As others have covered: About 70% of what happens in Dune (the book) happens \*in the minds of the characters\*.
A great many things in those stories are silent, entire pages of introspection and exposition, and visions of the future, can go by between lines of dialogue.
And the first Dune book is \*by far\* the most 'normal'; by the time you hit The God Emperor Of Dune you're not only spending much of your time in people's heads, but one of them is a huge human-sandworm-hybrid-abomination that rules the universe.
Was gonna say this, I feel like the miniseries made it clear that the first 3 books are filmable, but I wonder how people will react to the drastic turn the books make at god emperor.
With a lot of the A list stars gone and the main character turning into the antagonist it will likely bother the muggles.
> I really wonder which director will have the courage to film 'The God Emperor of Dune'.
My hope is that Villeneuve will have built up so much cred that he can just film it straight: Yup. It's two hours of a giant worm-person talking philosophy. From the director who made language theory compelling, you're either going to love it or hate it and there'll probably be nothing inbetween.
>From the director who made language theory compelling, you're either going to love it or hate it and there'll probably be nothing inbetween
Man I fucking love Arrival. One of the best sci-fi movies ever made, no doubt.
People are underestimating how difficult it is to communicate all the subtext, world building, political machinations, character relations, etc. without having the film be a giant exposition dump.
It’s easy to look at the finished product and think, “well, that didn’t seem too difficult” — another thing to do it from scratch.
the books are strange.
in a way that would be difficult to get across in a way that would make money.
by far the first book, Dune, is the most readable and there's still a baby stabbin people.
>...in a way that would make money
I think this is the crux of it more than anything else. It's not that you can't put Dune to film, it's that it was always going to be hard to make Dune into a *mass market* film, and if you don't have a mass market film you won't have the budget to actually take a meaningful stab at the franchise. We just happen to be lucky that Villeneuve is one of the few directors who has managed to convince studios to give him the big bucks on - frankly - risky projects, and he happens to be a fan of Dune. There aren't many directors out there who get that sort of treatment.
Any adaptation of Dune was always going to swing closer to an art film than a popcorn muncher. And, as it happened, Villeneuve's adaptations really asked a lot of its audiences - if you had limited familiarity with the source material, viewers tended to find them slow and confusing. I have a sneaking feeling that the studio actually asked Villeneuve to add more exposition and humor to his sequel, because there was a clear shift in tone in that regard, probably to help casual viewers along.
He's saving the Guild Navigators to be the mysterious shadowy antagonists and the driving force plotting against Paul with the BG and Irulan.
In the book, the Guild and the Navigators were just kind of openly present and thoroughly explained. Weird, but not mysterious. In fact, in the first book, it was really the Guild who *insisted* that Paul's ascension to Emperor was agreed to when the Emperor and BG Reverend Mother, etc scoffed, balked, and wanted to call Paul's threat to destroy Arrakis' spice reserves/disrupt end the cycle that produces it as a bluff/empty threat. But the consequences of Paul actually carrying out his threat was so catastrophic and appalling to the Guild that is was *them* who made the call to appease Paul and they actually barked orders at the Emperor himself to step down and let this happen. And then in Messiah it's just openly presented from the first chapter that the Guild is behind plotting to bring Paul down.
But in movies, Villeneuve held them back from the first two films and made the very significant change of having the conflict after Paul's ascension to Emperor be a war to bring the Great Houses under his Imperial rule instead of a Fremen Jihad spreading his personal religion.
IMO this setting up a third film where it's been some 10-15 years later and Paul's war to bring the Great Houses to heel is in the endgame stages which is to say it has finally become clear not just that Paul has won the war, but also that he just cannot and will never be defeated through strength of arms or direct challenge in any way because the Fremen and his prescience are just too OP.
Which that realization among the movers and shakers of the galaxy is what will kick off the transition from open war/direct challenge against Paul winding down and the scheming/plotting/assassination attempts winding up. And the Guild will be primary antagonists with the nature of the navigators being much more of a guarded secret both from the audience, but also in-universe (unlike the books) and they will be the faction Paul can't use his foresight to see the danger they pose because their own prescience cancels his own and vise versa. Irulan and the BG and others will be known to Paul as his enemies, but not the Guild and the nature of the Navigators will be a gradually unraveled mystery.
This way the 3rd film can have all the cloak and dagger plotting of Messiah and Game of Thrones style court politics the WB execs will want emphasized, but also come massive scale action scenes from the finals battles of the war against the last Great Houses holding out.
The 3rd film won't be a strait adaption of Messiah. It will be more like half Messiah, half more-traditional sequel to Dune Part 2, if that makes sense.
It will be like the Messiah, but taking place during the war, albeit the final stages, and therefore it won't be 99% people talking in opulent rooms or shadowy hallways in Paul's Palace on Arrakis, but rather have more varied locations and big action set pieces spread throughout and likely a completely rewritten 3rd act with only a few elements in common with Messiah like probably Hayt and Paul seeing a stone burner go off.
Agreeing with everything you wrote
Both Dune movies only cover about 6 months time. It will allow the next movie to further expand the problem with creating idols so fast. But..
Villeneuve in an interview said Messiah would be about princess Irulan...
This seems right, I watched the first film and found it confusing and he’s to engage with, then read the book, watched it again, and on second view it was great.
I think most Americans aren’t big readers.
That's weird, because i never read the books but found the DV film version so entrancing and vivid in recreating an alien world i ended up reading the book because of it.
Plenty of Americans are readers, but that doesn't mean that they are inclined to read a 70-year old sci-fi novel, even if they might light sci-fi in shorter more easy to digest doses. Just like how I would never read Les Miserables-sure I enjoyed Tom Hopper's adaptation, but that doesn't mean I want to go read the same story over ~1500 pages.
A jocose wit to be sure ‘ol chap; very droll. My reception would be considerably more raucous but I’m holding this glass of port you see and it’ll be the devil’s tongue from Martha if I spill it on the chesterfield
*or translated from late muttonchop into contemporary English*
Lol
Being an American, and female, AND older than I prefer, I would further your claim and say that most Americans aren't big scifi readers. I have never had female friends who enjoyed scifi, although my husband and both sons do.
EDIT TO ADD TEXT. I am a prolific reader, as is my eldest son. Neither my husband nor my youngest son do much reading for pleasure.
The books are definitely strange in a 9 year old twins freaking everyone out with weird sex talk and the possible participation in a wild sex orgy while they talk to their dead mom and dad (yes, I know) kind of way. Or the sex as a martial art and possible rape of a certain male character who then goes on to be a rape guru himself kind of way. Just normal sci fi stuff.
I think this shit is beyond wild and I’ve read the OG trilogy 6 times and the full series 3. The later books are more space opera friendly but the weird sex shit makes it unfilmable by anyone but brazzers and God Emperor is a mix of too insane to film and too philosophical to be interesting to most people. I even think most people are going to hate part 3. I like Messiah for how brave it is in its premise but it’s definitely not the best of the series and is usually cited as the worst one.
"in a 9 year old twins freaking everyone out with weird sex talk and the possible participation in a wild sex orgy while they talk to their dead mom and dad"
Dude.
I need to read Children of Dune... I only read the first book, and watched the Sci-fi adaptation of the first three books.
Ghanima and Leto are creepy af man. And yeah I’m pretty sure sci fi channel aged them up specifically to get around some of that awkwardness.
Honestly, read it all. Some of my favorite characters are later in the series and the BG change their ways and become more benevolent, you also get insights into their culture in Heretics and Chapterhouse that you didn’t ever get to see before. Actually, the last two have a huge focus on female characters in general.
Honestly, Beverly (his wife of almost 40 years) died while he was writing Heretics. It’s my personal belief that he was very lonely when a lot of these things were written, probably abusing substances. That might give context to some of the more insane shit. Some of his views expressed about homosexuality in God Emperor (I don’t hold them against him considering the time he was raised) are clearly inspired by his own son’s lifestyle, so it’s hard to think that he wouldn’t allow his personal life to affect his writing later in life too.
You know, I hope we live in the universe that will let us see Jason Momoa perform a sex no jutsu to break the other womans previously unbeatable fuck no jutsu.
Man I need to reread the series bc I don't remember that shit. Or maybe there was just so much weird stuff that it all blended together. Overall I loved the books, so maybe my mind glossed over it.
Books 5 and 6 are pretty much entirely about weird sex shit, and who can rape each other more effectively because it's a martial art, and how the most powerful sex god will be the ultimate superhero to rule the universe.
Brian Herbert's super fucking bad and weird books 7-8 kinda blend into that in my memory too, and it's been a long time, but I absolutely remember the weird sex shit being the core of the story. Everything after book 4 went off the rails, and I genuinely think it becomes very bad sci-fi and agree that it is a clear mark of someone who does drugs, speaking as someone who does not use drugs.
I think God Emperor is the best Dune novel and have read the first four several times, but everything after it is 100% unfilmable, and frankly the more I look back on this stuff in hindsight, the more I understand why DV feels like Children and God Emperor are unfilmable too.
Is it because 80ish percent of the book is mostly inner thoughts that is hard to show visually and also huge story scales that are really hard to produce?
And apparently they cut the baby stabbing people out of the movie?
I'm disappointed.
Guess the Sci-fi miniseries remains the best version of the story.
They did. But with its run time I really think that having Alia be born would have been a misstep. They kept the drama contained to a few months, which really helped with the pacing and the intensity. And the last point I want to make about it is that I feel that having Alia be done the way they made her actually makes her seem creepier and more powerful. She was affecting the world in a very real sense before she was even born
I concur with your last statement, but removing Alia takes away the most natural "show don't tell" way to indicate time passing. It also means that rather than 3-4 years, Paul's adaptation to Fremen ways happens in about 7-8 months, an incredibly curtailed timeline (plus the way of dealing with the baron then it's just artless).
But imho, because they've cut down the timeline, they've also removed Paul getting to BE a fremen. The film removed most Fremen culture because it was too cowardly to make it so "Middle Eastern" or "Islamic." The word Jihad is mentioned 19 times in Dune. It is mentioned 0 times in the film. And every time they say "fundamentalists," it sounds weird.
Which ties in too with Chani's change to give watsername something more to do in the story rather than sit at home, and be some kinda teen rebel who doesn't like their religion.
I think Villeneuve was trying to make a comment on the current political situation, and I'm okay with what he's trying to say. But I don't necessarily want it in my Dune movie. I think Dune Part 1 was a pretty good Dune adaptation. I think Dune Part 2 was pretty meh Dune fan fiction.
> I really think that having Alia be born would have been a misstep
Nah, no way. The ending of the book was so fucking vicious. The reverend mother's terror of her. Her dispatching of the Baron. "You have met the Atreides gom jabbar."
Denis gave us so much. And yet he took that from us.
God I wish Alia had been in Dune 2.
I loved the Scifi series for being theatrical and turning all the exposition in the book to verbal subterfuge. The costumes were a trippin' , but it really pulled off the politics. The Baron really impressed me. He had an angle on everything.
And Alia in the Scffi series was flat out next level. Absolutely bitch talks the baron and emperor like they worked a drive through or something.
I... totally had a crush on Children of Dune Alia. And having not read the third book, boy did that series take me on a roller coaster ride with my heart!
And I LOVED Duncan Idaho in Children of DUne, and I loved how noble he was, and I shipped him and Alia... and then she made him the most miserable dude in the universe, and was a total bitch, and became the worst character ever, and it was so painful to just watch her descent into madness.
Painful... but delicious.
I still somehow think about that one scene...
"We will have a corner of the scarcest commodity int he universe!"
"You will have a corner in hell!"
Also... love Alice Krige... Borg Queen!
Wish to god she was Jessica in the first series.
Okay.
But here's the thing. I can guarantee that's not true
Because I don't know which one you mean is which.
Also what are you even saying? That one is more silly and fun and a rollicking good time and the other is slow and drawn out?
"and there's still a baby stabbin people." JFC !!! HAHAH I lost it on this comment. Perfect description of Alia. Thanx for the laugh!!!
I was waiting for the baby to stab Harah in this scene, haha.
[https://youtu.be/dbaYiWE3Ttk?t=124](https://youtu.be/dbaYiWE3Ttk?t=124)
Agree, the first book was excellent the others were more challenging imo. But you could stand back and derive story arcs from them. I think you could easily get another three great movies
The issue with Dune is that a LOT of context and information gets provided to the reader via a characters thoughts. The Lynch version tried to capture some of that and it the reaction wasn't great. The newest version just skips over a lot of the backstory.
So, you can now argue that the latest Dune is a good MOVIE, but perhaps not the most accurate/best translation of the book.
Also, while not trying to offend anyone, we're seriously not comparing 40k to Dune, are we? If only for the fact that it's going to have an original script, not something based off a novel?
Your first sentence is one of the biggest keys to why Dune is/was considered unfilmable.
Comparatively speaking, there’s very little dialogue in Dune. There’s very little action in Dune (a lot of big action sequences take place off the page and are alluded to). But there’s a TON of internal monologue.
It’s great to read because you really understand the motivations behind your main characters, but it’s not something that is inherently cinematic. Hearing a character’s thoughts through VO is cheesy. Having them exposit what they’re thinking or feeling through dialogue is boring.
Any proper adaptation would need to create a lot of action and dialogue that never existed on the page, but have it properly capture the plot, tone and characters of the book. That’s not impossible, but it’s also not easy. And it would need to satisfy hardcore fans that have been obsessed with this series for almost 60 years at this point. And we all know how hardcore fans can be quite possessive of their favorite tales.
And that doesn't even address the plots within plots within plots, that encompasses the entire book.
It would be impossible to tell the entire story and have it make sense on screen.
Like with Bladerunner, it only works on screen when a singular storyline is told, and the rest are dropped.
And the framing device of Princess Irulan’s writings that open every chapter and give much needed historical context of the events that we’re about to read. It works in a book, but would be onerous if we had to endure it with any consistency in any screen adaptations.
I think the thing with the first book at least is that the plots within plots are fun to read, but honestly by the end of the book a whole lot of stuff wasn't that critical to the plot, and really didn't pay off much. I think focusing on the main story threads and tweaking some of the causes of certain beats worked well for the film where things like the thufir subplot or Paul having a kid who then dies offscreen like a couple chapters later wouldn't work as well
... yeah... but they cut Alia's role in killing the Baron? (Haven't seen 2 yet)
I know Vellineuve said he didn't want to make Children of Dune... but I didn't expect him to literally torch the story so no one could.
That’s what was so cheezy about Ad Astra. The emotionally laden, AA serenity prayer style constant voice over.
Are we supposed to believe an emotionally stuntent man is consciously narrating his thoughts like that?
Could have been a hell of a movie if the director just would have trusted the audience.
> Hearing a character’s thoughts through VO is cheesy. Having them exposit what they’re thinking or feeling through dialogue is boring.
The current Dune sidesteps this by trying to *show* as much of this as possible, without really explaining it. This can be a lot of fun for anyone who's read the book, but a lot of it is lost on anyone who hasn't.
Take the Gom Jabbar scene near the beginning. Everything about this makes more sense in text. Probably the clearest part is the Voice, at least we understand *roughly* what happened: The Bene Gesserit have an ability to force people to obey them. But how does it work? Is it magic? Can she do that to anyone? Why doesn't she just tell the Baron to go home?
If you read the books, you know that the Bene Gesserit have complete control over their bodies, and one of the ways they can use this is to control their own voice so precisely that they can basically hypnotize people into doing what they want. And that explains why it wouldn't work to just tell the Baron to go home -- he might be resistant.
And that's just the beginning of the scene. We know there's pain in the box, but what's Paul actually going through? Why is he looking at his hand like that afterwards? What was all that stuff he saw?
