New Dune film trailer

[KyriakosCH]

So, the trailer is released.

https://youtu.be/n9xhJrPXop4

I don't like it.
Music is inferior to the Lynch one.
General feel seems inferior too - apart from the Vladimir Harkonnen guy, who looks interesting and is played by a good actor, and The beast Rabban, whose casting is also great (Dave Bautista).
The Worm imo doesn't look as good as in other adaptations. And some of the casting is missing the mark by a lot.

[Crimson Wizard]

There's an increasingly annoying trend going on in cinema when they make everything devoid of colour. Dress, faces, architecture, human made objects and landscape, everything must look as bland and sterile as possible. I begin to hate people who make this.

[KyriakosCH]

Afaik the book's writer liked the environments as they were presented in Lynch's film (which had other serious issues, of course, including a rather bizarre ruin of the plot in the final scenes), and there the buildings were memorable. I really doubt this will have equally memorable buildings, although the planes look nice.
But I notice they didn't show some important characters, and one can fear those too are on the crap side of things Mostly the spice-using navigators and the Emperor.

[Jack]

Yeah, casting is way off. They cast the actor that should have played Duncan as the duke Leto, the rest just seems wrong, most notably Paul. I get that he's 15 in the book, and there may be a teen actor that could be believable, but this kid most likely isn't it.

They seem to have made some effort to stick to the story at least, but it's already at a disadvantage compared to the Lynch film, which nailed the casting for key characters. Most notably the lady Jessica, followed by Paul, Piter, The Baron. They had Sting, FFS.

The trailer doesn't suit the tone of the work, but lots of films have stupid trailers. I won't complain about the worm because they managed a rendering of the thousands of teeth, even though I prefer the design in other adaptations.

[KyriakosCH]

I think that, of the characters shown, I was indifferent to most, but disliked Jessica, Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam and Leto. They seem way too random.
Rabban and Vladimir are good, though.

[heltenjon]

This looks like a fun film. Looking forward to watching it. It's a bit early to tell whether it will be good from watching the trailer.

[LimpingFish]

Meh. But as a longtime supporter of the Lynch version, undoubtedly flawed as it is, I might be slightly biased.

I have no connection to Dune, having never read the books or seen any other adaptations.

The trailer seems to highlight a number of key scenes that are directly comparable to the Lynch version, which is understandable, since they show key plot points. But since a major complaint about the 1984 version is that it's not faithful enough to the book (and that this version is), showing scenes that are largely identical in nature seems a little strange.

I happen to like what I've seen of Villeneuve's past works, though, so...

[Stupot]

I like the look of it. Count me in. I’ve never read the book and the Lynch film was okay but by no means am I a fanboy. This version looks highly watchable.

[rongel]

Looked pretty good to me!

Denis Villeneuve is one of the best current, big-budget directors. He made the impossible, and did a good sequel to Blade Runner, so I have a lot of faith in him.

[lorenzo]

I wasn't a fan of Lynch's film. I saw it years ago, some time after reading the book and I remember not liking it much. It did have some good designs, though (some of the costumes, effects).

This new movie looks bland and uninteresting -- and more like a remake of Lynch's work than an adaptation of the book.

There's an increasingly annoying trend going on in cinema when they make everything devoid of colour. Dress, faces, architecture, human made objects and landscape, everything must look as bland and sterile as possible.

I agree. I hate this trend of making every film desaturated, probably to give them a unified look without actually making the shots with the right lights. In the end, they just look boring and flat.

[Snarky]

As some of you know, I'm a huge Dune fanâ€"in fact, much more so than I'm an AGSer. Like, one of the top highlights for me from any Mittens was the visit at Mittens Anaheim to the library at CalState Fullerton to see the original manuscript of the novel.

So I'm happy to see a new movie adaptation. Previous attempts have been pretty seriously flawed, although the fan-edit reconstructions of what Lynch's movie might have looked like without studio interference go a long way toward fixing the utter mess that is the theatrical version. Denis Villeneuve is a director I have a lot of respect for, even though I don't particularly love any of his movies. (BR2049 to me is a misfire.)

