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AnEdgelord posted:I dont know, I kind of appreciate how they echo modern american military equipment. There is an interesting Cold War metaphor with the "air and sea power" people teaming up with the space Muslims to fight an evil land power run by a Vladimir. Of course given the time the story was written and where the story goes the comparison falls apart pretty quickly, but there's still some resonance.
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Oct 31, 2021 21:40
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For what it's worth, I guess I'm a casual Dune fan, having only read the first book but having a passing acquaintance with what happens in the rest. I loved the movie. Absolutely loved it, 10 out of 10. The set design, the costumes, the casting, the dialogue, everything. In particular the editing and sound design of the Voice stood out at very well thought-out. The pacing seemed just right, and it threads the needle between letting the worldbuilding breathe without too much explanation and letting non-readers catch up. In terms of personal nitpicks, I would say there was probably exactly one too many Zendaya visions, and exactly one too many Hans Zimmer "WAHHHHHHH" screams at dramatic moments. But those are very, very minor nitpicks. My wife, who is not a Dune reader or SF fan at all usually, enjoyed it. Her complaint was the dialogue was a little hard to hear at times, which is understandable when so much of it is faux-arabic delivered with crazed intensity while something loud is happening. She thinks Lady Jessica is shady (understandable) and is pretty sure that Jason Momoa is going to be back. Which is... well, Frank Herbert was on a lot of drugs.
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Nov 1, 2021 02:20
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Alchenar posted:The film is clear in the fight with Jamis that Paul is crossing some form of threshold, but I don't think it is clear at all what that is beyond that threshold. It's an interesting fight in a mechanical sense. The Marvel Narrative Convention says it's a boss fight, which is supposed to be lengthy, closely-matched, and accompanied by some kind of moment of self-realized superpower at the end. In this film, it's short, lopsided, the moment of self-realization was a grim hallucination that happened well beforehand, and as a cherry on top it forces the good guy into a killing that's the first step down a path of blood that he doesn't want but can't avoid.
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Nov 1, 2021 13:32
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Here's a quick and surely point-missing logistical question: in the books, how do the Fremen physically get off the planet to do their Jihad? Extorting the Guild with the threat of cutting off the spice? Getting blasted on drugs and flying the ships themselves?
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Nov 1, 2021 17:28
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Grandpa Palpatine posted:Oh my God. That's an interpretation of it. The Baron's subsequent conversation with Yueh undercuts it somewhat, or at least I choose to believe so because 
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Nov 2, 2021 14:09
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The Emperor really will be an interesting casting challenge. I vote Ian McDiarmid.
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Nov 4, 2021 01:20
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Halloween Jack posted:But part of Dune's story is that the Emperor's grasp is slipping because he doesn't pay attention to the people beneath him. What you're suggesting is a lot more like the Autarch in the Book of the New Sun. This is a bit of a tangent, but if anyone is looking to get their next fix of unfilmable classic literary science fiction, they could do a lot worse than The Book of the New Sun.
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Nov 4, 2021 22:47
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Neo Rasa posted:Something I love about that book is you can spoil huge stuff like that and it doesn't actually spoil anything. So much of the effect of that book is not what happens, but how. There's a dangerous creature called an Alzabo which isn't too complicated - big bear-type thing, can imitate the voice of its victims, and has some ability to temporarily absorb their personality. But the scene where we actually meet a live one is among the most philosophically disturbing monster encounters I've ever read. The humbling thing about the book is that you start to thing "ok Gene, lay off making up weird sci-fi flavor text words" and then you start to realize with dawning horror that he's not making up any words, your own vocabulary is just pitiful in comparison. Chatelaine? Indanthrene? Paterissa? Too bad for you, better break out the dictionary.
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Nov 5, 2021 03:32
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Halloween Jack posted:I would like to add that the Book of the New Sun is very readable, but it also rewards multiple readings.  Totally missed that. I've only read it once, looks like I need to take another round of it.
