Watched Dune on Alex and Leo's build up

Didn’t go to well. Shut it off after 1 hour. The longest one hour I ever remember. But I did catch up on my sleep a little during that hour :slight_smile:

And what was your second longest hour you ever remember? That will give us some context. :grin:

Scott Bourne (emeritus TWiT host) recommended watching the show in a theater with an excellent sound system; we’ll do that next weekend. Perhaps you have one at home; perhaps not.

I don’t recall this person. Perhaps you meant: Scott Wilkinson

Here is Scott Bourne’s entry from the TWiT Wiki.

Here’s Scott’s recommendation for Dune (2021) and comment to watch with a good sound system.

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Hey not every movie is for every body! I hate comic book movies and looks both ways I’m not really a Star Wars fan.

I feel like Dune is a more grown-up Star Wars.

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I’m a huge Dune fan, I have read the whole series (original Frank Herbert) at least a dozen times in English and German.

What I really hate are films that aren’t true to the books.

The worst franchise: Jason Bourne - it does a disservice to the Jason Bourne legacy, whilst being a great action thriller. If they hadn’t used the Jason Bourne name, I’d have been fine with it. But they took the name and the amnesia and betrayed everything else that Bourne stood for.

The best franchise: LotR - it is epic, it follow the general story, although I find it annoying how Pip and Merry are treated and some of the sub plots are glossed over or other characters have to take on roles not assigned them in the book, the whole Treebeard being persuaded by Pip and Merry to go to war was the only thing that really got me angry, but it is good enough to be a great film.

I have real problems watching Harry Potter, for example. There are so many things wrong with the filming that it just ruins it for me.

Likewise the Hobbit, it is a relatively short story and the film is a complete farce in comparison and undoes all the good work that LotR did for the series, for me.

I saw the David Lynch Dune film before I read the books and I thought it was a good enough film, that it got me to read the books, now I can’t watch it. I tried watching the mini series from the late 90s early 2000s, but it was just frustrating.

Having seen the trailers for the new film, I have the same problems, so much in the trailer goes against canon that I found just that hard to watch. It is probably another one of those, if you don’t know the books, it is a great visual feast, but you won’t understand what is going on, because it is so complicated. If you know the books, you will be picking holes in the film the whole time and will be frustrated.

n=1 but my wife enjoyed the movie and followed along with minimal questions; maybe she just didn’t know what she didn’t know. She found the beginning a little slow. I read the books (once, about 15 years ago) and loved them. I thought the movie was great, though I agree it did not move at a breakneck pace. Are there gaps and differences? Sure, but it’s a two hour movie.

My own bias is to evaluate art on its own terms. Does a film tell a compelling story in a coherent, competent way? Does it have characters I care about, with realistic motivations, doing interesting things? If it strays from some source material, that’s fine with me. y enjoyment of the books won’t change either way. Nor does a great film elevate a bad book; the Godfather, for example, was kind of a middling book at best, but an absolutely fantastic film.

I watched the David Lynch movie as a 10 year old and found it very weird, but enjoyable; as an adult it was both less weird and less enjoyable, lol.

I read the Bourne books as a teenager, and the later films were almost unrecognizable to me. Again, though, I really enjoyed the films as their own thing. My initial disappointment/confusion kind of melted away before the first movie even ended because it was a good experience itself.

I disliked the Hobbit not because it strayed so much from the original story, or because it expanded the story, but because it just wasn’t very good. Had it been a great expansion of the story I would have enjoyed it, but the whole thing was a flabby, sloppy, mess. When Guillermo del Toro left, Peter Jackson got pressed into service at the last minute and they had to do the whole thing over with insufficient time to finish the new script or properly plan and storyboard everything. PJ had three plus years of pre-production work to nail down every element of LoTR; for the Hobbit they had a few months. I think if he and the team had another year or two to prepare, they could have made a decent trilogy. It still would have offended the book fans, but it could have been good on its own.

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I see that Dune did well enough that part 2 will be made, so have to wait another 2 years to see it.

@Leo on Security Now, Steve was wondering why they were using swords in 10191. He forgot about the personal shields. Lazers and projectiles are stopped by it, but slow moving objects are not. The reason is so that air can pass through.

That is one of the issues of making a book as dense as Dune into a movie, so much backstory has to be cut out to tell the primary story. Things like how shields work, what is a mentat, how does spice let the guild navigators fold space. All the political intrigue has to be distilled to a few throw-away lines.

I love and hate book adaptations.

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I’m really kind of surprised that Dune was not just made as a show on HBO Max. Ten episodes for the first book would have been great.

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