The trailer seems to highlight a number of key scenes that are directly comparable to the Lynch version, which is understandable, since they show key plot points. But since a major complaint about the 1984 version is that it's not faithful enough to the book (and that this version is), showing scenes that are largely identical in nature seems a little strange.

The vast majority of what's seen in the trailer is straight out of the book. The main exceptions are the arrival on Arrakis (the book skips over this, and Duncan would not have been present) and the shot of the Baron emerging from a pool of black oil, both of which seem like they might be inspired by the Lynch version. Villeneuve has said that there are elements of the Lynch version he really likes, and it looks to me like he's copying quite a lot. More than I would have expected.

Afaik the book's writer liked the environments as they were presented in Lynch's film (which had other serious issues, of course, including a rather bizarre ruin of the plot in the final scenes), and there the buildings were memorable. I really doubt this will have equally memorable buildings, although the planes look nice.

Agreed on the ornithopters. This looks like the first version to even attempt to get them right (though all the video games have managed it). As for Frank Herbert approving of the Lynch designs, he did say that some things looked just as he had imagined it, some things were better than his imagination, and other things… eh. In general, he said nice things about the movie until it floppedâ€"the man knew on what side his bread was buttered.

For this version, I don't really like the sparse, stripped-down look of the environments (someone in the cast called it "brutalist"). I would prefer to have more contrast between the harsh environment on Arrakis and the comfort and luxury that the ruling class surround themselves with. The book makes a point of this several times. (Something similar was one of my big problems with the Lynch version as well, although that had more to do with lighting and cinematography than set design: everything was so damn dark and gloomy that you often couldn't tell the difference between Caladan, Giedi Prime, the palace in Arrakeen or a Fremen sietch.) And the armor looks very 21-century military-industrial, not far-future feudal.

The sandworm is not as cool as the design in the Lynch movie (based on John Schoenherr's original magazine and book illustrations), but is more faithful to the description in the books.

Yeah, casting is way off. They cast the actor that should have played Duncan as the duke Leto, the rest just seems wrong, most notably Paul. I get that he's 15 in the book, and there may be a teen actor that could be believable, but this kid most likely isn't it.

They seem to have made some effort to stick to the story at least, but it's already at a disadvantage compared to the Lynch film, which nailed the casting for key characters. Most notably the lady Jessica, followed by Paul, Piter, The Baron. They had Sting, FFS.

I'll grant that Lynch nailed the casting of Jessica and maybe Piter (even if Brad Dourif does a better de Vries in the The Two Towers than in Dune). Irulan and baby Alia as well. But beyond that… oof! One big problem: while Herbert describes a melting-pot universe with people of Asian, Arabic, Persian, African, Russian and Mediterranean descent, Lynch's version is all-white. Villeneuve does a little bit better, but I'd like to see even more variety, since it's a pretty big part of the book.

Timothée Chalamet is a much better fit for Paul than Kyle McLachlan wasâ€"physically a good match to the book description, and even though about the same age, he looks younger and less mature to better approximate the 15-year-old Paul. It's probably too soon to really judge his performance; I think McLachlan was pretty woeful in the original, but the script and direction didn't do him many favors. Chalamet's husky mumbling could get old pretty quick, but hopefully it's something specific to the gom jabbar scene, and he has been very good in other films. (Of course, McLachlan went on to do great things as well.)

I also really like Charlotte Rampling's Reverend Mother as shown here (though I cringe at the intrusive R in "An animal caught in a trap will gnaw roff its own leg to escape"). She's properly uncanny and menacing. Oscar Isaac as the Duke (he has the tragic gravitas required for the role), Stellan Skarsgård as the Baron, and Dave Bautista as Rabban all look promising as well. I particularly dislike the Lynch version of the Harkonnens, so I have hopes for Villeneuve's take, even though I feel he's still leaning a bit too weird with them. They are just a decadent, brutal family, not total freaks; remember that Jessica is a Harkonnen.

