Speaking of HBO Max...
Last Saturday, Timothée Chalamet hosted Saturday Night Live. At the very end of the episode, he wore a Legendary hoodie.
Evidently, it's to show his support for Legendary Pictures in light of their alleged displeasure towards WB over just dumping Dune on HBO Max alongside other WB movies coming 2021.
Class act, Tim.
Let's all face it, there's something about the theater experience that cannot be replicated on HBO Max or any of the streamers.
Disney knows this. That's why last week, on Disney Investor day, they announced that all Marvel movies are strictly going to theatres, unlike what WB is doing (putting all 2021 theatrical release on HBO Max on the same day). Of course, it goes without saying that Disney in general is all about the experiences. I seem to recall that they have an interest in ownership and operation of theaters themselves, for better (keeping theaters alive) and for worse (giant company potentially shutting out certain films or distributors and/or buying up indie screens). I predicted way back at the start of these lockdowns that they would hold the line, and I’m relieved that they have.
I'm thankful for Villeneuve's voice and him bashing Warner Bros. for their decision to slap his “meticulously crafted” theatrical experience onto HBO Max.
Okey Dokey!Thursday and Friday, 40 select IMAX theatres will be screening the first ten minutes of the film.
Also, a new trailer drops tomorrow.
Edited by WillKeaton on Jul 21st 2021 at 7:16:00 AM
With the Mortal Kombat movie they showed the Sub Zero-future Scorpion fight in the past, and In The Heights had their opening number in youtube too. Guess they are making that a thing. Although getting it like a Disney short is new.
Edited by Blueace on Jul 21st 2021 at 2:02:00 PM
Wake me up at your own risk.The problem with the second trailer is that it doesn't really discuss the plot. It's a character-focused one but taken out of context it's hard to see anything but people doing stuff and saying stuff.
Edit: I should probably link to the actual video
.
Edited by Fighteer on Jul 22nd 2021 at 9:37:15 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Okay, I've given it some thought and my main issue with the Dune trailers — this one in particular — is that they seem to be paying way more attention to the action and less to the idea that Paul is a prescient who will become the Emperor of the known universe by the end.
Maybe that's intentional, but the Kwisatz Haderach plot is set up literally in the first chapter of the book, so it's not exactly a spoiler.
Edit: Actually, it could be due to the split into two films, because the messianic phase of Paul's life doesn't come until the second half of the book.
Edited by Fighteer on Jul 22nd 2021 at 12:51:33 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"That's most likely it. Right now all we're seeing in the trailer is House Atreides leaving their old world and arriving on Arrakis, then the Harkonnen attack. And that's the first part of the book, them getting to Arrakis, getting used to it, trying to prepare for any sort of trouble the Harkonnens aim to throw at them (because they are aware, right from the beginning, that it's probably a trap), and it failing. If anything the first movie will be some form of tragedy with a Bittersweet Ending while the second half is the pendulum swinging back the other way.
There was a moment in that trailer where Leto tells someone to smile, and they say back "I am smiling," and there was also a bit about Duncan teasing Paul about growing muscles. These are most definitely not bits from the book, because I remember the book being very serious at all times. I can't recall any moments of levity in any of the Dune books, and with the possible exception of Duncan, characters rarely emote. Now, I'm not saying the movie should have everyone be super emotionless all the time, honestly I think showing that these characters have character is an improvement over the books.
Edited by WillKeaton on Jul 22nd 2021 at 2:34:46 AM
Gurney is the only character who displays much in the way of levity in the books, but that's his official job.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
rollin' on dubs
Having Jason Momoa be a Red Shirt for the first film always struck me as a waste. I hope they give him some time and bring him back for later sequels.
Of course Christan Bale did tons of work to prepare for his role as Shai-Hulud...
I tried to walk like an Egyptian and now I need to see a Cairo practor....I've heard a good deal of "Mighty Whitey" arguments in regards to Dune, which seem to ignore the fact that the Fremen aren't native to Arrakis themselves, and have been a part of the Empire, and thus subject to it's laws, for as long as they have been there. It's not a "European Colonials" scenario, it's an "Emperor sends a lord to manage a troubled province" scenario.
Also note that while Fremen are culturally descended from Sunni Arabs, the racial composition of the population of the Dune universe is incredibly mixed. The Atreides claim Greek ancestry, but in the sci-fi future represented by the novels, everyone's races and religions are so hopelessly scrambled that applying the Mighty Whitey trope is almost impossible.
Edited by Fighteer on Jul 23rd 2021 at 7:19:40 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Well, it is hard not to draw Mighty Whitey parallels at least on the surface level thanks to the casting, even if the context fails to hold the letter of the law (or trope).
Edited by BaronVonFistcrunch on Jul 23rd 2021 at 5:44:19 AM
It's kind of an invoked in-universe Mighty Whitey, because the Bene Gesserit spread myths so that their agents would instantly be able to master any native population by playing into their prophecies. Of course, the whole plot is that their messiah showed up a generation early, unexpected and out of their control, so.
Because so much of Dune is about breeding and genetics and manipulation of cultures over the course of millennia, a lot of it shares at least a passing similarity with racist superiority tropes. I'd say the main thing that saves the series from being a White Supremacist wet dream is that the clear message of the books, pretty obvious even in the first but absolutely explicit in the later ones, was "wow, breeding a superhuman prescient ubermensch dictator was a stupid fucking idea."
Writing a post-post apocalypse LitRPG on RR. Also fanfic stuff.Kind of yes and kind of no. See, their superhuman prescient ubermensch dictator (the second, in fact) is the one who figures out that all this prescience stuff will obliterate humans if he doesn't do something about it. So his entire reign is about stopping people like himself from occurring again.
The morality play in Dune is vastly more complex than the first novel makes it out to be. This is why most serious fans of the series view it as a mere prologue to the real meat of the story. Of course, it's the one everyone tries to make into a film because it's the simplest in terms of plot and has the most action scenes that can easily be turned into a script.
Compare Ender's Game, which was made into a fairly good film a few years back. My son keeps asking me when they're making the sequel and I have to explain to him that Speaker for the Dead and subsequent novels have barely any action at all and are vastly different in tone and setting.
Edited by Fighteer on Jul 23rd 2021 at 9:14:08 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Dune is the kind of movie I can’t really imagine not watching on a big screen, honestly.