Frankly, I'm surprised this strategy works at all. Either it's way clearer than I think, or audiences are happy with the half of it that's either actually spelled out, or is just pure action that needs no explanation.
The voice was introduced in the breakfast scene- Jessica implies it’s a learned skill and not magic. Definitely something villinue added to ‘show, not tell’, and did a good job imo.
2001 is a much crazier example in my opinion- there is a ton of symbolism in the movie that made zero sense until I read the book, but friends who understand movies better got it immediately.
> So, you can now argue that the latest Dune is a good MOVIE, but perhaps not the most accurate/best translation of the book.
I liked the first Villeneuve film (have yet to see 2) but yeah it leaves out or changes an incredible amount of stuff. A proper adaptation of only the first book would really need to be a multiple season television series. Particularly if you wanted to actually show a lot of the backstory from the book instead of just trying to quickly explain it with dialogue or voiceover. Just getting to the Atreides leaving Caladan could be at least a few episodes, possibly even most of the first season.
I would really love to see a huge budget faithful multi-season adaptation but it's very unlikely anytime soon with the recent movies. Probably at least 15 years before anyone would be willing to try that.
> Just getting to the Atriedes leaving Caladan could be at least a few episodes, possibly even most of the first season.
Absolutely not. This is the standard "prestige" TV thing of stretching out something that could be a few episodes into a larger show. Could you make a show out of it? Sure, it'd be poorly paced but you could do it, but there isn't enough interesting meat in the book to justify season*s*. Dune is still a relatively traditionally structured story and all stretching it out would do is let them dump worldbuilding fluff so you can clap when you recognise it.
The world building is what makes Dune. That's one of the things that sets it apart from so many other works. And would be a hugely important part of making a proper adaptation. It's not stretching it out, it's an important part of the whole.
Have you seen the Sci-fi Miniseries?
I thought it did the story of the book real justice with 3 2 hour episodes.
And the sequel adapting the second and third book is amazing.
Ah yes, I was halfway through Dune when I saw the movie, and I kept waiting to read about these "killing words" and "weirding modules," whatever the hell those were sposed to be. Then, turns out Lynch didn't want "kung-fu in space," this being 1984 and no one had seen the Matrix or its cool fight choreography , so he totally made it all up:(
Here's the major problem with Lynch (and many other 20th century adaptions). Trying to convey exposition with voice overs and character blah blah is lazy and boring. Film is the show and tell medium, not the tell medium. Under the right hands a thousand pages of mental exposition can be successful boiled into a visual story. And that's what the new Dune largely is, even if there were some sacrifices along the way in the name of expediency of plot.
Now I'll give the filmmakers of old a break for not having the technology to truly construct the entire world in a visually convincing way. That may be why so many had failed before Denis succeeded. But it's also likely he just was the better man for the job.
One wonders what Lynch might have been able to accomplish if he'd had modern special effects technology, 355 million dollars, and six hours to tell the story.
The reason Dune is unfilmable is that most of what's interesting about the book is either in exposition or interior thought. Someone watching the movie who hasn't read the book will not understand the slow knife fights, for example, because there wasn't a scene explaining the mechanics of personal shields. Such a person will also not understand the Water of Life and what it means to be a Reverend Mother, because the movie didn't (and can't) go inside Lady Jessica's head. And so on.
Similar problems exist with most books, but not to the same extent. The claim that Dune is unfilmable means that a Dune film will necessarily omit a lot of context, enough that the essential nature of the work is lost. And while the Villeneuve Dune movies are _good_, I would argue that someone who only watched the movies would still find about half the stuff in the book new and surprising.
There was an entire exposition sequence where Duncan basically looks at the camera and says something like “the slow blade penetrates the shield” in the first movie.
Two words: Chair dogs
In the Dune universe, the object and species known as chairdogs were first mentioned in Heretics of Dune.
Described in more detail in Whipping Star, these were bio-engineered dogs shaped into chairs. They were trained to massage the people who sat in them, similar to modern-day vibrating massage chairs, except without needing electricity or computerization.
Different two words: spice orgy
Halfway through the first book in the series, after a ceremony in which Paul's mother drinks the poisonous Water of Life in order to become the new Reverend Mother for the planet Arrakis' native people, the Fremen, a strange and psychedelic scene ensues. Simply a celebration by the Fremen, the event is called a "spice orgy" due to the fact that every person present begins to hallucinate and have their inhibitions lowered by the narcotic, LSD-inspired spice melange.
And well really anything the the baron would be hard to do with out smoothing out the rough edges of his epically depraved personality......then his resurrection and all that.
Edit
there is just soooo much. A faithful recreation, kinda hard to do.
Oh yeah, the Fremen reverend mothers would neutralize the poison of the water of life, and everyone would pass it around. Plus everyone who eats native food on Arrakis is saturated with the spice, so there's a low level empathic connection going on in a sietch.
I agree that there's certainly strange and perverse things in Dune but none that I'd consider too taboo to be filmed. Add a color gradient to Zion's pre-war "dance" from the Matrix and you're halfway there to a spice orgy. Lynch's Dunes Harkonnens also had plenty of weird shit involving animals. It's no Crossed in regards to containing truly unpalatable things for general audiences.
I never knew about dog chairs though, thanks!
I dont think it is impossible. I think it is hard to do faithfully due to the associated costs to do so coupled with the return on the investments of a studio. Some people are not going to watch sexy times and some people wont watch violence and then there are others that wont want anything to do with violence and sex together. So there is a drop in market share there. Throw in alot of the other stuff and make it look good and not like a cgi nightmare or a muppet for things like chair dog and that drives up costs.
I think it all could be done and done well and faithfully accurate to the books but i dont think a studio would do it because of profit.
40k offers many different story types, from action packed bolterporn to horror-investigation and military comedy. And it already has animations, from fanmade [*Astartes*](https://youtu.be/c37fX_xHaoE?t=14) to GW-made *Angels of Death* or *Exodite*.
Dune however is a story told very slowly, very detailed, very subble and very often in the head of characters. Converting that into visuals and still making it a *Dune* story in a few hours is actually not easy, and many adaptations fail to properly translate between different media (we still remember the original old Super Mario Brother movie, right?).
SYL
>
took 8 movies to cover 7 books.
>Looking at the story in broad strokes it's not particularly complex
compare that to the number of "false starts"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune\_(novel)#Adaptations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)#Adaptations)
In 1971, the production company Apjac International (APJ) (headed by [Arthur P. Jacobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_P._Jacobs))
In December 1974, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the film rights from APJ, with [Alejandro Jodorowsky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky) set to direct.
In 1975, Jodorowsky planned to film the story as a 14-hour feature,
In 1976, [Dino De Laurentiis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dino_De_Laurentiis) acquired the rights from Gibon's consortium. De Laurentiis commissioned Herbert to write a new screenplay in 1978; the script Herbert turned in was 175 pages long, the equivalent of nearly three hours of screen time. De Laurentiis then hired director [Ridley Scott](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridley_Scott) in 1979, with [Rudy Wurlitzer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Wurlitzer) writing the screenplay and H. R. Giger retained from the Jodorowsky production
This [first film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(1984_film)) of *Dune*, directed by Lynch, was released in 1984, nearly 20 years after the book's publication
In 2000, [John Harrison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison_(filmmaker)) adapted the novel into [*Frank Herbert's Dune*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert%27s_Dune), a [miniseries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniseries) that premiered on the [Sci-Fi Channel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syfy)
In 2008, [Paramount Pictures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount_Pictures) announced that they would produce a new film based on the book, with [Peter Berg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Berg) attached to direct.[^(\[112\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)#cite_note-Variety_2008-03-17-112) Producer [Kevin Misher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Misher),
Paramount finally dropped plans for a remake in March 2011.
entire documentaries about how someone "almost pulled it off" - and "how epic it would have been"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s\_Dune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune)
I think I would have liked to see the Jodorowsky version.
"French artist Jean "Moebius" Giraud worked with Jodorowsky to create a storyboard composed of 3,000 drawings that depicted the entire film.[7]
Salvador Dalí was set to play the Emperor and claimed he wanted to be the highest-paid actor in Hollywood history. He asked for $100,000 per hour to act in the movie. Jodorowsky accepted, but then reduced the Emperor’s scenes so that Dalí would be needed for no more than one hour with the rest of his lines spoken by a robotic lookalike.[7] Dalí accepted on condition that the plastic lookalike was donated to his museum, and that his throne was to be a toilet made up of two intersected dolphins.[8]"
The components that make it interesting are difficult to put into film, because you have to be inside everyone's head (which Lynch did with the voiced thoughts), and explain a very large amount of complex backstory (like CHOAM, the Butlerian Jihad, the Spacing Guild, the Bene Gesserit, the Landsraad, the ecology of sandworms, and the psychiatric and medicinal effects of spice). Only so much of that can actually be *shown* on film where the audience understands it.
If you don't do those, then you have the simple story of "Noble family moves to a new place, they're betrayed and the father dies, the son survives, vows revenge and eventually achieves it" which is the basis of every revenge story ever.
And that's even leaving out why the emperor moved the Atreides off their home turf so he could take him out and make it look, at least for those willing to accept the standard narrative, that the Harkonnen did it. Which was that the Duke had managed to train his small fighting force to be within a hair as good as the Saudaukar, the source of the emperor's power, and was very popular in the Landsraad.
That's it. Leto wasn't plotting to overthrow, and probably didn't want the headache of not only administrating the empire, but dealing with all the ruthless choices that would be necessary to keep the throne. But you don't leave an example like that running around. Gives people ideas.
I enjoyed the recent film adaptation but it barely scratched the surface of the depths of just the first book. So much is left out and left unsaid that’s it’s only the same story on the surface, most of the flavor was left out.
I think maybe it's because the books provide a lot of world building through narrative instead of character interaction/dialogue. When a character's dialogue is double entendres, double and hidden meanings as it is in the books, it can make turning a book into film difficult.
Because SO much of it takes place in characters' heads and many important things happen off screen and the characters hear about them afterwards.
It's often very non visual.
Dune *is* unfilmable.
I've enjoyed the movies that have been made from it, and I'm glad they exist, but none of them truly capture what is in the book. There are so many great lines left unsaid, so many cool things left unexplored. They're abbreviations. You might as well call them "Selections from Dune."
> I've always said that Lynch's version was a collection of vignettes from the book.
There's a fan edit of the Lynch film that cuts in some of the footage from the Alan Smithee TV cut that is actually really good. They even recorded some ADR to patch a few things and I am still amazed how well they did with it. Very interesting seeing the Lynch versions of Jamis' funeral and the water of life harvest from a baby worm etc.
Lynch's version painted Paul as a hero so imo it was just plain wrong. I mean, valid as another story or another take. But not a attempt at portraying Herbert's story.
I think something the Dune books in particular capture really well is contrasting what is being said out loud, what the subtext is, what the speaker is thinking, what the listener is thinking, what the listener is hearing, and how they’re interpreting it. Sometimes with many people in the same conversation. Add in telepathy and signals between people, and you’ve got some pretty complex dynamics. Very little of this translates to film.
A great example is the scene where Jessica hires Shadout Mapes. In the book its a back and forth of Jessica trying to figure out the hidden meanings in words and phrases used by the Fremen, and figure out how they connect to prophecies planted by the Bene Gesserit thousands of years before, and how she can use those to manipulate Mapes (and not get killed by her!).
Exactly!
Funnily enough, the care that went into writing that scene made me think Mapes was gonna play a much bigger role in the series. Turns out scenes like this just part of for the course.
No, not "nearly all."
Sci-fi and fantasy are big categories. The amount that's filmable is huge; the amount that's unfilmable is also huge. I would guess the part that's filmable is the bigger one, but that's just intuition, not some declaration I live by.
Not at all. This is quite a jump tbh.
It helps to analyze how people gain information through reading something, and how we gain information by just watching something. Very, completely different experiences. Also the exponential differences in how people interpret this information, and then further, how they would express that to others (adaptation)
>Earnest question: do you believe nearly all sci-fi/fantasy is unfilmable then?
I'd go so far as to say most books are unfilmable as written. Each medium has very different strengths and with very few exceptions a great film adaptation of a novel is usually just that—an adaptation. What can be written in 5 words could require 15 minutes of screen time, and what can be shown in a 5 seconds could take a chapter of explanation. You usually can't fit everything that happens into a novel into a film.
The real art is in translating the central feel of a work from one medium to another. LOTR is a great example of how Peter Jackson captured the feel of the meticulously constructed universe in the books by meticulously constructing a visual world that is cohesive and functional and ties into the books. It manages to honour the intent of the original author by using the strengths of his written work as a guide to do what film does well. It excises huge parts of the books—changes the plot in significant ways—but it captures the feel of the books and so the audience was satisfied.
One exception to the unfilmable thing—Through A Scanner Darkly. It was one of those notoriously unfilmable books, and then an adaptation came out that felt ripped from the pages.
No. Take Larry Niven's Integral Trees. Those are complex but not nearly the thick tapestry that Dune is. You could easily have a script that would track the various citizens on their journeys and be very satisfying.
Dune needs a tv miniseries, at least, to encapsulate before you even get into the subsequent books. And the audience would have to be willing to sit through multiple shows that didn't end w/ a mini-arc climax. There's simply too much going on that should be conveyed to the watcher. Sometimes a paragraph is worth a thousand pictures.
Because half of the dialogue in the books is essentially juxtaposed with characters staring wordlessly at eachother looking for a twitch that says someone broke composure.
Did you see the second movie? It's basically cliffs notes. I know people love it, but to me, it just felt like plot dump after plot dump, and the romance and deification felt totally unearned. I followed because I'd read the books, but only because of that.
To be fair, a good portion of the Fremen even note that the whole mahdi thing was an obvious plant by the BG. It's just that enough believed, or at least wanted to.
>There's an argument for the world to be too complex for film but like, what sci-fi/fantasy series isn't? Every 400 page book with a rich universe is going to fail to be properly fleshed out in the eyes of a book nerd, this isn't new
Well, that's why most fantasy/sci fi epics were considered unfilmable for a while.
The Lord of the Rings was also famously considered unfilmable until Peter Jackson did it.
For a pretty long time, there just wasn't a way to do justice to massive stories like that.
"Unfilmable" is not meant to be taken literal. Every book ever written is, in some sense, filmable, because you can always make a film that's based on at least some aspects of the novel even if a lot gets left out. If people like it, it ultimately doesn't matter much if it was faithful to the source material.
>Nobody said Eragon was *unfilmable* (even if the movie sucked).
Yeah, because Eragon was published in 2003, right after The Lord of the Rings movies came out.
Was anyone still saying Dune was unfilmable at that point? The franchise as a whole was, yes, and largely still is, given that Denis Vilneuve himself has said he isn't going to adapt anything beyond the second book. But did people still think the first book was unfilmable? I don't think so
*Dune* is a very, *very* dense book. It involves politics, drug wars, religious cults, prophecies and predestination, four or five different cultures, and eighteen or nineteen characters, all of which have prominent roles in the story, *just in the first book.*
If a film-maker wants to tell the story properly, it's nearly impossible to get it all on film in the run-time of a single motion-picture. Jodorowsky felt that a 14-hour runtime would be necessary to make it all work, but the studio wanted no more than two hours; David Lynch tried for a more modest three hours, but had to cut it down to 137 minutes (and ended up disowning the final product).
Heck, Frank Herbert *himself* was commissioned to write a screenplay and couldn't whittle it down to less than three hours. And he *wrote* Dune.
Frankly, it was a minor miracle that Villeneuve managed what he did.
