the same director. In contrast, Lynch's doesn't look anything like his other films. Color grading is a huge part of what makes movies look like they do, but beside that there is a sterility and cleanliness, a monotony in how the images are handled.
      - pier25 3y ago
        > In contrast, Lynch's doesn't look anything like his other films. Well because this was the only big budget film Lynch ever worked on and produced by none other than Dino De Laurentiis. > beside that there is a sterility and cleanliness, a monotony in how the images are handled Not sure what you're referring to. Maybe you're missing the analog feel of shooting in film? Dune 2021 was shot in digital (the newer digital Arri IMAX cameras) and Dune 1984 was shot in 35mm. It's totally fine to not like digitally shot movies.
nurbl 3y ago
I agree! I found the new Dune boring, nice looking but generic (a lot like e.g. any recent Ridley Scott movie) and the actors seemed bored too. It failed to communicate a sense of wonder at the strange world. I re-watched Lynch's version after the new one, and even though the story is the same, I cared about everything that happened. I can overlook other flaws in a movie if it's at least interesting. So I think you are right, not because Lynch's Dune was a masterpiece (it wasn't), but because the new one will be mostly forgotten in a decade or so. Perhaps the new Dune was so appreciated because it ignores the recent trend of over-complicated story telling with time jumps and mystification, and instead just tells it straight. But that's a pretty low bar.
- jhbadger 3y ago
  Also the cast of Lynch's version is better -- you had first rate actors like Kyle Mclachlan as Paul, Max von Sydow as Kynes, Patrick Stewart as Halleck (and yes, Sting as Feyd-Rautha, although that's maybe not a plus as Sting is a much better singer than he is an actor).
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    Sting was hardly seen in the movie though.
  - at_a_remove 3y ago
    Jose Ferrer showing us how to de-cloak better than a dozen synchronized Romulan warbirds, Brad Dourif as the explanation of what happens when you twist a mentat, wee Alicia Witt as St. Alia of the Knife, and let's not forget Freddie Jones, a late British actor of a subtle versatility. The money men were really quite skeptical of hiring him on but after being shown some daillies, supposedly they apologized.
deepnet 3y ago
Lynch's Dune is vibrant, transgressive and weird. Every detail is unsettling in the way only Lynch is. The scale invokes awe. Excited frisson and disgust overlap uncomfortably. The emotions evoked are grand and complex. It is a challenging film, a masterpiece. Villeneuve's dune is an enjoyable film, it conforms to expectations, and easily lauded. As such it is somewhat anodyne and flat. It is only rich where it borrows from Lynch. The scale feels small like tilt-shift does.
- bshimmin 3y ago
  So many of the negative comments about Villeneuve's Dune in this thread are astonishing to me, but I will just pick this one: surely scale is something that Villeneuve does so brilliantly! From Arrival, though Blade Runner 2049, to his Dune, he has an amazing ability to make things seem vast (space ships, buildings, cities...) - it's almost a trademark of his work, to me, so colour me baffled that you would single this out for criticism. (For context, I read and enjoyed the Dune books as a child, I've seen the Lynch film several times and find it broadly comical, I love Twin Peaks, and I think Villeneuve is arguably one of the best mainstream directors working right now.)
  - galangalalgol 3y ago
    I think the GP meant Lynch's world (universe) felt bigger, more mysterious. Like there were more things going on outside this story than could ever be told. Not that the physical size of things was too small. I think I agree a bit. But that universe is supposed to be small and claustrophobic I think? It is part of the lesson in the last few books. I liked the scifi miniseries the best but mostly for what came after the first book. Lynch's I liked when young, but even then I found the amount of internal narrative extremely irritating. The new one jas the problem of most every adaptation of a beloved and dense written work. It tries to serve existing fans and the casual viewer with the same movie. It does much better at that than anything but Jackson's lotr I think, but it is always hard.
- devnullbrain 3y ago
  A few comments in this thread, including yours, have made me wonder: are you a fan of Dune and how Lynch adapted it, or are you a fan of Lynch's Dune? Because the qualities you're describing sound very much like other Lynch films but not like Herbert's Dune.
fullshark 3y ago
I agree, because Dune and David Lynch will still be part of the cultural consciousness I bet, the new films will be forgotten.
nwsm 3y ago
I didn't enjoy Lynch's Dune much as a Dune adaption, but I commend them for incredible creativity in the characters, costume, and sets. Most of the cast are not what I ever imagined in the books, but that does make it interesting and the characters are convincing.

