Denis Villeneuve's Dune

My overall feeling about the two miniseries is that they're extremely impressive given the extremely limited budgets and constraints they had to operate under.

There's a thing I've seen referred to as the "Maltese Falcon Rule", which is that you should only remake a thing if you genuinely believe you can improve on it in at least five ways. This is named after the Maltese Falcon having been adapted like five times before the big iconic Humphrey Bogart movie, each one being considered pretty bad, and the iconic one being the one that finally got it right.

And I think both the Dune miniseries and the new movies fit under that rule. The miniseries is a really accurate adaptation that doesn't have the visceral unpleasantness of the Lynch version and it's much easier to follow, and the new movies are able to get across the grandeur and alienness of the far future and have the budget and time to do the story justice.

I think the cheese of Dune 1984 is what makes it appealing—and that there's so much it's zipping through from beginning to end so unapologetically as well. Both the 2021 film & Part Two though? They were meticulous, focused and deep in all the right ways and were both more impressive for it too.

Edited by futuremoviewriter on Mar 20th 2024 at 7:28:07 AM

Did we just kind of gloss over the fact that Christopher Walken was the Emperor?

"Oh wow. This place, it's uh...got a lot sand."

Walken was such a non entity as the Emperor that frankly you could have put any old dude in there and the effect would be pretty much the same, in my opinion.

I feel like that was part of the point. Multiple people are conspiring to control or replace the Emperor, because the man himself isn't actually all that important. The Bene Gesserit basically say that they already control the Emperor as much as they want. The position of Emperor is powerful and dangerous, but it's unclear what the man himself actually wanted in these two movies.

In the first, he broke his own laws to bring down the Atreides at the behest of Harkonnen and the advice of the Bene Gesserit. In the second, Irulan notes he seems depressed that Atreides has fallen, but then at the end he tries to tell Paul that Leto was too compassionate and weak to rule. My guess is that he was rationalizing something that he was forced to do by others.

In the novels, Irulan's histories note that Shaddam Corrino IV was obsessed with the trappings of Imperial power while neglecting its foundations. In particular, he allowed the Sardaukar to partake of luxuries as a reward for their loyalty, with the result that they became less effective as a fighting force. They were still good enough to take on any of the Great Houses — except perhaps House Atreides, which was at the heart of Shaddam's discomfort with Duke Leto.

History regards him as "allowing" the grip of Imperial power to loosen, giving rise to dissent and rebellion and ultimately laying the foundation for Paul Atreides to rise. Had he not acted with cowardice in sending Sardaukar to Arrakis disguised as Harkonnens — or indeed in giving Arrakis to the Atreides in the first place — he wouldn't have lost his throne.

It's very much in keeping with his nature, though. He succeeded to the Imperial throne after poisoning his own father; this act was known to the Bene Gesserit and they used it to blackmail him into marrying one of theirs. His victories came not through straightforward use of force, but through conniving and treachery. Thus, he fell to a foe whom he himself created, who brought superior force to bear.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 20th 2024 at 11:28:40 AM

Shaddam's basically a puppet of the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild and he's all too aware of that.

This is an essential part of creating and controlling the Sardaukar, just as "rising them in a hellish prison, until only the fittest survive" is.

To do otherwise will risk the Sardaukar rebelling or trying to destroy the system of Salusa Secondus.

Thufer Hawat when discussing  how to create a Fremen counterpart for the Harkonen, did mention that the "graduated" will need to be rewarded handsomely, with even the lowest soldier allowed to live better than normal citizens.

Edited by jawal on Mar 20th 2024 at 4:48:20 PM

The Sardaukar were victims of their own success. They had been undefeated for so long that they came to genuinely believe themselves to be unbeatable. So they got complacent.

As for the rewards...it's less the luxury that keeps them in check and more the idea that they are "elite". They are kept loyal because being told they are now the elite makes them think that the suffering they endured meant something. They felt validated.

Edited by M84 on Mar 20th 2024 at 11:49:43 PM

I feel like even without the Letos ever existing the Sardaukars would eventually go down the Praetorian path of assigning the emperor's seat to the highest bidder, till an emperor gets tired of their shit.

The Sardaukar aren't the kingmakers. It's the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild who are the power behind the throne due to the extremely vital services they provide.

The reason they go on to oppose Paul is because he shifts the balance of power in his favor thanks to knowing how to destroy the spice forever. Both the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild — and human civilization in general — is utterly dependent on the spice.

The other element is that Salusa Secundus isn't actually the capital of the Corrino Empire, that's Kaitan. Salusa Secundus was the capital, but it got moved at some point, and one of the results is that if the Sarudakar decided to revolt against the Emperor, it'd be dead easy to completely isolate Salusa Secundus and cut it off from human contact forever.