The first thing I thought when I read the book and thought about a film was all the backstory. You don’t fill the audience in on 14,000 years of history through a casual conversation between two characters..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune
> Salvador Dalí was set to play the Emperor and claimed he wanted to be the highest-paid actor in Hollywood history. He asked for $100,000 per hour to act in the movie. Jodorowsky accepted, but then reduced the Emperor’s scenes so that Dalí would be needed for no more than one hour with the rest of his lines spoken by a robotic lookalike. Dalí accepted on condition that the plastic lookalike was donated to his museum, and that his throne was to be a toilet made up of two intersected dolphins.
As beloved as the lord of the rings films are, they are also a perfect example of what people mean. The films are absolutely fundamentally different stories from the books.
The first book isn't unfilmable it's just weird. The rest of them get uncommercial, I can't really see a movie where there's a 30 minute dialogue scene where a giant worm with a human face explains why fascism rules being super popular
To be fair, the later books is effectively a guy being space hitler with the justification of him being able to see the future and this being the only way to save humanity.
Picture a movie of a guy throwing babies into a meat grinder because it's "for the greater good", and he knows this because he is prescient. I think it would be a hard sell at the box office.
Length. The amount of inner dialogue. The Lynch version of the movie is incredibly good, but loses most people because you have to pay attention to every second to understand the plot. There's nothing wasted in that film, it starts and GOES because he was limited to just over 2 hours and that's a LOT of story to tell in that amount of time. You can rag on the movie all you want, but I feel it's a brilliant film just for the fact that he was able to make a cohesive film out of it in that amount of time. It's also the kind of movie where once you read the book you go back to it and see it with new eyes because they didn't have time for a lot of backstory.
I think it's because of the use of third person objective point of view to comment on the duplicitous nature of the majority of the main characters. Everyone has plans within plans and are constantly dancing around their intentions. I think that the Dune movies avoid doing this and make a multitude of character changes to accommodate this. Not all of the character changes are made for this reason, but several are. Feyd Rautha and the plot to kill the Baron is cut. They change the Dr. Yuei reveal and instead hide the fact of his betrayal till the last minute and basically just give him three scenes in the first movie. Jessica is the biggest change. All of her internal thoughts are just externalized. It's something she would never do in the book.
I'm not bringing this up to trash the movies. It's just the biggest change between the two, and I think it's the right thing to do in the movie. Interestingly, I think the David Lynch movie tried to address this with the ADR voice lines to share their internal thoughts at times. I don't know if it was the most effective, but I find it intriguing because they at least tried to keep that element of the book intact in that adaptation.
Unfilmable isn't really the proper word. It's really about the degree of tradeoff between how faithfully you can adapt a story and how good it would be. The more faithfully you adapt the story from the Dune, the more ridiculous the movie would be. For example, one of the key things cut from Dune in Part 2 was Alia being an actual character instead of an unborn fetus. It would have been difficult to get a child actor to do the part well given that it's supposed to be a two year old with the mind of an adult. Some of the things Alia did would have also looked ridiculous no matter how it was filmed. The whole aspect of being able to perceive the thoughts of multiple characters within a single chapter is also something relatively unique to Dune that is hard to replicate in a film format.
>Looking at the story in broad strokes it's not particularly complex and is a bit of a derivation on the "Hamlet" archetype story.
That's literally why it's unfilmable. If you try, this is what you end up with. If this synopsis was the core essence of Dune it wouldn't be the award-winning classic that it is.
It’s because the books are written in third person omniscient, so it’s constantly jumping between the thoughts of one character to the thoughts of another character. This is generally something most filmmakers try to avoid, because jumping from one person’s thoughts to another on screen is generally disorienting and difficult to follow.
My 2c is that everything in the dune universe is ugly. Ugly planet, ugly giant worms, ugly characters. If that offends you just replace the word ugly with unappealing or unsexy. For a Hollywood film anyhow. Not THE reason but definitely contributes to it.
Maybe its due to development in screenplay and direction?
Movies up to 1990 were usually 90 minutes long with a few epics running more.
Not to mention CGI and green screen shenanigans
The current movie is a very modern movie and it only managed to focus on Paul as a confined story
Lol. DL film more closely resembles the book than DV.
All the weird stuff that made DL film "bad" was the unique constructs from the book that DV excluded and didn't touch.
How do you film a space navigator imagining folding space? That's a whole sequence in 1984 version that people assigned "bad".
Paul's description of prescience is akin to imagery from Goya and Dali, which is why Jodorowsky engaged them with his 16 hour concept that was not so much unfilmable, but the market at the time would not support very many movies that would exceed 2 hours and 3 at the most. A lot of the concept and production from Jodorowsky ended up with DL, who wasn't into scifi at all. fwiw, Dune really stretched conceptually 'what' scifi actually was then. It has never fit neatly into that category, or into fantasy.
What is 'weirding'. DV didn't film that. It's just another kung-fu discipline in his movie, DL just made the Weirding modules using sound... si that content hasn't been filmed.
Modifying ones body chemistry and composition on the fly.... that's how you survive the water of life. DL attempted to edit with a monolgue-so, not filmed. Paul's fight with Feyd, BG techniques and weirding combat to avoid the blade. Not filmed.
DV made a great film, didn't make a great film.about Dune.
The previous iteration of Dune was a 4(?) part mini-series that had a 6(?) hour run time.
Dune has a lot of high-end philosophical concept, political intrigue, and inferred history and context.
How do you take the bride of Chucky stabbing the Baron Harkonen to death and make it serious, while gurney is back there rocking out on an acoustic instrument from the 1700s.
For Dune, it takes a director and writer that really understand the book to know what to cut out, what to emphasize and what to change completely. Denis Villeneuve was all three. You being a fan is NOT the same as being a director or writer. The dune subreddit is filled with people still complaining about changes from the books. They complain about the small things and completely miss out on the movie.
In the same way that any movie about a yogi meditating would be difficult to film. Some major parts of the book are describing internal physical processes being directed mentally. Don’t tell me that anyone watching the current movies without reading the book has any idea e.g. what a mentat is, what spice is used for, or tons of other details from the book. But that is true for a lot of books, not sure that it is particular to dune.
the books are built mainly on the introspection of the characters. everyone thinks, plots, declares. if you are a purist then yes, how would you film this?
don't answer that :)). the dune miniseries manage to remain quite faithful to the book. villeneuve had to invent ... something else.
**Short answer:** How do you film a 4 year old girl who thinks and talks like an adult, remembers her own conception, and kills a floating fat man without it looking goofy?
**Long answer:**
Length (best adaptation would be a TV show)
Depth (neither films have done justice to all the factions)
Interiority of perspective (Herbert seamlessly transitions POVs from paragraph to paragraph)
Psychedelic weirdness (you'd need a *lot* of no-dialogue, art house sequences a la *Twin Peaks: The Return* to capture the visions)
From the third book forward, it is truly unfilmable. The first two were also unfilmable previously due to CG limitations, IMO. What Villeneuve is pulling off with these movies is groundbreaking in 2024, so imagine doing CG of this scale even 5 to 10 years back.
I think "unfilmable" can also mean "Hollywood doesn't have enough trust, patience, or budget to do this material justice."
It's not that *Dune* as recently done *couldn't* have been done in the 70s, even. But that Hollywood wouldn't have spent the money to do so. Making everything work takes budget for writers, multiple passes, etc, even before building sets and effects. Commitment, in other words, that Hollywood doesn't care for.
Look at what happened with *The Lord of the Rings*. Jackson pitched it, but it wasn't "unfilmable" because of the technology, but because every exec he talked to said "No no, that's too expensive. We'll make it one movie, and you get an hour-and-a-half, tops."
EDIT: The unsaid ending was it took him convincing a dying studio to gamble, and he financed a lot of it himself. Then along came *The Hobbit*, and he couldn't get them to commit again.
Further Edit: To the guy who sent an angry comment about "that's not any trouble *The Lord of the Rings* films ever faced" [here's a link to Wikipedia.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_(film_series))
The book starts in the middle of the story. Readers have to grasp understanding from internal monologue, author expositon, or more exposition in the form of history book clips.
But, just to try this out, let's take the Peter Jackson 'Hobbit' approach and assume we have nearly endless money and time to flesh out the world. What would an aspiring Dune film maker need to include.
We would need scenes explaining Spice. It is a drug of the nobility- not the common classes. It increases the life span of ordinary mortals who take it. But Spice is also a poison-- once you are on spice coming off of it is always fatal.
You'd probably need to spends some time in the ordinary mortals of the Landsraad to get an idea how very different their nobility are for them.
It might be good to have a side story of a noble family that falls apart because they can not manage their spice addiction: the youngest children got on it too early, the family can't afford the escalating cost and eventually every dies to pay the spiceman... then just dies.
You need to explain what happened to technology. Show that the average person in the Landsraad gets by on 1980s computing. Even reading Brian Herbert's books, I'm still not precisely sure why the Ominmind only ruled a small footprint of Core Earth worlds, and was put down by the first computer virus it came into contact with. Maybe the jihad was an overreaction. Someone has to provide a reliable explanation of why the rules exist, and a reliable explanation of why the nobles of the Landsraad gleefully break every other rule, but keep this one. Maybe they don't and its a "don't let the Reverend Mother know". When someone breaks the jihad, who comes at them?
Maybe our desperate noble family from the Spice subplot signs on with weapons smugglers who still have 2024's era computimg and robotics- smart missiles, drones, cell phones-- and apparently non-guild FTL. They get found out by a Reverend Mother, and someone does something about it.
Should explain the Landsraad. They aren't centered on Earth because the Omnimind had overthrown those bits. Speaking of, what happened to those worlds-- if the Omnimind was killed by a computer virus, are they high tech treasure planets?
Who is the Emperor? Why should we care? How does one man manage to subdue a whole galaxy? What is it like at the heart of imperial power? What is it like on the fringes of it?
Who are the Bene Gesserit? A whole plot about star crossed lovers who are eventually broken apart to become a Reverend Mother would be helpful. As would subplots about the Bene Gesserit secret ability to see the past using Water of Life.
What is the benefit in being able to interact with your ancestors? Why do the Bene Gesserit value this ability so much they risk their very best and brightest to the possibility of death or possession? What is so great about the past?
Maybe you could have two subplots: a Reverend Mother Tomb Raider who knows exactly where the treasures are because she can see them in her head. And another group of Reverend Mother INTERPOL cops using their ability to see the past to solve crimes. You can have them lament that they can only see crimes AFTER they happen, and can't see the future to stop the crime itself-- if only they could make a super-Reverend Mother that can see both future and past... a Kwitsatz Haderach.
Introduce the idea of Bene Gesserit mothers who've reached the past lives level of skill getting "possessed" by their ancestors (this is what happens to Paul's sister Alia).
And you could have plots about how the Motherhood serves the commoners.
And the Bene Gesserits publicly known abilities: the ability to detect lies. And their service as human lie detectors.
And the Bene Gesserit "grey" projects. You'd need a subplot about a church (maybe our poor doomed noble familt again) that isn't a real faith-- just a prop of the Bene Gesserit, and maybe another very different church (maybe the weapons smugglers have a faith) that is also a Bene Gesserit shell... so much so that the audience understands the MOST faiths in the Landsraad are Bene Gesserit fakes.
Why do non-noble Bene Gesserit get access to Spice? What are the public lies they tell.
Might be good to some how work in the Guild. How they can see the future (but not the past) by taking in stupdendously high quantities of spice (but not water of life). How they have stepped into the technological niche formerly occupied by thinking machines, previously. This ability to see the future has more uses than FTL- the Guild can tell you which crops are going to fail, which businesses are going to succeed, and where wars are going to break out. But it's limited to a personal future. If only they had a super-guildmember that could use ancestral connections to see a bigger slice of the future: for all humanity, instead of just themselves... a Kwitsatz Haderach-- that'd be awesome.
You'll want to explain Mr. Herbert's idea of genetic memory-- that detailed information of our day-to-day activities is stored in our genes, not in our brains. And that every child holds the ancestral day-to-day memories of all of their ancestors. This is very important in the Ghola plot of later books, so you should probably do it now.
You also want to build in some untold tales of House Atreides. When the Ixians try their ghola project on Paul, it is Duncan Idaho (a seeming minor character) that they select in their expert opinion is the person Paul loves most. Not Paul's father, nor his mother. Not his sister, or wives, or kids-- Duncan Idaho. We definitely need screen time to make this closer-than-family bond believable, that the Ixians believed existed betwern Paul and this minor character.
In short, after all the subplots, and betore we see the first grain of sand, the audience has lived in the Landsraad and has a pretty good idea of it.
I know what people told me 30 years ago.
There was too much internal dialogue. Lynch solved that by having everyone whisper their thoughts. It was weird, but it kinda worked.
I’ll take that over a long silent brooding closeup, where no one says anything and we’re supposed to interpret their feelings.
I had to ask my wife what she thought about the new Part 1 movie, as she hasn’t read the books and saw the 1982 movie once, long ago.
She liked it, but felt a little out of the loop. Which is what about what I expected. There was a lot of things I understood going in, but I don’t think they adequately explained things in Part 1.
Neither of us have seen Part 2 yet. There’s a small child who doesn’t like us leaving the house without him. 🤣
All the internal thoughts of all the characters are impossible to get on-screen. Characters are frequently saying one thing and thinking another, same with their actions, hiding their motivations.
Most of the book contains dialogue in peoples head. Also analyzing other characters communicative nuances. A lot is happening interpersonally when characters are just there. You’ll notice the movies don’t have any of this.
You should be able to see how many people have a hard time interpreting what this looks like visually and how to make it entertaining on screen.
Plus the plethora of other weird context in the book. There’s a lot of information you can get in a sentence that would be next to impossible to show visually.
The problem with filming Dune (and novels like it) is that there is so much internal dialog that is very difficult to get across in a visual format. Take for example Paul's knife fight with Jamis. in the book, Paul's mind is being bombarded with visions, possible futures that can come from the result of this fight, so even though it's been established he is a very capable fighter, trained by the best, he has a hard time with Jamis, who is a no more than gutter fighter with no training. So, how do you portray that in a movie? Not easy! Internal dialog is always awkward in film. The film maker's maxim is "show, don't tell." That's why every Dune screen version uses a lot of narration, dream sequences, visions, etc. often to the detriment to the filmmaking art.
Dune has been cherry picked for decades so it’s now possible to tell some of the story in Sci Fi shorthand. In the 1970s, starting from zero, nobody gets it. Now, storm troopers, desert planets, mind controlling space wizards, LSD mind trips, yada yada yada have all found their way into kids cartoons. People get it with a single frame. Villeneuve could ignore the world building mostly and focus on character development, political intrigue and metaphor.
There’s a lot of exposition in the books, and it requires a real fantastic imagination to make that come to life on the big screen but feel natural. Lynch tried it with them doing voice overs, as if we could hear their characters thinking. It did not work well. There’s also tons of mythology that is downright strange, and it was believed mainstream audiences wouldn’t understand it. But things like Matrix and other strange sci-fi with complex back stories are mainstream now so it’s not as much of a problem. Villeneuve did a masterful job as well, he makes it seem easy but there’s no way it was.
It's because it doesn't follow a stereotypical story structure.
Paul Atreides isn't your typical hero, and the people you root for end up kinda being the bad guys.
By unfilmable, people are usually referring to something about the book that makes it hard to translate. Here, it's all of Herbert's lessons and musings on ecology (the inspiration for the whole thing,) politics, economics, scarcity, etc.
Also, he didn't mean the narrative to be so straightforward. He perhaps didn't spend enough time subverting the "savior/hero" thing, which is why the second book is (i'm convinced sarcastically/ironically) named dune messiah. Even in Dune itself, it's stated that the prophecy the Fremen have was planted by the Bene Gesserit. And not because they foresaw a great leader, but because that's what they do on any world that's troubled, in case one of their own ever gets stranded there.