lproven 3y ago

Agreed. One of the few uses of ever-improving "AI" bot generation of characters, faces, blending images, etc. I can imagine is the ability for fans to remix films and TV. For example... * to edit together the original BBC TV Hitch hikers' Guide to the Galaxy with the better SFX of the otherwise poor film. * to create extra episodes or installments of beloved serials where the text exists but the actors are dead * Or, in this instance, to mix Lynch's visuals and characters with Villeneuve's less scenery-chewing version which sticks closer to the text. One could even imagine editing Villeneuve's Arrival to stick closer to the text of Ted Chiang's sublime "the Story of your Life", where the way the aliens write is pivotal to the story but the screenwriters didn't understand.

adastra22 3y ago
It’s already being used to upscale Star Trek and Babylon 5. In 10-15 years, hopefully we can just input this script as a prompt, and get a full film in the style of David Lynch.
- low_tech_love 3y ago
  If we keep on praising uninteresting, soulless movies like Villeneuve’s Dune while shooting down more artistic (but weirder) views such as Lynch’s one, then I think we might end up with the opposite: human crews making films based GPT’s scripts. The same thing happened with Society of the Snow: a technically beautiful movie with nothing to say other than being more “faithful” and using native actors. All that is appreciated but Alive was a flawed but much more exciting telling of the story.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Well what I mean is that maybe a decade or so from now any one of us can create such a thing on our home computers.
darkerside 3y ago
> the way the aliens write is pivotal to the story but the screenwriters didn't understand Can you expand? I've read and watched, but don't recall anything similar. I watched the movie first, could be why.
- stoneman24 3y ago
  If I remember correctly (can't find the book), the novel describes the aliens writing as a intricate multi-level rectilinear ideogram where in order to start drawing the design, you needed to know the exact ending of the entire message. Each ideogram was an entire complex reply. This implied that the aliens had a different sense of time. Whereas the movie, the writing was a simpler circular design with slight filaments hanging off and no mention of the encapsulated message as a whole IIRC. The movie design reminded minded me of the Lucent Technologies logo [1] (worked for them a short while, back long ago). I really liked the story and the movie but different media formats have different aims and constraints so it's hard to compare. I wish the movie industry would tackle more original content (like Arrival) rather than endless sequels. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent
  - lproven 3y ago
    This is correct. In order to learn to write the aliens' script, the interpreter must learn what Douglas Adams called "defocussed temporal perception". To write the language you need to be able to see into the future. Learning the script teaches her to do this. Seeing into the future she watches her own daughter die and there's nothing she can do to stop it. The scriptwriters didn't understand any of this so they made the aliens spray-paint stencils on glass and inserted a terrible irrelevant subplot about stopping a war.
    - darkerside 3y ago
      I don't think it's that they didn't understand. They movie just focuses on something different from the book. Where the book is highly conceptual and philosophical, the movie applies this in a very personal way. I walked away thinking about how every story ends in sadness and despair. Even though we can't see the future in this much detail, we all know how every human story ends. And yet, we engage with hope, and I think life is still worth living.
low_tech_love 3y ago
About Arrival, another one of the soulless, empty outings by Villeneuve, it has 7.9 on IMDb and 94% on rotten tomatoes. Obviously, nobody really cares about the details (unfortunately). If anyone is interested in the ridiculous amount of potential that Villeneuve threw away by becoming Hollywood’s generic sci-fi director, watch Incendies.
- pier25 3y ago
  Couldn't it be possible that you just have a different taste? I'm not a huge fan of Arrival but I would not have said it's empty and soulless. I do think it's a good movie though.
  - low_tech_love 3y ago
    Absolutely; all my expressed opinions are my own.
    - darkerside 3y ago
      I loved the movie Arrival and can't agree it is soulless. Don't get so focused on what it lacks from the short story that you don't see what it does have that the short story does not.
      - low_tech_love 3y ago
        I haven't read the original text, I just couldn't find anything interesting about it. I understand that there is a plot twist which I should've become interested in, and apparently some of the characters are supposed to have some kind of emotional depth, but it just totally missed me.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    I really like the movie, but i think it did lose some of the soul of the short story. The short story is essentially a story about grief using time travel as a metaphor but not actually having time travel in it. The movie has the character changing the past in a critical moment which kind of undermines the whole soul of the story imo. To be clear, i still think arrival is a great movie, just rather different from the source material in terms of meaning and "soul"
hkt 3y ago
What I immediately thought was "seasons 8 to 100 of deep space 9" Strange what we can learn about ourselves through association
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Krasnol 3y ago

