Films/DVD Asylum

Dune 2021 Spoil alert!

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Inmates,

There's no question that Frank Herbert's 1965 430+ page scifi novel Dune (which I've never read) must be very difficult to adapt to film as David Lynch's 1984 version is whatever, three hours long, and difficult to follow. However, it does have wonderfully lush production design though, Max von Sydow, and at least has an ending.

Set in the year 10192, on the planet Caladan, the Emperor of the known universe, ol' what's his name, Padthai Emperor Saddam decrees that the control of Arrakis, that has a valuable resource called spice hitherto exploited by House Harkonnen will in future be exploited by House Atradies. Think along the lines that if in 1965 GB for no particular reason Britain proclaimed that the US could have all the oil in Arrakis. Arrakis = Iraq, get it?

Now, cut to the Denis Villeneuve version:

In 10192, House Atreides takes over the oil, I mean spice, and it appears that house Harkkonen did this with the sly expectation that Atradies would fail due to the indigenous people, the Fremen objecting after a few hundred years of exploitation, think Russia and then the US in Afghanistan.

Anway, the leader of house Atreides is very soon Paul, who is young, weedy, and speaks a bit like a Canadian teenager whose like really into Dungeons and Dragons and all that mystical stuff like the magic power of the Bennyjesuits, who can, wow, like, make things do things by asking them.

After a lot of things happen with complicated jargon and names in many dark shaowy, beautifully photographed places, and Paul reluctantly assumes the task of making friends with the desert dwelling Fremems. I won't spoil the ending as this tedious movie doesn't have an end, and as I didn't care about any of the characters anyway, it didn't really matter. We must assume that Paul Atredies gets some very high position in Caladonian Oil, I mean Caladanian SpiceCo.

There were so many illogicalities: theere were ships that could "fold space"- faster than light, hand-held devices that , whne screamed at: "Ka-Pow" could shatter things with sound, weapons that could send individual missiles to each person, but still fought hand to hand with swords. Also, if the Fremens, will kill someone to harvest the water from their body and the entire planet is bare sand- what did they eat? Even if they were cannibalistic, that would not be a sustainable, long-tern situation.

Beautiful imagery, production values, some excellent acting of extremely dull dialogue, and terrific special effects, but has only a couple of step of satisfaction level as Harry Potter, which is to say, not much. It's just beautiful and tedious and does not have a conclusion.

By the way, the actor that plays Beast Rabban Harkonnen in Dune, Dave Bautista, also plays Sapper Morton, the replicant "retired" by Officer K Ryan Gosling)in Blade Runner 2049. To clear the sour taste of the disappointment of Dune 2021, as soon as possible, I watched Blade Runner 2049 again.

Yours in controllable insanity,

Bambi_B

PS: I wonder if vinyl will still be as popular in 10192? Will DVD's be in 32000K resolution by then? Would we see tube gear fusion powered to achieve the 170,000 Watt 144-channel sound? I don't think I can wait!

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