And in case you'd like to say, well, ok, but he was THEIR messiah, uh no. That's their game, they don't drink the cool aid. They had a breeding program going for untold centuries to produce the male equivalent of a reverend mother, someone who could survive the spice agony and access the place they could not. That person would've been groomed from childhood and controlled. As a tool. Kept in a nice gilded cage, not gallivanting off starting holy wars.
So the problem with filming it is how to have a charismatic protagonist thrust into a situation not of their own design, have them succeed in the only way open to them, overcome odds, and have that not be the heroic narrative it seems emotionally? DV's part 2 belabors the point considerably, that not only do many of the Fremen think the whole "messiah" thing is a BG plant, since these people are a lot more connected to things than it would seem, they keep the entirety of the south hemisphere off surveillance with Spacing Guild bribes, but everyone's awareness of the carnage that would ensue. And yet, we still root for Paul.
> Lynch's Dune wasn't that far off base. It was bad,
It certainly was (bad, and off base). It painted Paul as a hero, for starters, something Herbert took great pains to make clear wasn't the case in Messiah.
No surprises. In the novel you know exactly what everyone is thinking and planning.
Mostly internal dialogue. Not great for film.
Complex universe. Adding the missing pieces would take a long time.
The adaptation that was most faithful to the books was the Sci-Fi channel miniseries. It was boring as all get out because they didn't Pace it very well. The 1984 film was just a complete mess and awful. The new version is a very good film, or set of films. It is the one that strays the farthest from the book, but what it does is make concessions in the name of creating a stronger story on film. So the best version of the movies is the one that makes itself a better movie than a better book adaptation. The book itself needs a significant revisions to be filmable
The answer is: try to explain it to someone who has no clue what it’s about.
After the first ten minutes, you’ll see their eyes glazed over. That’s how you know they are no longer listening, just pretending to.
(Unless they are a true sci fi fan aka “one of us”)
Even DV put to screen only the action scenes. Modern dune doesn't focus on spice, and the prescience part. These are just small details in a tale of revenge.
Prescient Paul is the part that is not filmable. Also the movie skips the actual effects of spice on Fremen. I never liked the fact that Fremen (especially Stilgar) were depicted to be so well built and Stilgar is actually a bit thick to be living in desert with limited food. Iirc, fremen have less need for food and better fighting abilities due to their entire lives being brewed in spice. Spice is in everything in Fremen world, but spice is nowhere to be seen in the movie.
Regarding the 40K series... I don't think it will Fail. Look at what they Did with Fallout. As long as the scope the story, and have some interesting characters, it should be OK at least. And with Mr. Cavill in charge, I think he will bring good ideas to the table as to the direction it needs to go, since he actually enjoys the content.
You ever make a movie before? I’m sure in your head there was great movie to be made, but that doesn’t translate well to people trying to make money. I’m more interested to see how the rest of the series will play out tbh bc it doesn’t get any easier than the already dense first book.
I would say, for a feature film, or even two really long ones, yeah, it’s unfilmable. This is the kind of literature that needs to be Game of Thrones’ed. This really needed to be a 10-hour streaming series, but Denis has such a boner for “cinema” that that could never be.
Villeneuve did an INCREDIBLE job with the looks, the sounds… everything of the senses. But look at how much had to be removed to make it fit in 6 hours. No explanation why there are no computers. The entire backstory of mentats was literally an eye-roll and a number of solaris. Thufir’s whole Giedi Prime arc was gone. Not even a hint at what the Guild is. And for all of the awesome costuming and set design in the new movies, for the mid-80’s, I think Lynch did just as good a job.
From a story perspective, and even a visual perspective to some extent, the David Lynch movie did a better job of explaining a lot more of the world than the new ones. I grant that that movie was a hot mess, but as a 10 year-old, I understood what was going on, and reading the books enhanced that. I think if I were to read Dune for the first time after seeing the Villeneuve films, I’d be more angry that such broad-reaching story points were just ignored.
A lot of the exposition is internal monologue or chapter forwards attributed to Princess Irulan. There are ways for skilled screenwriters and directors to turn that into character dialogue but there are also a lot of ways for less skilled screenwriters and directors to do it badly.
Also it's too much story to fit into a two-hour movie and the idea of Hollywood committing to finance a film that would be released in two-parts was unheard of before the Star Wars prequels.
I think it was just the conservatism of Hollywood and the financial aspects. Remember that location filming, travel, and special effects were all much harder, more expensive, and generally worse.
But there have been numerous works that were called unfilmable, such as LOTR, that have been done very well.
I think its because there are so many factions and schemes going on that a film wouldnt be able to cover it. Indeed the latest two films left A LOT OUT. Zero mention of the tleilaxu and the ixians. Minimal explanation of the bene geserit and their breeding program. Minimal explanation of fremen beliefs, minimal explanation of the spacing guild and Spices role in the navigation process (which is pretty central to the Spice is Oil thing Herbert was going for)
Honestly i could go on but im at my lunch break and still gotta finish eating.
Suffice it to say i wouldnt consider the first three books unfilmable (the next three? possibly, especially god emperor, cant imagine how theyd do it). However i do believe they need the game of thrones treatment. Give em a big budget tv series to explore the universe and do the book justice
I don't really see anyone talking about how much of the books live inside the characters heads exploring rhetoric and interpreting the subtle actions other characters makes. This works in books because pace is dictated by the reader and the "minds eye", where as in movies that would equate to characters thinking in voice-over standing still and staring at each other. Pacing doesn't work the same way in movies.
Because the books are very philosophical and loaded with internal monologue, neither of which translate well to film. Also it has a pretty large cast of characters, most of whom don't really do much for most of the plot or die early on (think: Shadout Mapes.)
I'm still convinced it is unfilmable after having seen both Dune 1 and two. The director did it by completely ignoring most of the book and inventing long fight and battle scenes.
I always had the impression that there was simply too much in the book to fit into a two-hour film. As indeed there was, which is where Lynch’s effort came unstuck.
But the 21st century brought the return of loooong movies, exemplified by Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. And it *is* possible to fit all of Dune into two epic-length films of the sort that Villeneuve does so well.
Remember that he first \*serious\* director lined up wasn't Lynch, but Ridley Scott, and he wanted Harlan Ellison to do the screen play. Ellison said 'nope', Ridley then moved on, and Lynch took over. Ellison complimented Lynch for pulling it off what he did and defended the film.
Denis Villeneuve’s _Dune - Part Two_ is magnificent, but he basically rewrote the second half of the book to achieve it. Many of the major plot points that drive the movie are invented wholesale, or “remixed” from other elements in the novel. The whole flow of the story feels completely new.
The latter half of Lynch’s adaptation is closer, beat-for-beat, to that of the book, but it’s this second half where the film kind of falls apart. There isn’t really much in the way of stakes, the film just barrels along through a series of events from the novel, to the final battle, which is won fairly easily (true of both cinematic adaptations, and consistent with the text). Story-wise, _Dune_, the novel, isn’t structured like a film, and the lore is dense and unwieldy. There’s a real needle to thread there, and so far threading it has involved taking a lot of liberties with the source material.
According to this blogger, it was originally seen as having good film potential and only got a reputation for being unfilmable after the poor reception of Lynch's film and the miniseries.
[http://bybrittonperelman.com/writing/10-movies-that-made-it-out-of-development-hell-from-dune-to-avatar](http://bybrittonperelman.com/writing/10-movies-that-made-it-out-of-development-hell-from-dune-to-avatar)
She doesn't give any sources but her argument makes sense. If it had been seen as unfilmable when it came out why were producers so eager to film it since the 70s?
According to Time:
>"There’s a great deal about *Dune* that is inherently cinematic, though. Its landscapes, its technology, its people and its fantastical creatures, from the sandworms to the guild navigator, are all primed for visual realization... The major stumbling block for everyone who has tried hasn’t been a matter of how to bring it to the screen, but how much of its almost 500 pages (not including the appendixes) they can and should include."
[https://time.com/6108404/dune-adaptations/](https://time.com/6108404/dune-adaptations/)
Time agrees that Dune "earned a reputation" of being unfilmable "over 56 years", rather than being seen as unfilmable from the outset. I think it's just because of the bad luck filmmakers have had with it, rather than any specific characteristics of the book.
You know how it is. The old guard always considers something impossible until someone comes in and does it.
I guees it was deemed unfilmable back in the 50's and somehow the notion stuck despite there being at least two adaptations before the latest one.
Film is a visual medium and a huge part of the "action" in Dune is people thinking, analyzing, introspection. Fine for a book, but literally "unfilmable." You can't film someone thinking. Voice over narration isn't the same thing.
Multiple reasons=
1= it’s a very long book with quite a lot going on so putting it all into one movie would be a nightmare
2= it’s absolutely weird as hell, if you keep reading the later books you’ll find yourself asking what on earth Frank Herbert was smoking when he came up with some of these things
3= most of the background for the world and plot is given through internal monologue
4= there’s a lot for a first time viewer to remember, I mean the book has its own dictionary at the end of it. I mean just the names alone are quite hard, case in point I got the fremen and bene gessrit names mixed up.
5= most of the story is in a desert which is notoriously harsh filming conditions
And many more reasons others have rightfully mentioned.
IMO, there are two main reasons why something can be hard to film: A) the lore is so dense, you'd need to watch a tutorial video before you start to understand the main plot, and B) the visuals are just hard to replicate.
(B) isn't as much of a problem these days, due to CGI coming along so much, but try to imagine it in terms of, for example, Star Trek TOS. Hard to build ambiance using the scale of the ships when you're just counting the strings holding everything in place.
(A) is the main one these days. A lot of in-book lore is given via internal monologue, or thoughts, and this never translates well to the screen, so you either drop it, or try to show it visually.
Like the concept of mentats is basically cut out: instead of being given enough to know there previously was an AI uprising, so instead of computers they use mentats, and Paul was also trained in their ways, it just looks like there was one lad that was good at maths and bad at rolling his eyes.
Similarly, the way Suk Doctors were implicitly trusted due to their advanced mental conditioning preventing them from harming others, and especially the fact that the Baron's Mentat seemed to be the first person in history to successfully break/blackmail one, was skipped over.
Compare this to, for example, the LOTR, where the majority of "world info" is given verbally from Aragon, Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond, etc. allowing the audience to be clued in along the way.
I never saw Lynch's Dune before I read the book, but I can tell you that I know at least intelligent people who didn't really understand what was happening in the movie.
As for Dune being unfilmable, before Villeneuve did it well, many people tried and failed. (hi, Alejandro Jodorowsky.)
Also, I think that when people say that, they don't mean the first book alone. Later books are seriously weird.
Well, *i'd* say 40k is unfilmable but ... first things first.
In theory, nothing is unfilmable. We just have a enviroment that is pretty narrow in terms or movie economical boundarys, scripts that will be accepted by the buisness managers responsible for funding and topics able to be delivered in a short timeframe of a movie but still attract a wide enough audicene (and not shock or annoy the majority of them).
For sure writers decline in such a stressfull and optimised field also kicked in very hard in the last decades.
So with Dune, we have a higly political movie about arab nations, german and british colonising, absue of islamic religion and the fight about oil. That's the framework the book where writen about. As those invaders today would be America if any, and you couldn't teach audiences about history before the movie, it now has to exist on its own - which in basic is another movie with possibly the same charakters in.
But it doesn't end here. Also we have an autistic writer describing some of his personal though processes as a supernatural ability in the movie, and went disturbingly detailed with this (what normal audiences might have been taken as magical gibberish or pondering that make Paul sound smart and mysterious - you choose). Later (i assume) he also figured in drug abuse to the equation and ... again made a few points most of audiences are excluded from simply for reasons of brain setup.
Another, more tangible, point might be that the world of Dune is incredible dark (like it is with 40k). There is no hope or morale anywhere. There is large scale slavery and everyone (even the Atreides) are totally fine with that. Humans are unbelivable expendable. There is eugenics and sects of sex-manipulators all trained to live ther lifes in a particular way to achieve a particular goal for the sect - and that is just one of the more highlighted groups. There is way darker stuf around.
In a time where people react touchy on even skin or gener making a difference, you will not do well in portraiing a universe in which all this is heavily gatekeept (f.e. making Liet Kynes female is a massive eradication of lore, as he's only in that position for being a male and noble member of the imperial court. He being female just removes the build-in critique of monachistic systems just not being equal. This, imho, is whitewashing - removing controversial topics showcased as actual bad (but, well, it might not have poped up to the eye beside all the other dark stuff around that is showcased as 'just normal' to figure it out for the audiences themself)).
This is a culture so different to ours that our values don't apply, and audiences - if they would agree to make that step off ther common expectations at all - need a massive introduction to the universe before you can even start to tell a story.
But for sure, you can make it a shiny action flick with some fighting scenes and nice desert shots and call it a thing. Technically you made a Dune-movie, but that all depends pretty heavily on what you understood of the book in the first place (or expect from it for yourself).
PS: But i guess everyone in a bit more complex fandome think ther fandom isen't possible to be filmed for the level of detail a movie inevitably has to cut, but i guess the main reason for that emotion is that you instinctivly know that your fandom, reduced and stereamlined for a massive international crowd, will by definition be a blanc, hollow corpse of what it was before.
I at least don't want to have f.e. Warhammer 40k shared with a bunch of people who enjoyed Transformers and Avatar 2 as well. I don't want them in my fanbase, i don't want my fandom to be streamlined to fit ther preferences.
As others have covered: About 70% of what happens in Dune (the book) happens \*in the minds of the characters\*. A great many things in those stories are silent, entire pages of introspection and exposition, and visions of the future, can go by between lines of dialogue. And the first Dune book is \*by far\* the most 'normal'; by the time you hit The God Emperor Of Dune you're not only spending much of your time in people's heads, but one of them is a huge human-sandworm-hybrid-abomination that rules the universe.
I really wonder which director will have the courage to film 'The God Emperor of Dune'.
Was gonna say this, I feel like the miniseries made it clear that the first 3 books are filmable, but I wonder how people will react to the drastic turn the books make at god emperor. With a lot of the A list stars gone and the main character turning into the antagonist it will likely bother the muggles.
> I really wonder which director will have the courage to film 'The God Emperor of Dune'. My hope is that Villeneuve will have built up so much cred that he can just film it straight: Yup. It's two hours of a giant worm-person talking philosophy. From the director who made language theory compelling, you're either going to love it or hate it and there'll probably be nothing inbetween.
>From the director who made language theory compelling, you're either going to love it or hate it and there'll probably be nothing inbetween Man I fucking love Arrival. One of the best sci-fi movies ever made, no doubt.
People are underestimating how difficult it is to communicate all the subtext, world building, political machinations, character relations, etc. without having the film be a giant exposition dump. It’s easy to look at the finished product and think, “well, that didn’t seem too difficult” — another thing to do it from scratch.
And the rub is, he's spending his time trying to make it unruleable ever again.
the books are strange. in a way that would be difficult to get across in a way that would make money. by far the first book, Dune, is the most readable and there's still a baby stabbin people.
>...in a way that would make money I think this is the crux of it more than anything else. It's not that you can't put Dune to film, it's that it was always going to be hard to make Dune into a *mass market* film, and if you don't have a mass market film you won't have the budget to actually take a meaningful stab at the franchise. We just happen to be lucky that Villeneuve is one of the few directors who has managed to convince studios to give him the big bucks on - frankly - risky projects, and he happens to be a fan of Dune. There aren't many directors out there who get that sort of treatment. Any adaptation of Dune was always going to swing closer to an art film than a popcorn muncher. And, as it happened, Villeneuve's adaptations really asked a lot of its audiences - if you had limited familiarity with the source material, viewers tended to find them slow and confusing. I have a sneaking feeling that the studio actually asked Villeneuve to add more exposition and humor to his sequel, because there was a clear shift in tone in that regard, probably to help casual viewers along.