I already do. There are some ridiculous changes to the story, and the end is so weird that it's funny, but the dialogues are so much better, the characters have substance. The scary ones are scary, the glorious ones are glorious. There is actual development in Leto. The whole world feels deep. Altogether, it feels like it was aimed at a more mature audience. The same audience that would also buy the books afterward if they didn't already read it. New Dune however feels more like Young Adult Entertainment. It looks fantastic, but the rest doesn't really matter. I didn't feel anything for any of those characters. Some of the dialogues were really cringe worthy (the Hangar dialogue for example) I went there with someone who never read the books. They were confused also didn't bother with most of the characters or what has become of them. I will go and see the second one though since it's Dune and I love Dune and this might also be the reason why this way of making movies works...the nerds still go in even if they complain and the "normal audience" gets something which won't be too challenging.

k__ 3y ago
I had the exact opposite impression. The old movies felt like a caricature of the books. The evil characters were ridiculous. In the new movie, I only disliked Momoa for playing himself again.
- wincy 3y ago
  I thought the new movies were absolutely awe inspiring. I bounced off the old movie pretty hard and thought it was some weird joke I hadn’t been invited in on.
- Fricken 3y ago
  Portraying the bad guy as a raving orange fat man was on point. The world just didn't know it yet at the time.
  - csa 3y ago
    Not op, but I thought that the roles for Rabban and Feyd were absolutely ham-fisted acting in the Lynch version. Maybe there was a goal to communicate complex character elements in a highly condensed way, but it just comes across as clumsy to me. Baron was fine if not better in the Lynch version. Note that I watched the Lynch version in a theater in the 80s and recently rewatched it, and my feeling about the acting portrayal of these two characters was the almost exactly the same then and now — painful to watch.

throw0101d 3y ago

> A few decades from now, I think Lynch's Dune will be looked upon more favorably than the recent films. By whom? Lynch's has been out for decades and is at 6.3: * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087182/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087182/ Villeneuve's is currently at 8.0: * https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1160419/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1160419/ The RT for each are at 44% and 83%: * https://www.rottentomatoes.com/search?search=Dune https://www.rottentomatoes.com/search?search=Dune Even with recency bias, do you think their scores will change much in 20+ years? The recent one was so "indistinguishable" from recent sci-fi movies it won Best Original Score, Sound, Film Editing, Cinematography, Production Design, and Visual Effects: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accolades_received_by_Dune_(2021_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accolades_received_by_... How many other sci-fi films even get nominated (including Best Picture and Screenplay), let alone win? What were the accolades for Lynch's movie? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(1984_film)#Accolades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(1984_film)#Accolades

djoletina 3y ago
People tend to project their personal preferences with an aura of superiority to the unknown future when everyone will ascend to their level and reach enlightenment.
- glitchcrab 3y ago
  Yup, too many overconfident people mistake their own subjective opinion for fact and then tell others that their opinion is wrong.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  It's rife in the arts. Such a thing would never happen in my preferred field of engineering, of course...
- sho_hn 3y ago
  For what it's worth, I think he is most likely correct that 20 years from now, any discussion of Dune and its adaptations will call Lynch's version "inventive, but flawed" and Villeneuve's "drab and lifeless, aimed at movie-goers who had freshly aged out of Iron Man and wanted to feel like it". I can practically feel this article stare at me from the screen already, too. And it probably wants to provoke a little. If anyone still cares, that is. The reception of Lynch's version will continue to be colored by his overall ouvre, and it's all just so much more interesting and charming for anyone who has to see and write about movies all week long.