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Nov 5, 2021 17:47
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In a lot of ways the whole novel is exposition. You feel like the setup is done and the real story is getting started right about the time you hit the back cover.
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Nov 8, 2021 02:57
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In 60s and 70s SF there were a lot of SF authors debuting their really weird fetishes in print. Herbert wasn't the worst by a long shot; I think most of the sex in the Dune series is consensual...ish. Still, he does win the cover art prize.
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Nov 9, 2021 01:09
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Basebf555 posted:Yea I'm reminded of a movie like Enemy of the State where the big thing was "oh poo poo, you mean there are satellites that the government can use to spy on our every move?!?!?", and of course satellites had been a thing for 30+ years at that point but people didn't really think about their capabilities and the potential of what they could do. In fairness, the capabilities of satellites as depicted in that movie are physically impossible.
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Nov 10, 2021 23:34
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jeeves posted:At least it doesn't NEED another 150 pages like most Neil Stephenson books though. That's an author that you can tell is just like 'gently caress this, I am done" only 80% into most of his stuff. Oh man, I just finished "Fall: or Dodge in Hell" and was tremendously irritated at the whole thing. I've read eight of his previous novels and liked every one of them, even if the endings tend to fall apart a bit on some of them. Fall was terrible from start to finish. Among other structural and plotting problems, early in the book (not even at the end!) there's an embedded hundred-fifty-page political satire subplot that not only flatly contradicts the rest of the setting, it literally does not affect any of the subsequent plot in the slightest and is never mentioned again.
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Nov 11, 2021 04:21
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Halloween Jack posted:When reading the books, it was incredibly weird to me that gay sex is beyond the pale in the decadent space empire. It would be incredibly weird if the decadent space empire had a morality even vaguely resembling ours. SF has often had the problem where future morality is either "the average opinion of New England WASPs at the time of writing" or "the morality of I, the Author, a Nietzschean god beyond the comprehension of you fools with your primitive superstitions and age of consent laws". Wonky stuff like Orange Catholics and Zensunni and jihads against thinking machines are at least something off the beaten path. Well, at least until we get to the space witches who can mind control you with how good they are at sex.
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Nov 17, 2021 23:39
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Baron von Eevl posted:Is the emperor supposed to be deeply likable and charismatic? I always thought of him as aloof, equal parts brilliant and barely hiding incompetence, vain but unsettling. I think Dali would have been great, and I think Bowie would have been interesting if he was basically doing "Baal took a shower and put on some nice clothes." I think someone with real screen presence is a must, but it kind of specifically has to be slightly uncomfortable to the viewer. Your eyes are drawn to them but you don't necessarily like what you see. A few posts up someone mentioned Antony Starr, Homelander in The Boys. Dial back the overt insanity and mute the color palette, and he'd barely have to change costume.
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Dec 7, 2021 05:04
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Torquemada posted:I read the Rama books during my wild youth, was i high, or is the whole thing jam packed with incest? Rendezvous With Rama is a fine book. The sequels, by not-Clarke, are an abortion in concept and execution.
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Dec 15, 2021 23:42
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DeimosRising posted:That’s funny, I’ve always thought the setting of dune, with its absurd economics and warfare, seemed very small. Notionally there are trillions of people or whatever, but they lose a war to a couple thousand mega ninjas. Incidentally that’s also how I feel about lotr, where the paucity of economics makes the whole thing obviously fake. It’s confusing to me that these two books are so famous for their “world building” Some of this is probably the LOTR movies' fault. In the books, economics is not exactly front and center, but things like farms and roads exist. On film, the dominant human empire is one (1) city of extreme density plopped in the middle of what seems to be thousands of square miles of untouched grassland. But really this is endemic. Star Wars is another example - it's a galaxy of billions of stars, most of which are said to have inhabited planets. The Sith lord who wants to conquer the galaxy orders up a little over a million clone soldiers. Typically a ratio of one solider per thousand planets is considered a little thin, but who am I to judge. It would have been much more realistic to say that in fact for Goldilocks zone reasons (or whatever) maybe there really are only some thousands of inhabited planets. Really this would be the way to go for most galaxy-scale space opera SF, although few do it. At some point though, I'm willing to just say that the worldbuilding Dune does is not really about logistical minutiae, it's about weird people taking huge amounts of drugs and doing interesting things. Good enough.