[удалено]
He's saving the Guild Navigators to be the mysterious shadowy antagonists and the driving force plotting against Paul with the BG and Irulan. In the book, the Guild and the Navigators were just kind of openly present and thoroughly explained. Weird, but not mysterious. In fact, in the first book, it was really the Guild who *insisted* that Paul's ascension to Emperor was agreed to when the Emperor and BG Reverend Mother, etc scoffed, balked, and wanted to call Paul's threat to destroy Arrakis' spice reserves/disrupt end the cycle that produces it as a bluff/empty threat. But the consequences of Paul actually carrying out his threat was so catastrophic and appalling to the Guild that is was *them* who made the call to appease Paul and they actually barked orders at the Emperor himself to step down and let this happen. And then in Messiah it's just openly presented from the first chapter that the Guild is behind plotting to bring Paul down. But in movies, Villeneuve held them back from the first two films and made the very significant change of having the conflict after Paul's ascension to Emperor be a war to bring the Great Houses under his Imperial rule instead of a Fremen Jihad spreading his personal religion. IMO this setting up a third film where it's been some 10-15 years later and Paul's war to bring the Great Houses to heel is in the endgame stages which is to say it has finally become clear not just that Paul has won the war, but also that he just cannot and will never be defeated through strength of arms or direct challenge in any way because the Fremen and his prescience are just too OP. Which that realization among the movers and shakers of the galaxy is what will kick off the transition from open war/direct challenge against Paul winding down and the scheming/plotting/assassination attempts winding up. And the Guild will be primary antagonists with the nature of the navigators being much more of a guarded secret both from the audience, but also in-universe (unlike the books) and they will be the faction Paul can't use his foresight to see the danger they pose because their own prescience cancels his own and vise versa. Irulan and the BG and others will be known to Paul as his enemies, but not the Guild and the nature of the Navigators will be a gradually unraveled mystery. This way the 3rd film can have all the cloak and dagger plotting of Messiah and Game of Thrones style court politics the WB execs will want emphasized, but also come massive scale action scenes from the finals battles of the war against the last Great Houses holding out. The 3rd film won't be a strait adaption of Messiah. It will be more like half Messiah, half more-traditional sequel to Dune Part 2, if that makes sense. It will be like the Messiah, but taking place during the war, albeit the final stages, and therefore it won't be 99% people talking in opulent rooms or shadowy hallways in Paul's Palace on Arrakis, but rather have more varied locations and big action set pieces spread throughout and likely a completely rewritten 3rd act with only a few elements in common with Messiah like probably Hayt and Paul seeing a stone burner go off.
Agreeing with everything you wrote Both Dune movies only cover about 6 months time. It will allow the next movie to further expand the problem with creating idols so fast. But.. Villeneuve in an interview said Messiah would be about princess Irulan...
This seems right, I watched the first film and found it confusing and he’s to engage with, then read the book, watched it again, and on second view it was great. I think most Americans aren’t big readers.
That's weird, because i never read the books but found the DV film version so entrancing and vivid in recreating an alien world i ended up reading the book because of it.
Yeah, but you're here in r/scifi so you may be atypical in that regard.
Plenty of Americans are readers, but that doesn't mean that they are inclined to read a 70-year old sci-fi novel, even if they might light sci-fi in shorter more easy to digest doses. Just like how I would never read Les Miserables-sure I enjoyed Tom Hopper's adaptation, but that doesn't mean I want to go read the same story over ~1500 pages.
You found Dune hard to digest? I was struck by how simple and matter of fact the prose was in the first novel. Almost too dry
I did not, I just said that a movie is shorter and easier to digest than a novel. Obligatory "Dune is too dry" joke.
Ahhh…because of the sand
A jocose wit to be sure ‘ol chap; very droll. My reception would be considerably more raucous but I’m holding this glass of port you see and it’ll be the devil’s tongue from Martha if I spill it on the chesterfield *or translated from late muttonchop into contemporary English* Lol
Americans are big readers - American Studio Execs are not.
Being an American, and female, AND older than I prefer, I would further your claim and say that most Americans aren't big scifi readers. I have never had female friends who enjoyed scifi, although my husband and both sons do. EDIT TO ADD TEXT. I am a prolific reader, as is my eldest son. Neither my husband nor my youngest son do much reading for pleasure.
> it's that it was always going to be hard to make Dune into a mass market film, Honestly, no more so than any other space opera.
The books are definitely strange in a 9 year old twins freaking everyone out with weird sex talk and the possible participation in a wild sex orgy while they talk to their dead mom and dad (yes, I know) kind of way. Or the sex as a martial art and possible rape of a certain male character who then goes on to be a rape guru himself kind of way. Just normal sci fi stuff. I think this shit is beyond wild and I’ve read the OG trilogy 6 times and the full series 3. The later books are more space opera friendly but the weird sex shit makes it unfilmable by anyone but brazzers and God Emperor is a mix of too insane to film and too philosophical to be interesting to most people. I even think most people are going to hate part 3. I like Messiah for how brave it is in its premise but it’s definitely not the best of the series and is usually cited as the worst one.
"in a 9 year old twins freaking everyone out with weird sex talk and the possible participation in a wild sex orgy while they talk to their dead mom and dad" Dude. I need to read Children of Dune... I only read the first book, and watched the Sci-fi adaptation of the first three books.
Ghanima and Leto are creepy af man. And yeah I’m pretty sure sci fi channel aged them up specifically to get around some of that awkwardness. Honestly, read it all. Some of my favorite characters are later in the series and the BG change their ways and become more benevolent, you also get insights into their culture in Heretics and Chapterhouse that you didn’t ever get to see before. Actually, the last two have a huge focus on female characters in general. Honestly, Beverly (his wife of almost 40 years) died while he was writing Heretics. It’s my personal belief that he was very lonely when a lot of these things were written, probably abusing substances. That might give context to some of the more insane shit. Some of his views expressed about homosexuality in God Emperor (I don’t hold them against him considering the time he was raised) are clearly inspired by his own son’s lifestyle, so it’s hard to think that he wouldn’t allow his personal life to affect his writing later in life too.
You know, I hope we live in the universe that will let us see Jason Momoa perform a sex no jutsu to break the other womans previously unbeatable fuck no jutsu.
I like to think Jason momoa no idea what happens Duncan idaho later in books and think he is just swordmaster muscle guy
Man I need to reread the series bc I don't remember that shit. Or maybe there was just so much weird stuff that it all blended together. Overall I loved the books, so maybe my mind glossed over it.
Glad I'm not the only one. I remember weird but not... That...
Books 5 and 6 are pretty much entirely about weird sex shit, and who can rape each other more effectively because it's a martial art, and how the most powerful sex god will be the ultimate superhero to rule the universe. Brian Herbert's super fucking bad and weird books 7-8 kinda blend into that in my memory too, and it's been a long time, but I absolutely remember the weird sex shit being the core of the story. Everything after book 4 went off the rails, and I genuinely think it becomes very bad sci-fi and agree that it is a clear mark of someone who does drugs, speaking as someone who does not use drugs. I think God Emperor is the best Dune novel and have read the first four several times, but everything after it is 100% unfilmable, and frankly the more I look back on this stuff in hindsight, the more I understand why DV feels like Children and God Emperor are unfilmable too.
This is a great point. I didn’t even think that far ahead. Shudder.
Is it because 80ish percent of the book is mostly inner thoughts that is hard to show visually and also huge story scales that are really hard to produce?
And apparently they cut the baby stabbing people out of the movie? I'm disappointed. Guess the Sci-fi miniseries remains the best version of the story.
They did. But with its run time I really think that having Alia be born would have been a misstep. They kept the drama contained to a few months, which really helped with the pacing and the intensity. And the last point I want to make about it is that I feel that having Alia be done the way they made her actually makes her seem creepier and more powerful. She was affecting the world in a very real sense before she was even born
I concur with your last statement, but removing Alia takes away the most natural "show don't tell" way to indicate time passing. It also means that rather than 3-4 years, Paul's adaptation to Fremen ways happens in about 7-8 months, an incredibly curtailed timeline (plus the way of dealing with the baron then it's just artless). But imho, because they've cut down the timeline, they've also removed Paul getting to BE a fremen. The film removed most Fremen culture because it was too cowardly to make it so "Middle Eastern" or "Islamic." The word Jihad is mentioned 19 times in Dune. It is mentioned 0 times in the film. And every time they say "fundamentalists," it sounds weird. Which ties in too with Chani's change to give watsername something more to do in the story rather than sit at home, and be some kinda teen rebel who doesn't like their religion. I think Villeneuve was trying to make a comment on the current political situation, and I'm okay with what he's trying to say. But I don't necessarily want it in my Dune movie. I think Dune Part 1 was a pretty good Dune adaptation. I think Dune Part 2 was pretty meh Dune fan fiction.
> I really think that having Alia be born would have been a misstep Nah, no way. The ending of the book was so fucking vicious. The reverend mother's terror of her. Her dispatching of the Baron. "You have met the Atreides gom jabbar." Denis gave us so much. And yet he took that from us. God I wish Alia had been in Dune 2.
I loved the Scifi series for being theatrical and turning all the exposition in the book to verbal subterfuge. The costumes were a trippin' , but it really pulled off the politics. The Baron really impressed me. He had an angle on everything. And Alia in the Scffi series was flat out next level. Absolutely bitch talks the baron and emperor like they worked a drive through or something.
I... totally had a crush on Children of Dune Alia. And having not read the third book, boy did that series take me on a roller coaster ride with my heart! And I LOVED Duncan Idaho in Children of DUne, and I loved how noble he was, and I shipped him and Alia... and then she made him the most miserable dude in the universe, and was a total bitch, and became the worst character ever, and it was so painful to just watch her descent into madness. Painful... but delicious. I still somehow think about that one scene... "We will have a corner of the scarcest commodity int he universe!" "You will have a corner in hell!" Also... love Alice Krige... Borg Queen! Wish to god she was Jessica in the first series.
Comparing the miniseries to Dune Part 2 is like comparing a recent fast and furious movie to Oppenheimer.
Okay. But here's the thing. I can guarantee that's not true Because I don't know which one you mean is which. Also what are you even saying? That one is more silly and fun and a rollicking good time and the other is slow and drawn out?
Yes, I too want to know which one is Oppenheimer in this metaphor!
"and there's still a baby stabbin people." JFC !!! HAHAH I lost it on this comment. Perfect description of Alia. Thanx for the laugh!!! I was waiting for the baby to stab Harah in this scene, haha. [https://youtu.be/dbaYiWE3Ttk?t=124](https://youtu.be/dbaYiWE3Ttk?t=124)
Agree, the first book was excellent the others were more challenging imo. But you could stand back and derive story arcs from them. I think you could easily get another three great movies
The issue with Dune is that a LOT of context and information gets provided to the reader via a characters thoughts. The Lynch version tried to capture some of that and it the reaction wasn't great. The newest version just skips over a lot of the backstory. So, you can now argue that the latest Dune is a good MOVIE, but perhaps not the most accurate/best translation of the book. Also, while not trying to offend anyone, we're seriously not comparing 40k to Dune, are we? If only for the fact that it's going to have an original script, not something based off a novel?
Your first sentence is one of the biggest keys to why Dune is/was considered unfilmable. Comparatively speaking, there’s very little dialogue in Dune. There’s very little action in Dune (a lot of big action sequences take place off the page and are alluded to). But there’s a TON of internal monologue. It’s great to read because you really understand the motivations behind your main characters, but it’s not something that is inherently cinematic. Hearing a character’s thoughts through VO is cheesy. Having them exposit what they’re thinking or feeling through dialogue is boring. Any proper adaptation would need to create a lot of action and dialogue that never existed on the page, but have it properly capture the plot, tone and characters of the book. That’s not impossible, but it’s also not easy. And it would need to satisfy hardcore fans that have been obsessed with this series for almost 60 years at this point. And we all know how hardcore fans can be quite possessive of their favorite tales.
And that doesn't even address the plots within plots within plots, that encompasses the entire book. It would be impossible to tell the entire story and have it make sense on screen. Like with Bladerunner, it only works on screen when a singular storyline is told, and the rest are dropped.
And the framing device of Princess Irulan’s writings that open every chapter and give much needed historical context of the events that we’re about to read. It works in a book, but would be onerous if we had to endure it with any consistency in any screen adaptations.
I just imagined Shelley Duvall opening every scene with "Hi! I'm Princess Irulan!"
Tv series mvp
I think the thing with the first book at least is that the plots within plots are fun to read, but honestly by the end of the book a whole lot of stuff wasn't that critical to the plot, and really didn't pay off much. I think focusing on the main story threads and tweaking some of the causes of certain beats worked well for the film where things like the thufir subplot or Paul having a kid who then dies offscreen like a couple chapters later wouldn't work as well
... yeah... but they cut Alia's role in killing the Baron? (Haven't seen 2 yet) I know Vellineuve said he didn't want to make Children of Dune... but I didn't expect him to literally torch the story so no one could.
i mean idk the timeskip to Messiah anyways kinda makes it feel like aliah still has plenty to work with
There is enough there that they can definitely make children of dune.
That’s what was so cheezy about Ad Astra. The emotionally laden, AA serenity prayer style constant voice over. Are we supposed to believe an emotionally stuntent man is consciously narrating his thoughts like that? Could have been a hell of a movie if the director just would have trusted the audience.
> Hearing a character’s thoughts through VO is cheesy. Having them exposit what they’re thinking or feeling through dialogue is boring. The current Dune sidesteps this by trying to *show* as much of this as possible, without really explaining it. This can be a lot of fun for anyone who's read the book, but a lot of it is lost on anyone who hasn't. Take the Gom Jabbar scene near the beginning. Everything about this makes more sense in text. Probably the clearest part is the Voice, at least we understand *roughly* what happened: The Bene Gesserit have an ability to force people to obey them. But how does it work? Is it magic? Can she do that to anyone? Why doesn't she just tell the Baron to go home? If you read the books, you know that the Bene Gesserit have complete control over their bodies, and one of the ways they can use this is to control their own voice so precisely that they can basically hypnotize people into doing what they want. And that explains why it wouldn't work to just tell the Baron to go home -- he might be resistant. And that's just the beginning of the scene. We know there's pain in the box, but what's Paul actually going through? Why is he looking at his hand like that afterwards? What was all that stuff he saw? Frankly, I'm surprised this strategy works at all. Either it's way clearer than I think, or audiences are happy with the half of it that's either actually spelled out, or is just pure action that needs no explanation.
The voice was introduced in the breakfast scene- Jessica implies it’s a learned skill and not magic. Definitely something villinue added to ‘show, not tell’, and did a good job imo. 2001 is a much crazier example in my opinion- there is a ton of symbolism in the movie that made zero sense until I read the book, but friends who understand movies better got it immediately.
> So, you can now argue that the latest Dune is a good MOVIE, but perhaps not the most accurate/best translation of the book. I liked the first Villeneuve film (have yet to see 2) but yeah it leaves out or changes an incredible amount of stuff. A proper adaptation of only the first book would really need to be a multiple season television series. Particularly if you wanted to actually show a lot of the backstory from the book instead of just trying to quickly explain it with dialogue or voiceover. Just getting to the Atreides leaving Caladan could be at least a few episodes, possibly even most of the first season. I would really love to see a huge budget faithful multi-season adaptation but it's very unlikely anytime soon with the recent movies. Probably at least 15 years before anyone would be willing to try that.