HDThoreaun 3y ago

Dune is easily Lynch’s worst movie. Hard for me to see it being remembered as anything other than that.

glimshe 3y ago

Lynch himself hates the movie, he had to make it due to contractual obligations. It does have a few cool moments, like the fight where they activate the barrier shields, but it's overall terrible.

einpoklum 3y ago
Didn't he say he hates what came out as the released film, rather than the project itself?

willis936 3y ago

>They simply have more character and vastly more interesting set design I feel the opposite. Lynch's Dune did its own thing with meandering and confused direction. Villenuve's Dune complements the book much better. It respects Herbert's intelligence and understands the world building decisions Herbert made. I'm betting that the book and Villeneuve's Dune will stand the test of time better.

broscillator 3y ago
It respects the source material too much. It serves the only function of being an acceptable, technically excellent version for two audiences: the purists, who care more about the book than about film as an art form; and the people who are interested in Dune because they heard about it but they will not sit down and read it. It has nothing to say cinematographically, and it has nothing to add to the messages that were written into Dune 50 years ago. It's very competent, nothing else.
- nurbl 3y ago
  In contrast, there are many things to say about Lynch's version, but he didn't just play it safe. Although compared to the plans Jodorowski (original director) had for the movie, he was probably conservative :D
- devnullbrain 3y ago
  Do you feel the same way about the Lord of the Rings films? The most common complaints about those are where it has strayed from the source material. Dune isn't fully pure, either. It goes against the most frequent theme of the first book simply by 'shooting' scenes outside during the day. Caladan is much more fleshed out. It introduces new Bene Tleilax lore in the first film which is notable because Herbert himself didn't introduce them until there was a second book to write, omniscience to restrict and characters to resurrect. Looking at the trailers for the next film, Feyd Rautha is bald Elvis instead of a handsome Paul-like character and I'd be very surprised if all of the Baron's proclivities are retained.
  - 3y ago

jncfhnb 3y ago

I thought Lynch’s was corny and funny. But I do think we have hit an inflection point of big movie fatigue. Small scope movies are just way more fun and interesting right now.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

A few decades from now people will be using AI to make their own versions/remixes/blends. Most of them will be trash, a few will be outstanding. Either that or most of us will be dead. It's hard to know at this point.

pier25 3y ago

What other modern scifi films look like Dune?

broscillator 3y ago
Thinking about it less than a second: Prometheus. Drab colors, very neat and slick sets and costume designs. Heck even Interstellar. BR2049 although that's much more interesting in having all the neon, at least there's some color and some grit.
- pier25 3y ago
  Well BR2049 was made by the same director and probably a lot of the same crew so I'd be surprised if it didn't look similar. Prometheus and Interstellar look nothing like these movies though. The production design is completely different even though there might be similarities in the color grading. I give you that the super washed out colors has been a very common aesthetic in the past 15 years or so but I wouldn't say all scifi movies adopt it. Some examples: District 9, Avatar 1 and 2, Inception, Tenet, Ex Machina, etc.
  - devnullbrain 3y ago
    >BR2049 was made by the same director In fact, most recent well-received sci-fi films were.
  - broscillator 3y ago
    I'm aware BR was made by the same director. In contrast, Lynch's doesn't look anything like his other films. Color grading is a huge part of what makes movies look like they do, but beside that there is a sterility and cleanliness, a monotony in how the images are handled.
    - pier25 3y ago
      > In contrast, Lynch's doesn't look anything like his other films. Well because this was the only big budget film Lynch ever worked on and produced by none other than Dino De Laurentiis. > beside that there is a sterility and cleanliness, a monotony in how the images are handled Not sure what you're referring to. Maybe you're missing the analog feel of shooting in film? Dune 2021 was shot in digital (the newer digital Arri IMAX cameras) and Dune 1984 was shot in 35mm. It's totally fine to not like digitally shot movies.