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Jan 4, 2022 15:17
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Halloween Jack posted:Whereas in LOTR, it's hard to imagine elves farming at all. Now that you mention it, Bilbo's exploitation of the maritime trading network supplying human-produced food and wine to the elves is a key plot point in the Hobbit.
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Jan 5, 2022 23:47
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DarkSol posted:Speaking of that breakfast scene when Paul actually used the voice, the way they did the voice made me actually jump in my seat a bit in the theatre. Was way more unsettling and off-putting than Lynch's treatment. I recommended that a friend should watch the IMAX version for this very reason. Sure, huge screen, pretty visuals. But the sound design in this film, the Voice in particular, is really something special.
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Mar 2, 2022 00:10
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I mean if you're taking lessons from Dune, you could do worse than "bear the heirs of the founder the Spacing Guild."
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Mar 14, 2022 01:42
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I'm just impressed that Fahrenheit is still in use in the year 10,000.
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Apr 25, 2022 01:11
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Xealot posted:I wish every choice was as weird as Christopher Walken, though; like, instead of the very normal and healthy-looking Florence Pugh, I kinda wish that Irulan came off like some sort of bizarre designer cat, had an uncanny inbred vibe like the Targaryans were supposed to. Which is an insulting prompt for an actor, but there are probably a lot of actors with a high fashion-y look who'd fit what I mean. (No actual complaints about Florence Pugh, though. She's been fantastic in every role I've seen her in.) I'm sure Anya Taylor-Joy is used to it by now.
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May 20, 2022 23:51
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wizardofloneliness posted:“Stocky” wtf, she just weighs slightly more than 100 pounds. Is your girlfriend actually a modeling executive from the 90s? Or Timothee Chalamet?  Honestly it's Walken who I have trouble picturing as the character, but I'm sure he'll be fine.
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Oct 11, 2022 01:28
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jeeves posted:Just as soon as the Weirding Way is ever mentioned. Javier Bardem mentions it toward the end when Jessica starts karate-ing his dudes.
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Oct 12, 2022 23:09
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Sodomy Hussein posted:Dune is so foundational to modern sci-fi and fantasy that its concepts are ingrained into our culture, so it's funny how much of Dune we take for granted because everything else is also doing Dune stuff. Yep. I first read Dune in my late teens after the usual childhood as a Star Wars fan. The experience was basically turn to the next page, "holy crap Star Wars stole this too", repeat about 800 times. Now the sequels, those are hallucinogenic enough that pop culture hasn't really managed to copy much.
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Oct 14, 2022 02:03
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Xiahou Dun posted:Actual good fictional names usually ground their schemes in some real-world thoughts about language to get a consistent set of phonological characteristics. This means generally having a linguist on staff to make a fictional language or already caring enough about language to do that work yourself (hi, Tolkien). Although even then a lot of cowards still just go with "take real world language our audience doesn't speak, make up new words" approach ; Dothraki is just a mix of Turkic and Mongolian, Tolkien's Elvish is really just Finnish, etc. I'd also throw in the Gene Wolfe approach in Book of the New Sun: have such a staggering vocabulary that it seems like you've made up a language when in fact almost every word is standard English.
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Nov 10, 2022 02:33
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I assume it's meant to be ambiguous. On one hand it's human, or at least human enough for the Voice to work on, and the only specific human the movie talks about in terms of potential body horrors is Yueh's wife. On the other, the Baron's dialog in the scene where he kills Yueh implies that his wife is already dead. Either way, it's pretty disturbing.
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Jan 20, 2023 22:03
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