New Dune Movie?

Blimey. I love Dune, but how many times is this going to be made? I already have the David Lynch film (brilliant) and thy Sci-Fi channel TV version (which i also thought was excellent. Shame it stopped after Children of Dune. I'd have loved to have seen the rest done.)

Still, I shall keep an open mind. Looking forward to hearing more information about this.
 
With todays technology and hopefully a good to great script this movie has so much potential. I also liked the '80's film and thought the mini-series was good but a little slow.
 
I'm always up for new 'imaginings' of fillums... I loved the mini-series but the film with Kyle McLachlan et al was pure brilliance in my humble opinion. It would be interesting to see how they will interpret everything now that they have fancy wizardy computery special effects.
 
I found the David Lynch film, the opening night for which I stood out in the cold in November (Canadian November at that), to be a profound disappointment (especially after freezing my whatevers off for 2 hours). The greatest flaw was that they took an epic book, and crammed it into a 2.5 hour movie. It needed the same treatment that LOTR received. To be fair, I understand that a great deal of that movie ended up on the cutting room floor. Too bad there was never a re-cut of that movie to include all of that extra material.

The Fremen didn't look like Fremen (no robes over the stillsuits), the acting was stilted, and the story did not make sense unless you read the book (my friends who came with me who had not read the book were totally lost). And that's just for starters! That movie committed all of the major crimes that Hollywood commits when putting a big imaginative sf/fantasy on the screen.

Easily one of the worst movies I ever saw, and THE worst book-to-movie I ever experienced. If they attempt another big-screen, I hope that they are sensible, and divide it up at least into two 3-hour movies. There are logical resting places in the middle of that book. Though I never saw the series, I suspected that the longer screen time allowed for a much better treatment of Herbert's story. I do agree that modern special effects would solve a lot of the problems that Lynch experienced, and that allowed Peter Jackson to make such an amazing visual impact with LOTR.
 
One of the things I thought ludicrous in both film versions was Paul.

Which part of fifteen years old and small for his age (according to the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam) did the producers not comprehend?
 
I thoroughly enjoyed the David Lynch film, but was away for the following TV adaptions.:(

One thing I have heard (which mirrors Clansman's sentiments) is that there was so much more to the books than the film could fit in, and of course there are always the differences from book to film translations.

I would love to see an epic LOTR style remake :)
 
The only adaptation I've seen is David Lynch's.

Aside from the usual "what's in/what's left out" issues and "who should play which character" arguments, I thought the biggest disappointments were the worms. Now perhaps this was solved in the TC mini-series, but I doubt it. I wonder if it is inevitable. Put simply, the worms are too big for translation to the screen. The difference in scale between a sand worm and the people around it is too much to encompass. Focus too much on the people and the worm becomes a huge wall; focus too much on the worm, and the people become next-to-invisible dots. Even in the cinema, it didn't work.

One cannot really blame the film-makers for this: they are only following the books. One cannot blame Herbert: the worms in the book are fine (if only because, without the obvious scaling problems on the screen, the mind can conceive of something small - a human - interacting with something so monumentally large as a sandworm).
 
Ursa major said:
The only adaptation I've seen is David Lynch's.

Aside from the usual "what's in/what's left out" issues and "who should play which character" arguments, I thought the biggest disappointments were the worms. Now perhaps this was solved in the TC mini-series, but I doubt it. I wonder if it is inevitable. Put simply, the worms are too big for translation to the screen. The difference in scale between a sand worm and the people around it is too much to encompass. Focus too much on the people and the worm becomes a huge wall; focus too much on the worm, and the people become next-to-invisible dots. Even in the cinema, it didn't work.

One cannot really blame the film-makers for this: they are only following the books. One cannot blame Herbert: the worms in the book are fine (if only because, without the obvious scaling problems on the screen, the mind can conceive of something small - a human - interacting with something so monumentally large as a sandworm).
Click to expand...

I think that an inventive director, with the access to the present-day computer animation that looks like actual film, should be able to surmount this problem, with something like cut shots, i.e. from people on the worm to the whole worm, or with a flying-in zoom shot (i.e. you see this massive worm speeding across the desert, and as the camera pans the length of the beastie, it begins an accelerating zoom to show little tiny people, who get larger and larger, then presto, Paul Maud'Dib riding with his Fremen warriors on the back of a massive worm...

Just an idea. I am sure someone with a background in film and special effects could do better than that.
 
Clansman said:
The Fremen didn't look like Fremen (no robes over the stillsuits), the acting was stilted, and the story did not make sense unless you read the book (my friends who came with me who had not read the book were totally lost). And that's just for starters! That movie committed all of the major crimes that Hollywood commits when putting a big imaginative sf/fantasy on the screen.
Click to expand...

There are those who absolutely worship the films of David Lynch. My older son is one of them. I'm not. I thought the effects (such as they were) did nothing to enhance the telling of the story. It seemed more of an attempt to turn Herbert's themes into Steampunk.

But the most important thing, if a third version is ever made, is to be true to the characters and to rely on their portryal (and, hopefully, some real acting) to carry the story along. Special effects don't make a movie. George Lucas certaily proved that with SW Episodes I-III. No, Stilgar needs to be a real force of nature. Paul needs to be a precocious boy. Baron Harkonnen needs to be menacing and frighteningly evil. None of these things were realized in the two versions out there. Oddly, I thought Sting made a good Feyd Rautha, but Linda Hunt as a throwaway character Shadout Mapes??? Silly.
 
This is great news. Nothing can ever match the book in my opinion, but I would still be interested in seeing a newer version with modern special effects.
 
That was on the other day. Still a superb film in my opinion and massively underrated.
 
Interesting news, definitely would be interesting to see it.
 
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