nurbl 3y ago

I agree! I found the new Dune boring, nice looking but generic (a lot like e.g. any recent Ridley Scott movie) and the actors seemed bored too. It failed to communicate a sense of wonder at the strange world. I re-watched Lynch's version after the new one, and even though the story is the same, I cared about everything that happened. I can overlook other flaws in a movie if it's at least interesting. So I think you are right, not because Lynch's Dune was a masterpiece (it wasn't), but because the new one will be mostly forgotten in a decade or so. Perhaps the new Dune was so appreciated because it ignores the recent trend of over-complicated story telling with time jumps and mystification, and instead just tells it straight. But that's a pretty low bar.

jhbadger 3y ago
Also the cast of Lynch's version is better -- you had first rate actors like Kyle Mclachlan as Paul, Max von Sydow as Kynes, Patrick Stewart as Halleck (and yes, Sting as Feyd-Rautha, although that's maybe not a plus as Sting is a much better singer than he is an actor).
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Sting was hardly seen in the movie though.
- at_a_remove 3y ago
  Jose Ferrer showing us how to de-cloak better than a dozen synchronized Romulan warbirds, Brad Dourif as the explanation of what happens when you twist a mentat, wee Alicia Witt as St. Alia of the Knife, and let's not forget Freddie Jones, a late British actor of a subtle versatility. The money men were really quite skeptical of hiring him on but after being shown some daillies, supposedly they apologized.

deepnet 3y ago

Lynch's Dune is vibrant, transgressive and weird. Every detail is unsettling in the way only Lynch is. The scale invokes awe. Excited frisson and disgust overlap uncomfortably. The emotions evoked are grand and complex. It is a challenging film, a masterpiece. Villeneuve's dune is an enjoyable film, it conforms to expectations, and easily lauded. As such it is somewhat anodyne and flat. It is only rich where it borrows from Lynch. The scale feels small like tilt-shift does.

bshimmin 3y ago
So many of the negative comments about Villeneuve's Dune in this thread are astonishing to me, but I will just pick this one: surely scale is something that Villeneuve does so brilliantly! From Arrival, though Blade Runner 2049, to his Dune, he has an amazing ability to make things seem vast (space ships, buildings, cities...) - it's almost a trademark of his work, to me, so colour me baffled that you would single this out for criticism. (For context, I read and enjoyed the Dune books as a child, I've seen the Lynch film several times and find it broadly comical, I love Twin Peaks, and I think Villeneuve is arguably one of the best mainstream directors working right now.)
- galangalalgol 3y ago
  I think the GP meant Lynch's world (universe) felt bigger, more mysterious. Like there were more things going on outside this story than could ever be told. Not that the physical size of things was too small. I think I agree a bit. But that universe is supposed to be small and claustrophobic I think? It is part of the lesson in the last few books. I liked the scifi miniseries the best but mostly for what came after the first book. Lynch's I liked when young, but even then I found the amount of internal narrative extremely irritating. The new one jas the problem of most every adaptation of a beloved and dense written work. It tries to serve existing fans and the casual viewer with the same movie. It does much better at that than anything but Jackson's lotr I think, but it is always hard.
devnullbrain 3y ago
A few comments in this thread, including yours, have made me wonder: are you a fan of Dune and how Lynch adapted it, or are you a fan of Lynch's Dune? Because the qualities you're describing sound very much like other Lynch films but not like Herbert's Dune.

fullshark 3y ago

I agree, because Dune and David Lynch will still be part of the cultural consciousness I bet, the new films will be forgotten.

nwsm 3y ago

I didn't enjoy Lynch's Dune much as a Dune adaption, but I commend them for incredible creativity in the characters, costume, and sets. Most of the cast are not what I ever imagined in the books, but that does make it interesting and the characters are convincing.