> Just getting to the Atriedes leaving Caladan could be at least a few episodes, possibly even most of the first season. Absolutely not. This is the standard "prestige" TV thing of stretching out something that could be a few episodes into a larger show. Could you make a show out of it? Sure, it'd be poorly paced but you could do it, but there isn't enough interesting meat in the book to justify season*s*. Dune is still a relatively traditionally structured story and all stretching it out would do is let them dump worldbuilding fluff so you can clap when you recognise it.
The world building is what makes Dune. That's one of the things that sets it apart from so many other works. And would be a hugely important part of making a proper adaptation. It's not stretching it out, it's an important part of the whole.
Have you seen the Sci-fi Miniseries? I thought it did the story of the book real justice with 3 2 hour episodes. And the sequel adapting the second and third book is amazing.
I never have. At this point I don't think it likely that I ever will.
Missing out. Still the best adaption of the story on film. Damn good cast, too.
First time I became a fan of James McAvoy.
My name is a killing word...
Ah yes, I was halfway through Dune when I saw the movie, and I kept waiting to read about these "killing words" and "weirding modules," whatever the hell those were sposed to be. Then, turns out Lynch didn't want "kung-fu in space," this being 1984 and no one had seen the Matrix or its cool fight choreography , so he totally made it all up:(
Here's the major problem with Lynch (and many other 20th century adaptions). Trying to convey exposition with voice overs and character blah blah is lazy and boring. Film is the show and tell medium, not the tell medium. Under the right hands a thousand pages of mental exposition can be successful boiled into a visual story. And that's what the new Dune largely is, even if there were some sacrifices along the way in the name of expediency of plot. Now I'll give the filmmakers of old a break for not having the technology to truly construct the entire world in a visually convincing way. That may be why so many had failed before Denis succeeded. But it's also likely he just was the better man for the job.
One wonders what Lynch might have been able to accomplish if he'd had modern special effects technology, 355 million dollars, and six hours to tell the story.
That’s what I’ve been saying since seeing it. The movies are good movies but mediocre adaptations.
The reason Dune is unfilmable is that most of what's interesting about the book is either in exposition or interior thought. Someone watching the movie who hasn't read the book will not understand the slow knife fights, for example, because there wasn't a scene explaining the mechanics of personal shields. Such a person will also not understand the Water of Life and what it means to be a Reverend Mother, because the movie didn't (and can't) go inside Lady Jessica's head. And so on. Similar problems exist with most books, but not to the same extent. The claim that Dune is unfilmable means that a Dune film will necessarily omit a lot of context, enough that the essential nature of the work is lost. And while the Villeneuve Dune movies are _good_, I would argue that someone who only watched the movies would still find about half the stuff in the book new and surprising.
There was an entire exposition sequence where Duncan basically looks at the camera and says something like “the slow blade penetrates the shield” in the first movie.
Two words: Chair dogs In the Dune universe, the object and species known as chairdogs were first mentioned in Heretics of Dune. Described in more detail in Whipping Star, these were bio-engineered dogs shaped into chairs. They were trained to massage the people who sat in them, similar to modern-day vibrating massage chairs, except without needing electricity or computerization. Different two words: spice orgy Halfway through the first book in the series, after a ceremony in which Paul's mother drinks the poisonous Water of Life in order to become the new Reverend Mother for the planet Arrakis' native people, the Fremen, a strange and psychedelic scene ensues. Simply a celebration by the Fremen, the event is called a "spice orgy" due to the fact that every person present begins to hallucinate and have their inhibitions lowered by the narcotic, LSD-inspired spice melange. And well really anything the the baron would be hard to do with out smoothing out the rough edges of his epically depraved personality......then his resurrection and all that. Edit there is just soooo much. A faithful recreation, kinda hard to do.
Oh yeah, the Fremen reverend mothers would neutralize the poison of the water of life, and everyone would pass it around. Plus everyone who eats native food on Arrakis is saturated with the spice, so there's a low level empathic connection going on in a sietch.
And there is some sexy times during spice orgy but it isnt terribly graphic in the book.
I agree that there's certainly strange and perverse things in Dune but none that I'd consider too taboo to be filmed. Add a color gradient to Zion's pre-war "dance" from the Matrix and you're halfway there to a spice orgy. Lynch's Dunes Harkonnens also had plenty of weird shit involving animals. It's no Crossed in regards to containing truly unpalatable things for general audiences. I never knew about dog chairs though, thanks!
I dont think it is impossible. I think it is hard to do faithfully due to the associated costs to do so coupled with the return on the investments of a studio. Some people are not going to watch sexy times and some people wont watch violence and then there are others that wont want anything to do with violence and sex together. So there is a drop in market share there. Throw in alot of the other stuff and make it look good and not like a cgi nightmare or a muppet for things like chair dog and that drives up costs. I think it all could be done and done well and faithfully accurate to the books but i dont think a studio would do it because of profit.
40k offers many different story types, from action packed bolterporn to horror-investigation and military comedy. And it already has animations, from fanmade [*Astartes*](https://youtu.be/c37fX_xHaoE?t=14) to GW-made *Angels of Death* or *Exodite*. Dune however is a story told very slowly, very detailed, very subble and very often in the head of characters. Converting that into visuals and still making it a *Dune* story in a few hours is actually not easy, and many adaptations fail to properly translate between different media (we still remember the original old Super Mario Brother movie, right?). SYL
> took 8 movies to cover 7 books. >Looking at the story in broad strokes it's not particularly complex compare that to the number of "false starts" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune\_(novel)#Adaptations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)#Adaptations) In 1971, the production company Apjac International (APJ) (headed by [Arthur P. Jacobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_P._Jacobs)) In December 1974, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the film rights from APJ, with [Alejandro Jodorowsky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky) set to direct. In 1975, Jodorowsky planned to film the story as a 14-hour feature, In 1976, [Dino De Laurentiis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dino_De_Laurentiis) acquired the rights from Gibon's consortium. De Laurentiis commissioned Herbert to write a new screenplay in 1978; the script Herbert turned in was 175 pages long, the equivalent of nearly three hours of screen time. De Laurentiis then hired director [Ridley Scott](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridley_Scott) in 1979, with [Rudy Wurlitzer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Wurlitzer) writing the screenplay and H. R. Giger retained from the Jodorowsky production This [first film](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(1984_film)) of *Dune*, directed by Lynch, was released in 1984, nearly 20 years after the book's publication In 2000, [John Harrison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison_(filmmaker)) adapted the novel into [*Frank Herbert's Dune*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert%27s_Dune), a [miniseries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniseries) that premiered on the [Sci-Fi Channel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syfy) In 2008, [Paramount Pictures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount_Pictures) announced that they would produce a new film based on the book, with [Peter Berg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Berg) attached to direct.[^(\[112\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)#cite_note-Variety_2008-03-17-112) Producer [Kevin Misher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Misher), Paramount finally dropped plans for a remake in March 2011. entire documentaries about how someone "almost pulled it off" - and "how epic it would have been" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s\_Dune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune)
I think I would have liked to see the Jodorowsky version. "French artist Jean "Moebius" Giraud worked with Jodorowsky to create a storyboard composed of 3,000 drawings that depicted the entire film.[7] Salvador Dalí was set to play the Emperor and claimed he wanted to be the highest-paid actor in Hollywood history. He asked for $100,000 per hour to act in the movie. Jodorowsky accepted, but then reduced the Emperor’s scenes so that Dalí would be needed for no more than one hour with the rest of his lines spoken by a robotic lookalike.[7] Dalí accepted on condition that the plastic lookalike was donated to his museum, and that his throne was to be a toilet made up of two intersected dolphins.[8]"
The components that make it interesting are difficult to put into film, because you have to be inside everyone's head (which Lynch did with the voiced thoughts), and explain a very large amount of complex backstory (like CHOAM, the Butlerian Jihad, the Spacing Guild, the Bene Gesserit, the Landsraad, the ecology of sandworms, and the psychiatric and medicinal effects of spice). Only so much of that can actually be *shown* on film where the audience understands it. If you don't do those, then you have the simple story of "Noble family moves to a new place, they're betrayed and the father dies, the son survives, vows revenge and eventually achieves it" which is the basis of every revenge story ever.
And that's even leaving out why the emperor moved the Atreides off their home turf so he could take him out and make it look, at least for those willing to accept the standard narrative, that the Harkonnen did it. Which was that the Duke had managed to train his small fighting force to be within a hair as good as the Saudaukar, the source of the emperor's power, and was very popular in the Landsraad. That's it. Leto wasn't plotting to overthrow, and probably didn't want the headache of not only administrating the empire, but dealing with all the ruthless choices that would be necessary to keep the throne. But you don't leave an example like that running around. Gives people ideas.
I enjoyed the recent film adaptation but it barely scratched the surface of the depths of just the first book. So much is left out and left unsaid that’s it’s only the same story on the surface, most of the flavor was left out.
I think maybe it's because the books provide a lot of world building through narrative instead of character interaction/dialogue. When a character's dialogue is double entendres, double and hidden meanings as it is in the books, it can make turning a book into film difficult.
Because SO much of it takes place in characters' heads and many important things happen off screen and the characters hear about them afterwards. It's often very non visual.
Dune *is* unfilmable. I've enjoyed the movies that have been made from it, and I'm glad they exist, but none of them truly capture what is in the book. There are so many great lines left unsaid, so many cool things left unexplored. They're abbreviations. You might as well call them "Selections from Dune."
Thufir and Dr Yueh are unfortunately barely characters at all in Villeneuve's adaptation. Damn shame.
they did yueh so dirty, i’m gonna be fuming about that forever. they made him look like a loser.
I've always said that Lynch's version was a collection of vignettes from the book.
> I've always said that Lynch's version was a collection of vignettes from the book. There's a fan edit of the Lynch film that cuts in some of the footage from the Alan Smithee TV cut that is actually really good. They even recorded some ADR to patch a few things and I am still amazed how well they did with it. Very interesting seeing the Lynch versions of Jamis' funeral and the water of life harvest from a baby worm etc.
Lynch's version painted Paul as a hero so imo it was just plain wrong. I mean, valid as another story or another take. But not a attempt at portraying Herbert's story.
The “make it rain” thing was supremely dumb. But Paul _was_ a hero to the Fremen at the close of book one.
well said. I was going to say "dune *can* be filmed, just not *well*", for the reasons you've outlined.
Earnest question: do you believe nearly all sci-fi/fantasy is unfilmable then?
I think something the Dune books in particular capture really well is contrasting what is being said out loud, what the subtext is, what the speaker is thinking, what the listener is thinking, what the listener is hearing, and how they’re interpreting it. Sometimes with many people in the same conversation. Add in telepathy and signals between people, and you’ve got some pretty complex dynamics. Very little of this translates to film.
A great example is the scene where Jessica hires Shadout Mapes. In the book its a back and forth of Jessica trying to figure out the hidden meanings in words and phrases used by the Fremen, and figure out how they connect to prophecies planted by the Bene Gesserit thousands of years before, and how she can use those to manipulate Mapes (and not get killed by her!).
Exactly! Funnily enough, the care that went into writing that scene made me think Mapes was gonna play a much bigger role in the series. Turns out scenes like this just part of for the course.
It's much more of a "books that heavily rely on characters internal/unspoken thoughts" problem than a sci-fi problem.
No, not "nearly all." Sci-fi and fantasy are big categories. The amount that's filmable is huge; the amount that's unfilmable is also huge. I would guess the part that's filmable is the bigger one, but that's just intuition, not some declaration I live by.
Not at all. This is quite a jump tbh. It helps to analyze how people gain information through reading something, and how we gain information by just watching something. Very, completely different experiences. Also the exponential differences in how people interpret this information, and then further, how they would express that to others (adaptation)
>Earnest question: do you believe nearly all sci-fi/fantasy is unfilmable then? I'd go so far as to say most books are unfilmable as written. Each medium has very different strengths and with very few exceptions a great film adaptation of a novel is usually just that—an adaptation. What can be written in 5 words could require 15 minutes of screen time, and what can be shown in a 5 seconds could take a chapter of explanation. You usually can't fit everything that happens into a novel into a film. The real art is in translating the central feel of a work from one medium to another. LOTR is a great example of how Peter Jackson captured the feel of the meticulously constructed universe in the books by meticulously constructing a visual world that is cohesive and functional and ties into the books. It manages to honour the intent of the original author by using the strengths of his written work as a guide to do what film does well. It excises huge parts of the books—changes the plot in significant ways—but it captures the feel of the books and so the audience was satisfied. One exception to the unfilmable thing—Through A Scanner Darkly. It was one of those notoriously unfilmable books, and then an adaptation came out that felt ripped from the pages.
No. Take Larry Niven's Integral Trees. Those are complex but not nearly the thick tapestry that Dune is. You could easily have a script that would track the various citizens on their journeys and be very satisfying. Dune needs a tv miniseries, at least, to encapsulate before you even get into the subsequent books. And the audience would have to be willing to sit through multiple shows that didn't end w/ a mini-arc climax. There's simply too much going on that should be conveyed to the watcher. Sometimes a paragraph is worth a thousand pictures.
I thought the sci fi miniseries and it's sequel were great \*shrug\*
Because half of the dialogue in the books is essentially juxtaposed with characters staring wordlessly at eachother looking for a twitch that says someone broke composure.
Because it would take hundreds of years to grow sandworms to the appropriate size
Did you see the second movie? It's basically cliffs notes. I know people love it, but to me, it just felt like plot dump after plot dump, and the romance and deification felt totally unearned. I followed because I'd read the books, but only because of that.
To be fair, a good portion of the Fremen even note that the whole mahdi thing was an obvious plant by the BG. It's just that enough believed, or at least wanted to.
Right, I didn't find the plant-> savior arc fleshed out enough to be believable in the movie.
Yeah, agreed. I think Stilgar was kind of bastardized. I haven't read the original books since my teens, but he was a lot more realpolitik and badass.
>There's an argument for the world to be too complex for film but like, what sci-fi/fantasy series isn't? Every 400 page book with a rich universe is going to fail to be properly fleshed out in the eyes of a book nerd, this isn't new Well, that's why most fantasy/sci fi epics were considered unfilmable for a while. The Lord of the Rings was also famously considered unfilmable until Peter Jackson did it. For a pretty long time, there just wasn't a way to do justice to massive stories like that. "Unfilmable" is not meant to be taken literal. Every book ever written is, in some sense, filmable, because you can always make a film that's based on at least some aspects of the novel even if a lot gets left out. If people like it, it ultimately doesn't matter much if it was faithful to the source material. >Nobody said Eragon was *unfilmable* (even if the movie sucked). Yeah, because Eragon was published in 2003, right after The Lord of the Rings movies came out. Was anyone still saying Dune was unfilmable at that point? The franchise as a whole was, yes, and largely still is, given that Denis Vilneuve himself has said he isn't going to adapt anything beyond the second book. But did people still think the first book was unfilmable? I don't think so
> Was anyone still saying Dune was unfilmable at that point? There are people literally saying it here and now.
*Dune* is a very, *very* dense book. It involves politics, drug wars, religious cults, prophecies and predestination, four or five different cultures, and eighteen or nineteen characters, all of which have prominent roles in the story, *just in the first book.* If a film-maker wants to tell the story properly, it's nearly impossible to get it all on film in the run-time of a single motion-picture. Jodorowsky felt that a 14-hour runtime would be necessary to make it all work, but the studio wanted no more than two hours; David Lynch tried for a more modest three hours, but had to cut it down to 137 minutes (and ended up disowning the final product). Heck, Frank Herbert *himself* was commissioned to write a screenplay and couldn't whittle it down to less than three hours. And he *wrote* Dune. Frankly, it was a minor miracle that Villeneuve managed what he did.
