I’ve been rereading Dune on audio book. (Or am I relistening? But I didn’t listen the first time. Progress creates semantic uncertainty.) But anyway I’ve been experiencing that sequence of words again for the first time since high school. In the same time period, I’ve had a number of conversations about the movie both with some people who have read the book and some who haven’t. I have (mostly spoiler-free, though I do discuss some plot elements in a general way) thoughts.
1) For anyone who has not yet seen the movie but is considering it, there’s something you should know. It’s touched on in the movie, but the one gripe I’ve heard about the movie that I find legitimate is that this isn’t clear, because it’s not that clear and it’s vital. Namely:
There are two reasons that the Emperor takes the planet Arrakis away from the Harkonnen family and gives it to the Atreides family. A) The Atreides Family is widely admired, and the Emperor fears the other houses will follow them and turn against him. He is forcing them into conflict to weaken them. B) The Emperor holds a large stockpile of Spice. If Atreides falters on Arrakis and Spice production is interrupted, his stockpile will gain value, and he can blame them for it.
This second reason is ALSO why the Harkonnen family seems unconcerned about losing Arrakis. They have an even BIGGER stockpile of Spice (because they were the ones mining it), and would love an interruption in production that they didn’t take the blame for. They figure they can always come back later and take back over.
If I can help one person enjoy Dune more, this newsletter has not been in vain!
2) The real genius in the adaptation is that it is decidedly NOT the book. The book has scenes, but it’s mostly inner monologue and what the characters “know” about each other. Herbert’s exposition isn’t particularly artful, it’s workmanlike—it’s just that what he’s expositing is so interesting and cool that we don’t care. He can tell instead of show all he wants because every idea is better than the last.
You can’t do that on screen, and Villanueve didn’t. He excised the inner monologue, invented scenes to do the exposition work, and turned a book that’s basically a diary of political intrigue into a movie about a young man and his mother.
I’ve seen Villanueve in several interviews venerate the book, as he should, and take pains to detail his efforts to stay true to the book, which, uh, okay Dennis. I assume it’s just that he’s good at marketing because obviously he knows what he changed, and no hate there!
3) I’m also two episodes into the Foundation series on Apple TV right now, and it’s a real contrast. An equally compelling story (that I also don’t know well but is an all-time classic) but told in a way that’s so much more plodding and frankly boring that it must hew closer to the original than Dune does. It’s not that Foundation is bad, per se, it’s actually not and I’ll watch the whole season. But it’s more of a chore than Dune was, the exposition more grinding, the novel-ish ness of it all more obvious.
4) The first episode of The Wheel of Time (It is an *insane* time for massive sci fi series right now; the success of Game of Thrones made some studio execs get real brave!) airs in six days, and I am cautiously excited, BUT—It makes adapting Dune look easy, in terms of its complexity and scope. There are over 1000 named characters (that’s not a typo) in the entire series. It’s going to be a problem.
The book series is an all-time favorite of mine (along with many, many other people). It starts in a tiny mountain village, which, cool, I see how they’ll do that. And then they leave there and go to a city, which, okay, cool, makes sense. Then the entire cast splits up and goes off on years of separate adventures, and each meets an entire cast’s worth of secondary characters spread through dozens of nations, each with their own complex customs and history. Uh oh. And THEN, they acquire the power to fast-travel (in video game lingo) and start zipping through each other’s storylines so often that they’re all interdependent and altering any one of them or excising a single scene would have ripples in many directions.
There’s literally an extended analogy in-world that the entire series is named after about how the Wheel of Time spins and changes to reality burn threads out of it and can cause it to unravel. So I guess what I’m getting at is that starting to mess with the story is an act not without hubris!
I really hope it goes well. But I’ve been thinking about these issues for fifteen years and I’m not sure what they’re going to do.
5) However good these are or aren’t, it’s a great time to be a fantasy and sci fi fan. It’s no longer the province of nerds alone (they’re now reading video-game-fanfic on Rainbow Road), and that means there’s enough money now to make a bunch of awesome stuff. What a privilege to live in an era when people are taking big shots on all-time great material, and the tech exists to make it look like real film.
I remember watching an interview with Steven Spielberg when I was a kid, after Jurassic Park came out, and he was waxing poetic about the future, and computers, and what would be possible. Jurassic Park still holds up, no joke, those dinos look great, but what it took a genius to do then is the standard now.
6) Can you freaking imagine how amazing Avatar 2 and 3 are going to be? Like those are still happening! Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent, so they are absolutely, 100% coming out one day! James Cameron has been isolated in an edit bay, held aloft by straps like Baron Harkonnen in Dune, for the last decade just making these two freaking movies. The storyline of the first Avatar was incredibly stupid, and I will still be there opening day for these.
What’s weird to me though is, how much better could it get? Like Dune was perfect, it looked real. They had huge fight scenes and monsters and machines and it could have been a documentary. What the heck is Cameron going to do that’s leaps and bounds above that? I can’t imagine, but I will pay my money to find out.
7) I hope everyone has a great week, enjoy all the wonderful sci fi out there in the world right now, and I will be back next Sunday morning with another story!