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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   3236 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 12, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I just finished watching Dune 2 and took some notes while doing so. Notes, not an essay, so what you get is a jumble of thoughts.

  • The Director turned a fanciful book that made little sense into a visually impressive film that makes even less. All visual spectacle.
  • Present-day politics clearly present and accounted for. White people bad, the whiter the worse. Paul and Jessica are presented as outright villains, and Chani is the moral center of the story.
  • Soundtrack with people suddenly screaming in fantasy-arabic, ouch, my ears.
  • Emperor: A fucking joke.
  • Chani, if it weren't rude I'd say she's an ugly bitch.
  • Irulan - the acting suited the character, the speech did not, the looks did not at all.
  • Margot Fenring, Lady Jessica, Alia, pretty actresses, decent acting.
  • Fight scenes: Absolute trash. Ridiculous acrobatics VS completely passive victim-badguys. Harkonnens, Sardaukar, no matter, they just stand around dumbfounded and do some slow-motion waving once per scene, while the Fremen breakdance all over the place. And of course the Fremen have regular guns and use them...from off-screen at impossible angles, but not when it would actually make sense. None of the fighting makes sense!
  • Lasers and metal-storm like helicopter door guns looked nice though.
  • Sardaukar standing around in the desert sun in triumph-of-the-will formation.
  • Worst of all: The boots. Floppily open-topped boots in a sandy desert. Ouch. Luckily it wasn't all of the characters who wore them, but I still pitied the ones who did.
  • The Fremen hideouts are...giant highly visible architecture. How stupid exactly were the Harkonnens? Do the people of the future just not believe in reconnaissance? Same for the Fremen having a massive but completely unnoticed troop buildup just around the corner from the Emperor's army. Everything is so damn visible! But then the Fedaykin just dig themselves out of the sand at the feet of the army, so I guess nothing needs to make sense anyways.
  • Javier Bardem, I don't know if he's a good actor at all. I don't know. Feels like he's phoning it in, or was never much good to begin with and I overrated him so far because I'm a Cormac McCarthy fanboy. Or maybe he is good, but the movie is such overrated tripe that he falls flat.
  • The final duel between Paul and Feyd-Rautha is...meh. Not as bad as the one-sided fights preceding it, but it looks like stage fighting 101, with nothing but flashy, highly-visible moves meant to be easy to counter. Makes sense for a movie, of course, but still looks something in between silly and boring.
  • Now, to be fair, Dune is difficult material to work with, because it made little sense even as a book. But this is just...all shape, no substance.

A thousand apologies for a worthless post, worthlessly posted, but I needed to put it somewhere.

And that’s what the Fun Thread is all about.

Re: Fremen hideouts, yeah, the people of the future hate recon. Or rather they rely on satellites, which the planetologist subverted by bribing the Spacing Guild. Everything on the north half had to be camouflaged, but the south definitely had open-air operations.

Present-day politics clearly present and accounted for. White people bad, the whiter the worse. Paul and Jessica are presented as outright villains, and Chani is the moral center of the story.

Every major character apart from Chani was white (as in, portrayed by a white actor), though.

Yes, but you can clearly see a gradient of morality that's pretty much the gradient of skin darkness. From the very dark Liet-Kynes, practically a saint, to the darkish Chani, morally flawless except for her doing violence, to the lighter Stilgar, a fanatic blinded by propaganda, but at least on the right side, to the much lighter Atreides, greedy egoistical colonialists who exploit the natives for their political games and are nominal heroes only because they fight even worse people, to the almost-albino cartoon villain Harkonnens.

This frankly seems like a bit of an overthink. The Fremen (canonically originating from Egypt or the general Nilotic area) are black or brown. The Great Houses, again canonically distantly from Greece and Russia (though it would be amiss from me to not to mention that the surname Harkonnen originates from Finnish), are white. Most of the nonwhite characters died in the previous film.

Present-day politics clearly present and accounted for. White people bad, the whiter the worse. Paul and Jessica are presented as outright villains, and Chani is the moral center of the story.

I wouldn't agree on Paul but it did occur to me that Jessica, due to the movies downplaying how much her going AWOL (and kicking off the deaths of everyone as a result) was about love , really comes across as vastly more malevolent not just in this movie but in the first one too.

They sort of flip Jessica and Paul's eagerness with respect to the missionara protectiva prophecy; in the book Paul is all for it and Jessica reluctant. But in the movie it is Jessica who is the insistent one and Paul troubled with it. This makes Jessica seem much more manipulative and also lumps her in with the rest of the Bene Gesserit when she was supposed to be the black sheep

Did they explain the original BG plan in the books? They were going to marry Paula off to Fred to breed back to the harkonnen bloodline, but would the emperor not have joined the conspiracy if Atredes only had a daughter?

Yes. And their male child would unite the Atreides and Harkonnen families. The emperor has no male children. His daughter would be married to this person.

I don't think they explain it past that in the books. I guess the BG were gonna massage it later but the implication is that's how they would get some peace (or at least preserve one of the lines)

In the films they do say that Jessica was told to carry daughters but not explicitly that they were to be wed to Feyd (like many things, there's enough to project the book canon unto it but not enough to recreate it). It is explicitly said in Part One that Paul is a boy because Jessica wanted to bring about the Kwisatz Haderach early and was willing to risk Paul's life to do so.

Casts all of her behavior in a very different light.

Jessica’s internal monologue definitely says she did it for Leto in the book. Weird change to make.

Agreed, The the movie was a collosal waste of 3 hours.

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