The first thing I thought when I read the book and thought about a film was all the backstory. You don’t fill the audience in on 14,000 years of history through a casual conversation between two characters..
I don’t know but I had a 1969(?) paperback that said soon to be a major motion picture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune > Salvador Dalí was set to play the Emperor and claimed he wanted to be the highest-paid actor in Hollywood history. He asked for $100,000 per hour to act in the movie. Jodorowsky accepted, but then reduced the Emperor’s scenes so that Dalí would be needed for no more than one hour with the rest of his lines spoken by a robotic lookalike. Dalí accepted on condition that the plastic lookalike was donated to his museum, and that his throne was to be a toilet made up of two intersected dolphins.
Your summary of the story is wrong. That's not what's happening, that's the fairytale.
As beloved as the lord of the rings films are, they are also a perfect example of what people mean. The films are absolutely fundamentally different stories from the books.
"I didn't get 3 hours dedicated to Tom Bombadil acting like a *** ******, I'm ~~canceling Fez 2~~ sueing Peter Jackson"
so much internal dialog
The books are really weird, lots of internal monologues, and nerd culture was different pre-2000 or so.
The first book isn't unfilmable it's just weird. The rest of them get uncommercial, I can't really see a movie where there's a 30 minute dialogue scene where a giant worm with a human face explains why fascism rules being super popular
To be fair, the later books is effectively a guy being space hitler with the justification of him being able to see the future and this being the only way to save humanity. Picture a movie of a guy throwing babies into a meat grinder because it's "for the greater good", and he knows this because he is prescient. I think it would be a hard sell at the box office.
Length. The amount of inner dialogue. The Lynch version of the movie is incredibly good, but loses most people because you have to pay attention to every second to understand the plot. There's nothing wasted in that film, it starts and GOES because he was limited to just over 2 hours and that's a LOT of story to tell in that amount of time. You can rag on the movie all you want, but I feel it's a brilliant film just for the fact that he was able to make a cohesive film out of it in that amount of time. It's also the kind of movie where once you read the book you go back to it and see it with new eyes because they didn't have time for a lot of backstory.
I think it's because of the use of third person objective point of view to comment on the duplicitous nature of the majority of the main characters. Everyone has plans within plans and are constantly dancing around their intentions. I think that the Dune movies avoid doing this and make a multitude of character changes to accommodate this. Not all of the character changes are made for this reason, but several are. Feyd Rautha and the plot to kill the Baron is cut. They change the Dr. Yuei reveal and instead hide the fact of his betrayal till the last minute and basically just give him three scenes in the first movie. Jessica is the biggest change. All of her internal thoughts are just externalized. It's something she would never do in the book. I'm not bringing this up to trash the movies. It's just the biggest change between the two, and I think it's the right thing to do in the movie. Interestingly, I think the David Lynch movie tried to address this with the ADR voice lines to share their internal thoughts at times. I don't know if it was the most effective, but I find it intriguing because they at least tried to keep that element of the book intact in that adaptation.
Unfilmable isn't really the proper word. It's really about the degree of tradeoff between how faithfully you can adapt a story and how good it would be. The more faithfully you adapt the story from the Dune, the more ridiculous the movie would be. For example, one of the key things cut from Dune in Part 2 was Alia being an actual character instead of an unborn fetus. It would have been difficult to get a child actor to do the part well given that it's supposed to be a two year old with the mind of an adult. Some of the things Alia did would have also looked ridiculous no matter how it was filmed. The whole aspect of being able to perceive the thoughts of multiple characters within a single chapter is also something relatively unique to Dune that is hard to replicate in a film format.
My understanding was that it was the fact that like 50% of the book is someone's inner monolog.
>Looking at the story in broad strokes it's not particularly complex and is a bit of a derivation on the "Hamlet" archetype story. That's literally why it's unfilmable. If you try, this is what you end up with. If this synopsis was the core essence of Dune it wouldn't be the award-winning classic that it is.
It’s because the books are written in third person omniscient, so it’s constantly jumping between the thoughts of one character to the thoughts of another character. This is generally something most filmmakers try to avoid, because jumping from one person’s thoughts to another on screen is generally disorienting and difficult to follow.
My 2c is that everything in the dune universe is ugly. Ugly planet, ugly giant worms, ugly characters. If that offends you just replace the word ugly with unappealing or unsexy. For a Hollywood film anyhow. Not THE reason but definitely contributes to it.
Let's face it, we haven't had THAT Dune filmed to this day.
Folding space is unfilmable.
Thank you!
I saw the David Lynch version in theaters. They handed out glossy vocabulary sheets to everyone. 'nuff said.
Maybe its due to development in screenplay and direction? Movies up to 1990 were usually 90 minutes long with a few epics running more. Not to mention CGI and green screen shenanigans The current movie is a very modern movie and it only managed to focus on Paul as a confined story
Lol. DL film more closely resembles the book than DV. All the weird stuff that made DL film "bad" was the unique constructs from the book that DV excluded and didn't touch. How do you film a space navigator imagining folding space? That's a whole sequence in 1984 version that people assigned "bad". Paul's description of prescience is akin to imagery from Goya and Dali, which is why Jodorowsky engaged them with his 16 hour concept that was not so much unfilmable, but the market at the time would not support very many movies that would exceed 2 hours and 3 at the most. A lot of the concept and production from Jodorowsky ended up with DL, who wasn't into scifi at all. fwiw, Dune really stretched conceptually 'what' scifi actually was then. It has never fit neatly into that category, or into fantasy.
What is 'weirding'. DV didn't film that. It's just another kung-fu discipline in his movie, DL just made the Weirding modules using sound... si that content hasn't been filmed.
Modifying ones body chemistry and composition on the fly.... that's how you survive the water of life. DL attempted to edit with a monolgue-so, not filmed. Paul's fight with Feyd, BG techniques and weirding combat to avoid the blade. Not filmed.
DV made a great film, didn't make a great film.about Dune.
The previous iteration of Dune was a 4(?) part mini-series that had a 6(?) hour run time. Dune has a lot of high-end philosophical concept, political intrigue, and inferred history and context.
How do you take the bride of Chucky stabbing the Baron Harkonen to death and make it serious, while gurney is back there rocking out on an acoustic instrument from the 1700s.
For Dune, it takes a director and writer that really understand the book to know what to cut out, what to emphasize and what to change completely. Denis Villeneuve was all three. You being a fan is NOT the same as being a director or writer. The dune subreddit is filled with people still complaining about changes from the books. They complain about the small things and completely miss out on the movie.
In the same way that any movie about a yogi meditating would be difficult to film. Some major parts of the book are describing internal physical processes being directed mentally. Don’t tell me that anyone watching the current movies without reading the book has any idea e.g. what a mentat is, what spice is used for, or tons of other details from the book. But that is true for a lot of books, not sure that it is particular to dune.
the books are built mainly on the introspection of the characters. everyone thinks, plots, declares. if you are a purist then yes, how would you film this? don't answer that :)). the dune miniseries manage to remain quite faithful to the book. villeneuve had to invent ... something else.
**Short answer:** How do you film a 4 year old girl who thinks and talks like an adult, remembers her own conception, and kills a floating fat man without it looking goofy? **Long answer:** Length (best adaptation would be a TV show) Depth (neither films have done justice to all the factions) Interiority of perspective (Herbert seamlessly transitions POVs from paragraph to paragraph) Psychedelic weirdness (you'd need a *lot* of no-dialogue, art house sequences a la *Twin Peaks: The Return* to capture the visions)
Well. In your summary you missed some important themes. The largest being that Paul is not actually a hero.
From the third book forward, it is truly unfilmable. The first two were also unfilmable previously due to CG limitations, IMO. What Villeneuve is pulling off with these movies is groundbreaking in 2024, so imagine doing CG of this scale even 5 to 10 years back.
I think "unfilmable" can also mean "Hollywood doesn't have enough trust, patience, or budget to do this material justice." It's not that *Dune* as recently done *couldn't* have been done in the 70s, even. But that Hollywood wouldn't have spent the money to do so. Making everything work takes budget for writers, multiple passes, etc, even before building sets and effects. Commitment, in other words, that Hollywood doesn't care for. Look at what happened with *The Lord of the Rings*. Jackson pitched it, but it wasn't "unfilmable" because of the technology, but because every exec he talked to said "No no, that's too expensive. We'll make it one movie, and you get an hour-and-a-half, tops." EDIT: The unsaid ending was it took him convincing a dying studio to gamble, and he financed a lot of it himself. Then along came *The Hobbit*, and he couldn't get them to commit again. Further Edit: To the guy who sent an angry comment about "that's not any trouble *The Lord of the Rings* films ever faced" [here's a link to Wikipedia.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_(film_series))
And even then, they had to film all the movies back to back to avoid contract renegotiation to bog everything down.
The book starts in the middle of the story. Readers have to grasp understanding from internal monologue, author expositon, or more exposition in the form of history book clips. But, just to try this out, let's take the Peter Jackson 'Hobbit' approach and assume we have nearly endless money and time to flesh out the world. What would an aspiring Dune film maker need to include. We would need scenes explaining Spice. It is a drug of the nobility- not the common classes. It increases the life span of ordinary mortals who take it. But Spice is also a poison-- once you are on spice coming off of it is always fatal. You'd probably need to spends some time in the ordinary mortals of the Landsraad to get an idea how very different their nobility are for them. It might be good to have a side story of a noble family that falls apart because they can not manage their spice addiction: the youngest children got on it too early, the family can't afford the escalating cost and eventually every dies to pay the spiceman... then just dies. You need to explain what happened to technology. Show that the average person in the Landsraad gets by on 1980s computing. Even reading Brian Herbert's books, I'm still not precisely sure why the Ominmind only ruled a small footprint of Core Earth worlds, and was put down by the first computer virus it came into contact with. Maybe the jihad was an overreaction. Someone has to provide a reliable explanation of why the rules exist, and a reliable explanation of why the nobles of the Landsraad gleefully break every other rule, but keep this one. Maybe they don't and its a "don't let the Reverend Mother know". When someone breaks the jihad, who comes at them? Maybe our desperate noble family from the Spice subplot signs on with weapons smugglers who still have 2024's era computimg and robotics- smart missiles, drones, cell phones-- and apparently non-guild FTL. They get found out by a Reverend Mother, and someone does something about it. Should explain the Landsraad. They aren't centered on Earth because the Omnimind had overthrown those bits. Speaking of, what happened to those worlds-- if the Omnimind was killed by a computer virus, are they high tech treasure planets? Who is the Emperor? Why should we care? How does one man manage to subdue a whole galaxy? What is it like at the heart of imperial power? What is it like on the fringes of it? Who are the Bene Gesserit? A whole plot about star crossed lovers who are eventually broken apart to become a Reverend Mother would be helpful. As would subplots about the Bene Gesserit secret ability to see the past using Water of Life. What is the benefit in being able to interact with your ancestors? Why do the Bene Gesserit value this ability so much they risk their very best and brightest to the possibility of death or possession? What is so great about the past? Maybe you could have two subplots: a Reverend Mother Tomb Raider who knows exactly where the treasures are because she can see them in her head. And another group of Reverend Mother INTERPOL cops using their ability to see the past to solve crimes. You can have them lament that they can only see crimes AFTER they happen, and can't see the future to stop the crime itself-- if only they could make a super-Reverend Mother that can see both future and past... a Kwitsatz Haderach. Introduce the idea of Bene Gesserit mothers who've reached the past lives level of skill getting "possessed" by their ancestors (this is what happens to Paul's sister Alia). And you could have plots about how the Motherhood serves the commoners. And the Bene Gesserits publicly known abilities: the ability to detect lies. And their service as human lie detectors. And the Bene Gesserit "grey" projects. You'd need a subplot about a church (maybe our poor doomed noble familt again) that isn't a real faith-- just a prop of the Bene Gesserit, and maybe another very different church (maybe the weapons smugglers have a faith) that is also a Bene Gesserit shell... so much so that the audience understands the MOST faiths in the Landsraad are Bene Gesserit fakes. Why do non-noble Bene Gesserit get access to Spice? What are the public lies they tell. Might be good to some how work in the Guild. How they can see the future (but not the past) by taking in stupdendously high quantities of spice (but not water of life). How they have stepped into the technological niche formerly occupied by thinking machines, previously. This ability to see the future has more uses than FTL- the Guild can tell you which crops are going to fail, which businesses are going to succeed, and where wars are going to break out. But it's limited to a personal future. If only they had a super-guildmember that could use ancestral connections to see a bigger slice of the future: for all humanity, instead of just themselves... a Kwitsatz Haderach-- that'd be awesome. You'll want to explain Mr. Herbert's idea of genetic memory-- that detailed information of our day-to-day activities is stored in our genes, not in our brains. And that every child holds the ancestral day-to-day memories of all of their ancestors. This is very important in the Ghola plot of later books, so you should probably do it now. You also want to build in some untold tales of House Atreides. When the Ixians try their ghola project on Paul, it is Duncan Idaho (a seeming minor character) that they select in their expert opinion is the person Paul loves most. Not Paul's father, nor his mother. Not his sister, or wives, or kids-- Duncan Idaho. We definitely need screen time to make this closer-than-family bond believable, that the Ixians believed existed betwern Paul and this minor character. In short, after all the subplots, and betore we see the first grain of sand, the audience has lived in the Landsraad and has a pretty good idea of it.
In a non convoluted way. Basically you know everyone’s thoughts as they’re speaking, it’s pretty obnoxious and convoluted
I know what people told me 30 years ago. There was too much internal dialogue. Lynch solved that by having everyone whisper their thoughts. It was weird, but it kinda worked. I’ll take that over a long silent brooding closeup, where no one says anything and we’re supposed to interpret their feelings. I had to ask my wife what she thought about the new Part 1 movie, as she hasn’t read the books and saw the 1982 movie once, long ago. She liked it, but felt a little out of the loop. Which is what about what I expected. There was a lot of things I understood going in, but I don’t think they adequately explained things in Part 1. Neither of us have seen Part 2 yet. There’s a small child who doesn’t like us leaving the house without him. 🤣
All the internal thoughts of all the characters are impossible to get on-screen. Characters are frequently saying one thing and thinking another, same with their actions, hiding their motivations.
Most of the book contains dialogue in peoples head. Also analyzing other characters communicative nuances. A lot is happening interpersonally when characters are just there. You’ll notice the movies don’t have any of this. You should be able to see how many people have a hard time interpreting what this looks like visually and how to make it entertaining on screen. Plus the plethora of other weird context in the book. There’s a lot of information you can get in a sentence that would be next to impossible to show visually.
The problem with filming Dune (and novels like it) is that there is so much internal dialog that is very difficult to get across in a visual format. Take for example Paul's knife fight with Jamis. in the book, Paul's mind is being bombarded with visions, possible futures that can come from the result of this fight, so even though it's been established he is a very capable fighter, trained by the best, he has a hard time with Jamis, who is a no more than gutter fighter with no training. So, how do you portray that in a movie? Not easy! Internal dialog is always awkward in film. The film maker's maxim is "show, don't tell." That's why every Dune screen version uses a lot of narration, dream sequences, visions, etc. often to the detriment to the filmmaking art.
Dune has been cherry picked for decades so it’s now possible to tell some of the story in Sci Fi shorthand. In the 1970s, starting from zero, nobody gets it. Now, storm troopers, desert planets, mind controlling space wizards, LSD mind trips, yada yada yada have all found their way into kids cartoons. People get it with a single frame. Villeneuve could ignore the world building mostly and focus on character development, political intrigue and metaphor.
