Post by Park Sung Jetson on May 14, 2023 23:43:33 GMT
"The book was better."
How many times have you heard someone say that after watching a movie based on a novel? It's practically an axiom. Books and movies are very distinct animals, and as a rule any book not intended for an audience of pimply 12 year olds fails as a cinematic piece. Truly good books, i.e. universally appealing because they say something meaningful about life, should not be turned into movies because the episodic, visual nature of that medium cannot convey the abstractions that give the novel its power to move and inspire.
Many films are moving and inspiring, but those tend to be scripts written with an original film in mind. People ought to respect the limitations of each art form and stop trying to turn a geranium into a potato.
All of which brings me along to Frank Herbert's novel, Dune.
Several attempts have now been made to translate Dune onto film. David Lynch's 1984 attempt was largely panned, although Lynch brought Frank Herbert himself onboard as a consultant. I don't pretend to know all the details; apparently the movie studio intruded itself into Lynch's vision and forced changes upon the director over his strident protests. Lynch hates it, absolutely despises what it became, and while it is a guilty pleasure of mine it's sort of objectively bad ( I'm looking at you, Sting!) and miserably fails to capture what Herbert was saying in his book.
Then SyFy made a miniseries in the early 2000s. This version stays a bit closer to the plot but is plagued with terrible costume design (I'm looking at you, ridiculous hats everywhere!) and ultimately failed just as miserably in entirely different ways.
Now they have made a new version, and...you guessed it... It fails worse than all past attempts combined.
Where to begin? First of all, Paul is a whiny, petulant snot, and not the remarkably mature incipient leader he was in the book. This is no small matter; it's like turning Zorro into a sniveling coward or Han Solo into a mopey shoegazing teen. You've destroyed the character and everything that made him interesting.
Then we see the Lady Jessica weeping helplessly while Paul faces the gom jabbar. The Lady Jessica is a Bene Gesserit adept who controls her own body to the extent that she chose her son Paul's sex at conception; in this steaming film version she bawls like a teenybopper that got stood up at the ice cream social.
What were they thinking? Have any of the morphodites involved with this fecal smear ever read the book? It honestly feels like the director (Danny Dippedinwoe, I think) once saw the other failed film attempts and is simply re-interpreting that.
In the Lynch version all the Harkonnens had red hair and a greasy, unsavory look about them. (I'm still looking at you, Sting!). In the new movie they're all bald. Ok, I'll go with that (although the red hair is in the novel and illustrates the genetic aspect so central to the Bene Gesserit mission, but whatevvs). But calling them Hark-uh-nuns is a total misfire; Herbert was on set in 1984 and knew how the name he had chosen was pronounced.
I honestly couldn't get through it. The overly dark sets, the orphan scenes that established nothing and moved the plot nowhere, the awful, nerve- jangling musical score. I gave up and turned it off.
Stop mutilating classic novels you neither understand nor honor. Dune does not, cannot, and will never work as a movie. The themes of religion as a control mechanism, environment as shaper of culture and ethos, control of commodities, eugenics-- these things cannot be conveyed by simply aping a few of the plot points and reinventing the dialog.
Just stop.
The spice must go.
How many times have you heard someone say that after watching a movie based on a novel? It's practically an axiom. Books and movies are very distinct animals, and as a rule any book not intended for an audience of pimply 12 year olds fails as a cinematic piece. Truly good books, i.e. universally appealing because they say something meaningful about life, should not be turned into movies because the episodic, visual nature of that medium cannot convey the abstractions that give the novel its power to move and inspire.
Many films are moving and inspiring, but those tend to be scripts written with an original film in mind. People ought to respect the limitations of each art form and stop trying to turn a geranium into a potato.
All of which brings me along to Frank Herbert's novel, Dune.
Several attempts have now been made to translate Dune onto film. David Lynch's 1984 attempt was largely panned, although Lynch brought Frank Herbert himself onboard as a consultant. I don't pretend to know all the details; apparently the movie studio intruded itself into Lynch's vision and forced changes upon the director over his strident protests. Lynch hates it, absolutely despises what it became, and while it is a guilty pleasure of mine it's sort of objectively bad ( I'm looking at you, Sting!) and miserably fails to capture what Herbert was saying in his book.
Then SyFy made a miniseries in the early 2000s. This version stays a bit closer to the plot but is plagued with terrible costume design (I'm looking at you, ridiculous hats everywhere!) and ultimately failed just as miserably in entirely different ways.
Now they have made a new version, and...you guessed it... It fails worse than all past attempts combined.
Where to begin? First of all, Paul is a whiny, petulant snot, and not the remarkably mature incipient leader he was in the book. This is no small matter; it's like turning Zorro into a sniveling coward or Han Solo into a mopey shoegazing teen. You've destroyed the character and everything that made him interesting.
Then we see the Lady Jessica weeping helplessly while Paul faces the gom jabbar. The Lady Jessica is a Bene Gesserit adept who controls her own body to the extent that she chose her son Paul's sex at conception; in this steaming film version she bawls like a teenybopper that got stood up at the ice cream social.
What were they thinking? Have any of the morphodites involved with this fecal smear ever read the book? It honestly feels like the director (Danny Dippedinwoe, I think) once saw the other failed film attempts and is simply re-interpreting that.
In the Lynch version all the Harkonnens had red hair and a greasy, unsavory look about them. (I'm still looking at you, Sting!). In the new movie they're all bald. Ok, I'll go with that (although the red hair is in the novel and illustrates the genetic aspect so central to the Bene Gesserit mission, but whatevvs). But calling them Hark-uh-nuns is a total misfire; Herbert was on set in 1984 and knew how the name he had chosen was pronounced.
I honestly couldn't get through it. The overly dark sets, the orphan scenes that established nothing and moved the plot nowhere, the awful, nerve- jangling musical score. I gave up and turned it off.
Stop mutilating classic novels you neither understand nor honor. Dune does not, cannot, and will never work as a movie. The themes of religion as a control mechanism, environment as shaper of culture and ethos, control of commodities, eugenics-- these things cannot be conveyed by simply aping a few of the plot points and reinventing the dialog.
Just stop.
The spice must go.