I'm not 100% sold on Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho or Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck, but both of them are certainly much better choices than Patrick Stewart (great actor, all wrong for Gurney) and whatever non-entity Lynch had as Duncan.

All in all: I have reservations. This will not be "my" Dune. (The 1992 Cryo game has come closest, even with its utterly bizarre take on Duncan.) But I'm cautiously optimistic.

Oh, and one more thing:

But I notice they didn't show some important characters, and one can fear those too are on the crap side of things Mostly the spice-using navigators and the Emperor.

In the book, the Emperor and Guild Navigators only show up in person at the very end (and the Navigators there are just human). This adaptation splits the book into two films, and they will reportedly not appear in this movie.

[MA Moncada]

I like this trailer: there's a actually a lot of action in it but I think that's because of what they want to show to capture and as it often happens with trailers it shall not be representative of the mix of the actual full movie

Dune (the book) has overall a slow pace, with deep introspection/ mysticism and ecology themes, but also some quite epic moments, battles and fights . And looking at what Villeneeuve did right with BR 2049 I would be surprised to see him doing mistakes in this sense.... this is not a Marvel Movie and Villeneuve is not that kind of director

I like a lot the casting, the costumes and the photography. As some already noticed, the only flaw I see is that the music seems out of place... which is strange given the author behind it

[Mandle]

The movie looks good but...

Is anyone else getting sick of this template for trailers they seem to have been using for the last decade or so:

Show a scene with ominous music, fade to black, fade back in, rinse and repeat for a while and then the music speeds up and the obviously unrelated scenes start flashing by faster and faster and then there is a BOOM! final image accompanied by a dramatic sound, then fade out to the release date.

I remember when the trailer was made by the same people who made the movie and retained quite a bit of the movie's personality. You could feel the mood of the film by watching the trailer.

These days every trailer makes me think I'm about to go watch Inception again.

[KyriakosCH]

In another forum someone brought up the issue of the animal-or-human thing in chapter 1 (also shown in this trailer, briefly).
I have read chapter1 and I would agree that (if one only reads that chapter, anyway) the parallel doesn't make sense. The Reverend Mother character is supposedly establishing if Paul is capable of acting more like a human, by not paying as much attention to the pain he feels when his hand is in the box, and focusing on the future where he will have the ability to move (cause the poisoned dagger won't be at his throat then). But this is neither a parallel to the animal which decides to self-amputate the trapped limb, not is it about instinct vs thought:

-The animal lives in the present, ok, but even if one trapped acted as a human and waited for the trapper to return and attack the trapper when the trap was opened, there was always the risk the trapper would only return in the distant future and the trapped person would have bled to death. Or that the trapper would return promptly, but make sure the trapped person was dead, eg by blowing their head off with a gun 
-Instinct vs thinking doesn't work either, cause the Reverend mother already told Paul that he would be killed if he took his hand off the box, and the pain in the box begins as very faint and only gradually increases. It's not rapidly increasing so as to cause an instinctive reaction.

[LimpingFish]

Previous attempts have been pretty seriously flawed, although the fan-edit reconstructions of what Lynch's movie might have looked like without studio interference go a long way toward fixing the utter mess that is the theatrical version.

I'm not sure if I've ever seen the fan-edit(s), but the "Alan Smithee" TV cut (of which multiple versions exist!) that runs almost an extra hour longer than the theatrical cut, restores a handful of interesting scenes (and a lot of extraneous guff), along with a mind-numbing extended opening narration. It somehow manages to make less sense than the theatrical cut. A lot of the new footage concerns the Fremen, be it longer/alternate versions of existing scenes, or restorations of minor scenes previously lost in editing. It's fairly easy to identify the new/alternate scenes, as all of them are missing the post-production blue glow of the Fremen's eyes.

I'd love to see a proper restored version, though. Lynch seemingly envisioned a three-hour edit intially, but has stated (many times!) that he has zero interest in returning to Dune. Which is kind of sad. Michael Mann has a similar opinion of his version of The Keep. But whereas Lynch has just washed his hands of Dune, Mann blocked The Keep from getting any sort of updated release, which is why the only version currently available is an SD digital version of the (largely incomprehensible) theatrical cut/print used for the original LaserDisc release(!).