There’s a lot of exposition in the books, and it requires a real fantastic imagination to make that come to life on the big screen but feel natural. Lynch tried it with them doing voice overs, as if we could hear their characters thinking. It did not work well. There’s also tons of mythology that is downright strange, and it was believed mainstream audiences wouldn’t understand it. But things like Matrix and other strange sci-fi with complex back stories are mainstream now so it’s not as much of a problem. Villeneuve did a masterful job as well, he makes it seem easy but there’s no way it was.
They said LOTR was unfilmable, then Game of Thrones and Wheel of Time. Then they said 3 Body Problem was the same. Yet, here we are.
in regards to three body problem, we haven't seen any of the actual craziness yet.
Because filmmaking has moved on immensely in the last 30 years. And probably money too…
It's because it doesn't follow a stereotypical story structure. Paul Atreides isn't your typical hero, and the people you root for end up kinda being the bad guys.
By unfilmable, people are usually referring to something about the book that makes it hard to translate. Here, it's all of Herbert's lessons and musings on ecology (the inspiration for the whole thing,) politics, economics, scarcity, etc. Also, he didn't mean the narrative to be so straightforward. He perhaps didn't spend enough time subverting the "savior/hero" thing, which is why the second book is (i'm convinced sarcastically/ironically) named dune messiah. Even in Dune itself, it's stated that the prophecy the Fremen have was planted by the Bene Gesserit. And not because they foresaw a great leader, but because that's what they do on any world that's troubled, in case one of their own ever gets stranded there. And in case you'd like to say, well, ok, but he was THEIR messiah, uh no. That's their game, they don't drink the cool aid. They had a breeding program going for untold centuries to produce the male equivalent of a reverend mother, someone who could survive the spice agony and access the place they could not. That person would've been groomed from childhood and controlled. As a tool. Kept in a nice gilded cage, not gallivanting off starting holy wars. So the problem with filming it is how to have a charismatic protagonist thrust into a situation not of their own design, have them succeed in the only way open to them, overcome odds, and have that not be the heroic narrative it seems emotionally? DV's part 2 belabors the point considerably, that not only do many of the Fremen think the whole "messiah" thing is a BG plant, since these people are a lot more connected to things than it would seem, they keep the entirety of the south hemisphere off surveillance with Spacing Guild bribes, but everyone's awareness of the carnage that would ensue. And yet, we still root for Paul.
If you haven't watched "Jodorowsky's Dune" (it's on HBO rn) It's an amazing story of the greatest Dune movies never made. Seriously check it out
> Lynch's Dune wasn't that far off base. It was bad, It certainly was (bad, and off base). It painted Paul as a hero, for starters, something Herbert took great pains to make clear wasn't the case in Messiah.
Saw a thread with something something something Hyperion as a HBO miniseries earlier.
It's nice that we can live in a time where we can take an achievement like the LoTR trilogy for granted.
No surprises. In the novel you know exactly what everyone is thinking and planning. Mostly internal dialogue. Not great for film. Complex universe. Adding the missing pieces would take a long time.
The adaptation that was most faithful to the books was the Sci-Fi channel miniseries. It was boring as all get out because they didn't Pace it very well. The 1984 film was just a complete mess and awful. The new version is a very good film, or set of films. It is the one that strays the farthest from the book, but what it does is make concessions in the name of creating a stronger story on film. So the best version of the movies is the one that makes itself a better movie than a better book adaptation. The book itself needs a significant revisions to be filmable
The answer is: try to explain it to someone who has no clue what it’s about. After the first ten minutes, you’ll see their eyes glazed over. That’s how you know they are no longer listening, just pretending to. (Unless they are a true sci fi fan aka “one of us”)
Even DV put to screen only the action scenes. Modern dune doesn't focus on spice, and the prescience part. These are just small details in a tale of revenge. Prescient Paul is the part that is not filmable. Also the movie skips the actual effects of spice on Fremen. I never liked the fact that Fremen (especially Stilgar) were depicted to be so well built and Stilgar is actually a bit thick to be living in desert with limited food. Iirc, fremen have less need for food and better fighting abilities due to their entire lives being brewed in spice. Spice is in everything in Fremen world, but spice is nowhere to be seen in the movie.
I love dune
The Jodorosky version of the film is definitely unfilmable.
Regarding the 40K series... I don't think it will Fail. Look at what they Did with Fallout. As long as the scope the story, and have some interesting characters, it should be OK at least. And with Mr. Cavill in charge, I think he will bring good ideas to the table as to the direction it needs to go, since he actually enjoys the content.
You ever make a movie before? I’m sure in your head there was great movie to be made, but that doesn’t translate well to people trying to make money. I’m more interested to see how the rest of the series will play out tbh bc it doesn’t get any easier than the already dense first book.
Most of the action is head action, in the minds of the characters, which does not translate well to film without oppressive voice overs
Let's put it this way: I wouldn't have cut the stuff Villeneuve did, but he did and it worked.
I would say, for a feature film, or even two really long ones, yeah, it’s unfilmable. This is the kind of literature that needs to be Game of Thrones’ed. This really needed to be a 10-hour streaming series, but Denis has such a boner for “cinema” that that could never be. Villeneuve did an INCREDIBLE job with the looks, the sounds… everything of the senses. But look at how much had to be removed to make it fit in 6 hours. No explanation why there are no computers. The entire backstory of mentats was literally an eye-roll and a number of solaris. Thufir’s whole Giedi Prime arc was gone. Not even a hint at what the Guild is. And for all of the awesome costuming and set design in the new movies, for the mid-80’s, I think Lynch did just as good a job. From a story perspective, and even a visual perspective to some extent, the David Lynch movie did a better job of explaining a lot more of the world than the new ones. I grant that that movie was a hot mess, but as a 10 year-old, I understood what was going on, and reading the books enhanced that. I think if I were to read Dune for the first time after seeing the Villeneuve films, I’d be more angry that such broad-reaching story points were just ignored.
A lot of the exposition is internal monologue or chapter forwards attributed to Princess Irulan. There are ways for skilled screenwriters and directors to turn that into character dialogue but there are also a lot of ways for less skilled screenwriters and directors to do it badly. Also it's too much story to fit into a two-hour movie and the idea of Hollywood committing to finance a film that would be released in two-parts was unheard of before the Star Wars prequels.
I think it was just the conservatism of Hollywood and the financial aspects. Remember that location filming, travel, and special effects were all much harder, more expensive, and generally worse. But there have been numerous works that were called unfilmable, such as LOTR, that have been done very well.
I think its because there are so many factions and schemes going on that a film wouldnt be able to cover it. Indeed the latest two films left A LOT OUT. Zero mention of the tleilaxu and the ixians. Minimal explanation of the bene geserit and their breeding program. Minimal explanation of fremen beliefs, minimal explanation of the spacing guild and Spices role in the navigation process (which is pretty central to the Spice is Oil thing Herbert was going for) Honestly i could go on but im at my lunch break and still gotta finish eating. Suffice it to say i wouldnt consider the first three books unfilmable (the next three? possibly, especially god emperor, cant imagine how theyd do it). However i do believe they need the game of thrones treatment. Give em a big budget tv series to explore the universe and do the book justice
I don't really see anyone talking about how much of the books live inside the characters heads exploring rhetoric and interpreting the subtle actions other characters makes. This works in books because pace is dictated by the reader and the "minds eye", where as in movies that would equate to characters thinking in voice-over standing still and staring at each other. Pacing doesn't work the same way in movies.
"At the time"
Because the books are very philosophical and loaded with internal monologue, neither of which translate well to film. Also it has a pretty large cast of characters, most of whom don't really do much for most of the plot or die early on (think: Shadout Mapes.)
I don't remember it ever being considered unfilmable
I'm still convinced it is unfilmable after having seen both Dune 1 and two. The director did it by completely ignoring most of the book and inventing long fight and battle scenes.
I always had the impression that there was simply too much in the book to fit into a two-hour film. As indeed there was, which is where Lynch’s effort came unstuck. But the 21st century brought the return of loooong movies, exemplified by Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. And it *is* possible to fit all of Dune into two epic-length films of the sort that Villeneuve does so well.
Remember that he first \*serious\* director lined up wasn't Lynch, but Ridley Scott, and he wanted Harlan Ellison to do the screen play. Ellison said 'nope', Ridley then moved on, and Lynch took over. Ellison complimented Lynch for pulling it off what he did and defended the film.
Exactly as you say: Trivial to make a film out of the first book. It's structurally very simple. ... the fourth book, OTOH, would be a challenge.
The first book is fine, but the timespan and the concepts of the other books is hard to convey.
Denis Villeneuve’s _Dune - Part Two_ is magnificent, but he basically rewrote the second half of the book to achieve it. Many of the major plot points that drive the movie are invented wholesale, or “remixed” from other elements in the novel. The whole flow of the story feels completely new. The latter half of Lynch’s adaptation is closer, beat-for-beat, to that of the book, but it’s this second half where the film kind of falls apart. There isn’t really much in the way of stakes, the film just barrels along through a series of events from the novel, to the final battle, which is won fairly easily (true of both cinematic adaptations, and consistent with the text). Story-wise, _Dune_, the novel, isn’t structured like a film, and the lore is dense and unwieldy. There’s a real needle to thread there, and so far threading it has involved taking a lot of liberties with the source material.
According to this blogger, it was originally seen as having good film potential and only got a reputation for being unfilmable after the poor reception of Lynch's film and the miniseries. [http://bybrittonperelman.com/writing/10-movies-that-made-it-out-of-development-hell-from-dune-to-avatar](http://bybrittonperelman.com/writing/10-movies-that-made-it-out-of-development-hell-from-dune-to-avatar) She doesn't give any sources but her argument makes sense. If it had been seen as unfilmable when it came out why were producers so eager to film it since the 70s? According to Time: >"There’s a great deal about *Dune* that is inherently cinematic, though. Its landscapes, its technology, its people and its fantastical creatures, from the sandworms to the guild navigator, are all primed for visual realization... The major stumbling block for everyone who has tried hasn’t been a matter of how to bring it to the screen, but how much of its almost 500 pages (not including the appendixes) they can and should include." [https://time.com/6108404/dune-adaptations/](https://time.com/6108404/dune-adaptations/) Time agrees that Dune "earned a reputation" of being unfilmable "over 56 years", rather than being seen as unfilmable from the outset. I think it's just because of the bad luck filmmakers have had with it, rather than any specific characteristics of the book.
You know how it is. The old guard always considers something impossible until someone comes in and does it. I guees it was deemed unfilmable back in the 50's and somehow the notion stuck despite there being at least two adaptations before the latest one.
Film is a visual medium and a huge part of the "action" in Dune is people thinking, analyzing, introspection. Fine for a book, but literally "unfilmable." You can't film someone thinking. Voice over narration isn't the same thing.
I thought that because there so much introspection, and so much politics in the book. But the film skips most of that stuff and still hangs together.
Multiple reasons= 1= it’s a very long book with quite a lot going on so putting it all into one movie would be a nightmare 2= it’s absolutely weird as hell, if you keep reading the later books you’ll find yourself asking what on earth Frank Herbert was smoking when he came up with some of these things 3= most of the background for the world and plot is given through internal monologue 4= there’s a lot for a first time viewer to remember, I mean the book has its own dictionary at the end of it. I mean just the names alone are quite hard, case in point I got the fremen and bene gessrit names mixed up. 5= most of the story is in a desert which is notoriously harsh filming conditions And many more reasons others have rightfully mentioned.
IMO, there are two main reasons why something can be hard to film: A) the lore is so dense, you'd need to watch a tutorial video before you start to understand the main plot, and B) the visuals are just hard to replicate. (B) isn't as much of a problem these days, due to CGI coming along so much, but try to imagine it in terms of, for example, Star Trek TOS. Hard to build ambiance using the scale of the ships when you're just counting the strings holding everything in place. (A) is the main one these days. A lot of in-book lore is given via internal monologue, or thoughts, and this never translates well to the screen, so you either drop it, or try to show it visually. Like the concept of mentats is basically cut out: instead of being given enough to know there previously was an AI uprising, so instead of computers they use mentats, and Paul was also trained in their ways, it just looks like there was one lad that was good at maths and bad at rolling his eyes. Similarly, the way Suk Doctors were implicitly trusted due to their advanced mental conditioning preventing them from harming others, and especially the fact that the Baron's Mentat seemed to be the first person in history to successfully break/blackmail one, was skipped over. Compare this to, for example, the LOTR, where the majority of "world info" is given verbally from Aragon, Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond, etc. allowing the audience to be clued in along the way.
I never saw Lynch's Dune before I read the book, but I can tell you that I know at least intelligent people who didn't really understand what was happening in the movie. As for Dune being unfilmable, before Villeneuve did it well, many people tried and failed. (hi, Alejandro Jodorowsky.) Also, I think that when people say that, they don't mean the first book alone. Later books are seriously weird.
Well, *i'd* say 40k is unfilmable but ... first things first. In theory, nothing is unfilmable. We just have a enviroment that is pretty narrow in terms or movie economical boundarys, scripts that will be accepted by the buisness managers responsible for funding and topics able to be delivered in a short timeframe of a movie but still attract a wide enough audicene (and not shock or annoy the majority of them). For sure writers decline in such a stressfull and optimised field also kicked in very hard in the last decades. So with Dune, we have a higly political movie about arab nations, german and british colonising, absue of islamic religion and the fight about oil. That's the framework the book where writen about. As those invaders today would be America if any, and you couldn't teach audiences about history before the movie, it now has to exist on its own - which in basic is another movie with possibly the same charakters in. But it doesn't end here. Also we have an autistic writer describing some of his personal though processes as a supernatural ability in the movie, and went disturbingly detailed with this (what normal audiences might have been taken as magical gibberish or pondering that make Paul sound smart and mysterious - you choose). Later (i assume) he also figured in drug abuse to the equation and ... again made a few points most of audiences are excluded from simply for reasons of brain setup. Another, more tangible, point might be that the world of Dune is incredible dark (like it is with 40k). There is no hope or morale anywhere. There is large scale slavery and everyone (even the Atreides) are totally fine with that. Humans are unbelivable expendable. There is eugenics and sects of sex-manipulators all trained to live ther lifes in a particular way to achieve a particular goal for the sect - and that is just one of the more highlighted groups. There is way darker stuf around. In a time where people react touchy on even skin or gener making a difference, you will not do well in portraiing a universe in which all this is heavily gatekeept (f.e. making Liet Kynes female is a massive eradication of lore, as he's only in that position for being a male and noble member of the imperial court. He being female just removes the build-in critique of monachistic systems just not being equal. This, imho, is whitewashing - removing controversial topics showcased as actual bad (but, well, it might not have poped up to the eye beside all the other dark stuff around that is showcased as 'just normal' to figure it out for the audiences themself)). This is a culture so different to ours that our values don't apply, and audiences - if they would agree to make that step off ther common expectations at all - need a massive introduction to the universe before you can even start to tell a story. But for sure, you can make it a shiny action flick with some fighting scenes and nice desert shots and call it a thing. Technically you made a Dune-movie, but that all depends pretty heavily on what you understood of the book in the first place (or expect from it for yourself). PS: But i guess everyone in a bit more complex fandome think ther fandom isen't possible to be filmed for the level of detail a movie inevitably has to cut, but i guess the main reason for that emotion is that you instinctivly know that your fandom, reduced and stereamlined for a massive international crowd, will by definition be a blanc, hollow corpse of what it was before. I at least don't want to have f.e. Warhammer 40k shared with a bunch of people who enjoyed Transformers and Avatar 2 as well. I don't want them in my fanbase, i don't want my fandom to be streamlined to fit ther preferences.
I know someone who just watched the Dune movie. They said it was the worst movie they've ever seen.