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I agree on all these points. My main concern with the first film was how bland things tended to be in terms of aesthetics, acting, and culture. This film improved:
(1) Somewhat on aesthetics. I liked the Harkonnen stuff. I liked the biomorphic technology: a recurring theme in Herbert's work is the idea of making a plausible future by implementing or magnifying tropes inspired by recurring patterns in human history (aristocracy, verbal manipulation, women attaining power through manipulation and intrigue rather than brute force etc.) and biomorphic technology is all around us without us noticing, e.g. velcro.
(2) Acting. The actor playing Feyd was weird in a good way, Paul's mother was suitably insane and menacing, Javier Berdem is a god of acting, and even Zendaya was less flat (acting-wise).
(3) Culture. Lots of time with the Fremen and the Harkonnens. I wanted more Islamo-futurism and I got it. My main complaint would be that the Harkonnens should have had more Spartan themes. While that doesn't fit the books, I think it (a) helps audiences to understand how the Harkonnens represent a dehumanized future with an alien culture, where humanity is ceasing to be recognisable to us, and (b) gives more explanation of the Harkonnen appeal, given that the wild sex, drugs, and rock n roll weren't going to be represented on screen. Dune One showed how the Harkonnens rule by fear, but no empire survives on fear alone; Dune Two gave more hints of what Harkonnen culture and legitimation might be like, but I wanted more, especially if it satirises modern Spartan cults. Ideally, I would have liked more discipline, more survival of the fittest, more homeroticism, to extents that offend gymbros and wokists alike.
Any Dune film is going to be full of missed opportunities. This film missed somewhat fewer than the first.
Yep. Granting that the director is going to pick and choose what gets emphasized and also what makes it in at all so one should really only judge how well he used what he included and not on HOW MUCH they managed to squeeze in, this was an amazing job.
Have to agree on making the Harkonnens a Sparta analogue. While I loved how it was used, I think making the Harkonnen uniforms be basically black space leather with minimal adornment was a... tame choice? Made it easy to pick them out on screen, but I had also understood that Harkonnens prefer a certain amount of ostentatious gaudiness.
The visual cue "WE ARE THE BAD GUYS" every time one of them is on screen was mostly unneeded.
I agree on the black space leather. In the Dune video games (Dune II and IIRC Emperor of Dune) the Harkonnens are mostly in red, which is cool because it's a colour associated both with allure (red fruit, roses, red lips etc.) and violence (blood). The Sci-Fi miniseries goes with similar aesthetics and generally portrays the Harkonnens as cool/sexy, which helps explain how e.g. Feyd could plausibly have sufficient popularity among the Great Houses to become Emperor. I thought Dune Part Two did a good damage mitigation job on this point, by making Feyd more honourable than he is in the books; I don't know if that was deliberate, but it helped.
Incorporating red into their color themes would have undoubtedly improved the design in my eyes.
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