At least Dune is on blu-ray. 

The sandworm is not as cool as the design in the Lynch movie (based on John Schoenherr's original magazine and book illustrations)...

Agreed. I would have liked to see a modern version of that design.

I'm not 100% sold on Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho or Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck, but both of them are certainly much better choices than Patrick Stewart (great actor, all wrong for Gurney) and whatever non-entity Lynch had as Duncan.

Lynch's Duncan (played by the late Richard Jordan, a fine actor done a total disservice by whatever Lynch was thinking at the time) has always made me scratch my head; not because I know anything about the character from the book, though I get he's a big deal. He's introduced in one scene, then killed in another, and, despite apparently being an important figure in Paul's life, we learn next to nothing about him and he has little or no impact on the plot. I can only assume that either the character was originally absent from Lynch's initial draft of the screenplay and awkwardly shoe-horned in later on, or a significant amount of footage concerning the character was lost. I'm actually leaning towards the former, because, perhaps tellingly, Jordan is the only actor (playing a major character) missing from the weird end-title cast roll-call, instead being represented by awkwardly edited movie footage, perhaps because he was cast later and wasn't around for the shooting of what are presumably character/costume test shots?

EDIT: I tell a lie. Max von Sydow is also represented by movie footage...so bang goes that theory. Although he too could have been cast later... (mumble, mumble) ¬¬

Is anyone else getting sick of this template for trailers they seem to have been using for the last decade or so...

Yes. Very!

[Snarky]

-Instinct vs thinking doesn't work either, cause the Reverend mother already told Paul that he would be killed if he took his hand off the box, and the pain in the box begins as very faint and only gradually increases. It's not rapidly increasing so as to cause an instinctive reaction.

You're confusing "instinct" with "reflex." As the pain increases, the instictive urge to withdraw the hand grows more and more irresistible (compare holding your hand above a flame, Lawrence of Arabia-style). And Mohiam also comments: "I observed you in pain, lad. Pain's merely the axis of the test. Your mother's told you about our ways of observing. I see the signs of her teaching in you. Our test is crisis and observation."

Of course, the irony is that in the end, all of humanity is powerless to oppose the collective instinct driving them towards jihad.

I'm not sure if I've ever seen the fan-edit(s), but the "Alan Smithee" TV cut (of which multiple versions exist!) that runs almost an extra hour longer than the theatrical cut, restores a handful of interesting scenes (and a lot of extraneous guff), along with a mind-numbing extended opening narration. It somehow manages to make less sense than the theatrical cut. A lot of the new footage concerns the Fremen, be it longer/alternate versions of existing scenes, or restorations of minor scenes previously lost in editing. It's fairly easy to identify the new/alternate scenes, as all of them are missing the post-production blue glow of the Fremen's eyes.

I'd love to see a proper restored version

Check out Dune: The Alternative Edition Redux, often referred to as the "Spicediver edit":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94d77kdmOvU

(Also available on TPB.)

It takes shots from the theatrical cut, Smithee cut and deleted scenes, doing various sorts of restoration to improve the picture quality in the new clips (though of course ultimately limited by the state of the material available), adds missing SFX like the blue eyes (controversially, even for the Guild Navigator), and in some cases constructs a new soundtrack. It's pretty impressive work.

It restores most of the cut material while managing to make the movie flow quite well, removes most of the voiceovers, takes out the rain ending, and even finds a way to use bits of the illustrated Smithee introduction while keeping Irulan's intro, by repurposing it as the filmbook lecture that Paul studies. The only real misstep, to my mind, is that it uses excerpts from Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson's books to introduce different parts of the movie, rather than something by Frank Herbert.

I think the only reason to watch the official theatrical cut is for historical interest or if you are an absolute studio purist—if you want the best possible film experience or Dune adaptation from that attempt, this fanedit is the way to go.

