Change Your Image
jakobkralj
Reviews
Dune (2021)
It's like a monkey had written the script - it misses the point.
Dune is a brilliant book, but a complicated one. This movie had quite a task to accomplice. It should have been easy enough for normal people to understand and still capture major undertones of the story. But it did not. Sure, the score was very good and the visuals also, but the story THE STORY was done quite poorly.
PROBLEMS WITH THE STORY:
1. Paul
Paul was trained in the ways of Bene Gesserit, who are masters of self control and observations. He was a strong child - able to control himself and deduce much in others. In this movie, for some reason, they tried to make him look weak. In the book, the convercation between the reverent mother and him is an intelligent, reason based discussion. In the movie, the mother uses voice to control him and torture him - for no reason at all is given to him prior the control. He has frequent bursts and seem to be a total loser - for what, for the movie to force some growing up hero myth? I hated that part. In the book Paul is strong, but not a hero. In the movie, he seems to be destined to become one.
2. Jessica
Much of the same holds for Jessica. She is a master of self control, but seems to be all over the place emotionally.
3. For the book lovers only
I have watched the movie with one, who had no prior knowledge of dune universe and I needed to do a lot of explaining. The bull for example, or how the seeker works and why is it used. Or what is an Imperial conditioning. Or what just happened to house Atreadis. Or how the shields work and why they need to be disconnected on Arrakis.
4. Not the right book
There are 3 types of fantasy books. The ones where the movie can capture most of what is happening (Harry Potter), the one where a lot is happening but you can cut most of it out and people will still get most of the underlying ideas visually (like LOTR) or ones where most of the lore and story is in thoughts and conversations between characters. The Herbert's way of narrating the story, where he uses 3. Person omnipotent does not help either. The inability to show thought of people kinda removes 30 % of everything the dune is.
5. The message
Herbert wrote the book to warn us from who we follow. He said that:
"I wrote the Dune series because I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on their forehead: "May be dangerous to your health." One of the most dangerous presidents we had in this century was John Kennedy because people said "Yes Sir Mr. Charismatic Leader what do we do next?" and we wound up in Vietnam. And I think probably the most valuable president of this century was Richard Nixon. Because he taught us to distrust government and he did it by example."
I think most of that is lost. And I feel sorry that people will get a wrong idea about the story and not read the book.
I think a miniseries would work better here.