That's the Spacing Guild's power, they can, if they wanted, permanently remove a planet from the equation just by refusing to go there. Even the Bene Gesserit can't do anything to counter that. Which seems to be why the Bene Gesserit tend to focus on manipulating the Great Houses and CHOAM and not the Spacing Guild itself so much, because pushing too hard gets a backlash the Bene Gesserit have no counter to.

Not to mention the Bene Gesserit just don't have anything to offer the Navigators.

The only reason the Spacing Guild don't do more with their power to influence politics is because they don't really care about anything but keeping the spice flowing. They are just that dependent on spice not only to do their jobs but to even survive.

Edited by M84 on Mar 21st 2024 at 10:28:33 PM

The Spacing Guild has a degree of prescience, but it's very narrow: focused on navigation, of course, but also on its own survival. Navigators have little ability to foresee things beyond "what will maintain our power". Thus, Paul's threat to destroy the spice is, to them, the ultimate trump card. They have no choice but to obey him.

It is noted in the books that they specifically reject the idea of taking over the Imperium themselves. While they could do it, they foresee that it would lead inevitably to their destruction. While never stated, it is implied that they're happy with the Bene Gesserit's long-term plan because the stability it would (allegedly) create would be to their benefit.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 21st 2024 at 10:37:48 AM

The threat to get rid of spice for good also terrifies the Bene Gesserit since their own powers have become too dependent on it as well.

It reinforces the idea that people in general are just too dependent on spice.

Edited by M84 on Mar 21st 2024 at 10:58:52 PM

IIRC, it's like...

The Spacing Guild holds ultimate control but doesn't bother exercising it most of the time. The Bene Gesserit maintain social control, but the Spacing Guild is always there, watching them in case they get too overt. CHOAM (the company that actually does the spice trade, basically all the adaptations quietly drop it or deemphasize it because it does like, nothing relevant to the plot) controls the spice itself, but because CHOAM is controlled by the Lansdraad, it's not really an independent player, and because it depends on the Spacing Guild and is controlled by the Bene Gesserit by proxy, it has very little real maneuvering power. And the Landsraad are nominally the great powers in the Empire, but the Spacing Guild could wipe out any of them any time they wanted without any violence at all, and the Bene Gesserit have them under near total control.

And all of this is dependent entirely on the Spice existing and being accessible. Which ends up necessarily putting the Spacing Guild at the top of the heap again because they're the only reason the spice trade even exists at all.

And this is all only maintained because of the restriction on computers, because if someone managed to make a navigation computer again, the entire system would collapse overnight.

Edited by Zendervai on Mar 21st 2024 at 11:07:20 AM

Good thing a Spice jihad never happened.

That's actually what Leto II's Golden Path is in part. He maintained a complete monopoly on spice throughout his reign, only granting strictly controlled allotments to others as he saw fit. The ultimate goal was to force people to be less dependent on spice. This was one of the ways Leto II forced humanity out of its terminal rut to scatter across the stars.

Yeah, it's funny to think that they had to come up with all of these weird workarounds because they're too afraid to make any computing machine with more processing power than a calculator.

Oh sure, why not mutate people into spice gas huffing fish? Better that than make a computer!

Edited by M84 on Mar 21st 2024 at 11:13:59 PM

The other thing that I do find interesting is that the original books mostly leave out any implication that the Butlerian Jihad was like, a war. Or that the Machines were actually really an issue and that it wasn't just a fringe religious sect that somehow sparked off a frenzy and just got people to smash up their computers.

In the original books it was hinted at that true artificial intelligence — the thinking machines — had been achieved at least. The tech level of the Dune setting was just that advanced.

It's why the Orange Catholic Bible's supreme commandment is Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. That implies that prior to the Butlerian Jihad they had managed to build such machines.

Edited by M84 on Mar 21st 2024 at 11:37:30 PM

The original books don't give precise details of the Butlerian Jihad. This seems to have been intentional on Herbert's part. It makes sense that the people of the Imperium, ten thousand years later, would regard that as more myth than fact, and that records would be unreliable.

Fittingly, the same happens in-universe to Muad'dib's jihad thousands of years later. Almost nobody in-universe — at least those who aren't gholas with the genetic memory of those times — knows the full story of Paul Atriedes and why the jihad in his name began.

Edited by M84 on Mar 21st 2024 at 10:05:25 PM

Granted the actual reason was pretty vague wasn't it? Just massacring those that opposed him.

Tell me the truth, Tropers: Am I the *only* person who thought Dune Part 2 was terrible?

As in, not just underwhelming, or not as good as I'd hoped, but actively *bad*?

Edited by Melendwyr on Mar 22nd 2024 at 1:43:19 PM

You probably are, I thought it was great. But I'm curious, you wanna elaborate on your feelings? I hope they're more complex than They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.