There are other fanedits, like the Third Stage Edition, which some prefer. There are also fanedits that attempt to stick as closely as possible to Lynch's plans before the studio forced him to deliver a shorter cut (ADM's Dune: The Reconstructed Workprint, Michael Adam Warren's Dune: The Complete Saga, and Dune: The Purist Cut)—although because some scenes either have not been released or were never shot in the first place, it can never be quite perfect. The Purist Cut actually uses production stills and descriptions of the missing scenes to fill in the gaps.

Oh, and talking of fan efforts, Mediteatro, a group of Spanish film/theater students, made a trilogy of fan films from the book some time between 2000–2007. They put a trailer on YouTube, and were promptly shut down by the Herbert Limited Partnership (the Frank Herbert estate):

Spoiler

[close]

I would give a lot for a copy of those films.

[KyriakosCH]

2020 vs 1984

https://youtu.be/CcZPZGq3Zy8

[Snarky]

Hah, I was just about to post that! 

Of course, it's not too surprising that you can line up scenes like the gom jabbar test or Paul's meeting with Chani, and some of the clips are clearly just "the closest-looking thing" even if not actually the same (for example, the burning palm trees from the book are matched with the burning weirding modules definitely not from the book), but there are some pretty close matches there in how Lynch and Villeneuve has chosen to depict certain things.

[Jack]

Is anyone else getting sick of this template for trailers they seem to have been using for the last decade or so:

I don't watch a lot of trailers but this one was totally asinine. So bad that you must assume the film would be better. The music particularly, and then the lead actor, make it seem like a Bieber film cooked up in the dungeons of hollywood.

And Snarky, I reject the idea that MacLachlan was anything but excellent in the Lynch version:

The Lynch version made several changes and added some things of his own, but in my opinion it managed to bring across the most important elements of Dune. I don't know if Patrick Stewart not working for Gurney was because the casting really didn't work or because he'll always be Picard to me, but how can you speak ill of a film that showed Gurney going to war with a pug in his jacket? The litany of the (twisted) mentat, or a medical device that involves a mouse strapped to a hairless cat? It's magnificent. This weird and deep film got me into the Dune universe.

Sorry but, modern hollywood is practically incapable of living up to its predecessor. More likely it will turn into this:

[LimpingFish]

Check out Dune: The Alternative Edition Redux, often referred to as the "Spicediver edit":

I will do that. 

2020 vs 1984

Yeah, it's interesting when you stand them back-to-back like that, even though, as Snarky says, some of those match-ups are a bit of a stretch. It also reminds me of those times when a remake or new version of an existing IP is coming out, some directors make a point to say "Oh, I didn't watch the original in preparation for this", or go out of their way to emphasize that's it's a "totally new" interpretation, to which I always shrug. It seems a silly, counter-productive thing to say, as if "different" automatically means "better" to your intended audience. Why not embrace what has gone before? At the very least, you'll get a heads-up on certain pitfalls to avoid.

Regardless of whether Villeneuve was or wasn't paying homage to Lynch, if you're sticking close to the source material, even if you're only picking and choosing on a scene-by-scene basis, it's fairly difficult to not end up with some similarities.

I reject the idea that MacLachlan was anything but excellent in the Lynch version

Oh, I agree. He plays the character, as Lynch wrote him, perfectly fine, and his arc of going from optimistic youngster to messianic figure plays out well enough for me. He's a fine Lynch Paul Atreides (that is, within the confines of Lynch's take), though perhaps, as noted countless times since 1984, not so much a fine Herbert Paul Atreides. It doesn't matter to me of course; as I mentioned, I have no real connection to the Dune saga (I think my older brother may have read it thirty or so years back; I certainly remember him reading other Herbert books) beyond Lynch's film, which is largely why I don't notice the liberties taken with the source material. I like the world of Dune as interpreted by Lynch, but it doesn't necessarily make me want to go any further.

But, man, the cast of Lynch's Dune is crammed with superb actors! Maybe not the most accurate casting, or the most fleshed out characters, but you certainly can't fault them for talent.