Welcome to the final Roger Corman episode (no, really, we mean it this time) in our mini-series “Be Adjacent to the Cor-Man.” Super-hero movies: can you believe there was a time when they weren’t being released on a daily basis? This dim and distant era was called “The 1990’s” and we didn’t have any of this fancy CGI crap or compelling stories or talented actors! No! We had to stuff hamsters into tiny spandex body suits and tie little capes around their necks and try to get them to fight while we played the ”Carmina Burana” in the background! You think that was easy? Do you know how hard it is to get hamsters to fight ANYTHING? I do! Never mind how I know! But in this dark and strange time, all we had to eat was cardboard and wooly mammoth jerky (and the occasional hamster, but never mind about that). And the only decent superhero movies we had were a couple of Superman and Batman films. Where was Marvel Comics in all this? Making terrible Captain America movies, that’s where! Well, Roger Corman and others decided that there was a need and they filled it! Well, sort of. I mean, they started to fill it and . . . or maybe someone else didn’t want them filling it . . . because this was the film the Fantastic Four needed, but not the film it deserved . . . it’s complicated. Because I’m Batman! [editor’s note: Max is in no way, shape, or form Batman]. Anyway, here is the very first film adaptation of Marvel’s First Family that was never actually released because it was so . . . good? Give a listen and find out.
Poll question: What did you think of the recent two-movie adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune?
Get this: you can call our super-special-awesome Max, Mike; Movies Hotline™ and record your response! Leave us a message and we’ll use it on the show. Just call 617-398-7266! No operators are standing by!
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I never would have guessed Dune as the 300th episode! I have along been a fan of Denis Villeneuve as a local filmmaker so I might be biased as I think like many his films, Dune parts 1 & 2 were visually stunning and the sound work and all the technical stuff was pretty much some of the best stuff out there these days. I have also read the Dune trilogy at least 4 times, Dune itself 5 or 6 times and I played the 1970 board game. I also read the 4th book and was fine with it but nothing after that, so not a super fan.
Part one really felt like the book to me overall but I wasn’t confused by the accelerated timeline in some areas, Paul becomes part of the Fremen in what must be weeks or months and not years and lady Jessica is still pregnant at the end of the second film so no Alia! The second film began to wildly move away from the book in ways I did not expect. Alia’s scene with the Baron at the end of Dune was something I was very much looking forward to seeing happen in this version and it takes a very different route I found disappointing.
I appreciated almost of the acting choices, Paul is young not in his 30s or whatever Kyle McLaughlin was in the David Lynch version, which I did not and do not like much. I like some aspects of it but it suffered from not the best effects work and Lynch not really having good control over the production or a good understanding of the story, in my opinion. Jason Mamoa was not as bad as I feared but he is wrong for the character and I do not see how he will work at all in future films in that role.
I expected changes from book to film, its inevitable. I think they made the right decision to cut a lot of the lore, legends and complexity of the book out of the film. It is weird you never really get any idea what the spice is or worms are about, though I guess enough is hinted at that will bring interested cinephiles to read the books and not confuse those who haven’t with too much detail. The final battle was rushed to me, if I was in charge I would have made the sandwort attack longer and really something of a set piece that would knock people’s socks off with their shear size and power.
I have seen the 2 Sc-Fi mini-series and I don’t hate them as much as some do. They tried, I felt, and I see why they combined the last 2 books in the trilogy into one story. This is what Villeneuve is doing as well, it seems. Jessica is already a douche by the end of part 2 so that is a character change already well under way and while I wanted to see 5 year old Alia taking on the Baron, it might have come off poorly, campy or just silly. I am concerned that the next film has been cut off from much of the interesting material set up in the first book and expanded in the next two though. I do have confidence they will do something interesting even if it doesn’t quite gel with me as a Frank Herbert reader.
Highlights on Dune 1&2 for me are the visuals, the way the presented the voice which is jarring in a good way and how they managed to get across the dark sun on Giedi Prime, the Harkonnen home world. They didn’t overuse the worms or get too messianic in what is quite the messianic storyline to begin with. It thought they got across the Paul is NOT a hero but is someone who decides the best way forward is to accept his monstrous future.
Was this too long? Too bad it’s your own fault for choosing 6 hours of movie to talk about! A movie that is about a place the antithesis of my snowbound, silly homeland of penguins and poutine!
I am very tempted to call… but should it be in French or my almost accent-less Boston English?
You should absolutely call, Vince! Be warned, though, that if you speak in Canadian (“French”? I’m supposed to believe that’s a real language?), I’ll have to run it through BabelFish or Google Translate or something and then present the translation EXACTLY AS IT COMES OUT! Think about that, won’t you?
Too long? About movies? Your words are strange to me! So many intriguing insights . . . too much is never enough! And as you say, we’re not exactly choosing an example of cinematic brevity here! I have to admit, I was sorry we didn’t get to see Alia in these movies either, except in a flash forward/vision/whatever. I think Anya Taylor-Joy is a good choice, but I would have liked to see toddler Alia deliver the death blow to the Baron. Oh well . . .
As a study in contrast vis-a-vis Vince’s verbosity (really, I just can’t compete!), I thought new Dune was…fine? The visuals are nice, but a lot of it makes no sense within the fiction of the world (what scale are we working on, again?), and it doesn’t do as good a job of capturing FHerb’s weirdness as the David Lynch movie does.
Personally, I’ve always found the idea of Dune to be more compelling than the actual book or movie itself. Maybe that’s a product of living in a post-Dune world in which ecologically-minded SF runs rampant; I think I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy first, which for my money does the sweeping generational epic a lot better, but that being written in the 90s could take advantage of our knowledge of spaceflight (member, Dune was published in 65, predating the moon landings by four whole years!). Conversely, weird takes on religion and a post-computing society (not to mention ultra-hardened space soldiers with swords) have been firmly established for me by reading about the WH40K lore (though I wish I had the proverbial dump truck of cash [and time] to dump into playing the game, I mostly know about it through the internet). But the most salient movie comparison I can draw is with what’s probably my favorite movie, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which I certainly saw before I’d read or seen anything Dune-related. Whereas Dune has always been ponderous, Nausicaa was zippy, telling a similar exile-and-return/grapple-with-your-fate/relationship-to-violence/humanity-and-nature story in two-thirds of the time (95 minutes to 137 for David Lynch–and that’s the shortest version!) with considerably better, well, acting. While Dune was more dramatic in some ways, it didn’t do a great job of conveying the emotional journey of the characters simply because I had to wait such a long time between episodes and had forgotten what had happened in the first by the time the second rolled around! Compare to Lord of the Rings, in which the visual language was clear enough to delineate segments and make them memorable (though of course I wasn’t watching those movies as they came out, Dune has always struggled to make the most of Technicolor, being troubled by the tomato-stained Tupperware filter that directors feel they need to apply to anything set remotely near a desert). Couple that with the battle sequences making very little sense and the logistics of imperium (which were crucially important to the original story and its message about American petrohegemony) being mostly swept under the rug, and all we’re left with is a four (five?) hour pile of references to a cooler book. And don’t get me started on the noble savages tropes constantly being applied to the Fremen–while Herbert’s attitude was commendable at the time of writing, it, uh, hasn’t aged well. He nails in the book how different people can have different relationships to the world around them and how we all have different goals, but in the movies the Fremen constantly feel like a resource to be exploited. Book-Paul struggles with the dual responsibilities of being a person who wants to respect those around him and needing to convince people to die for him to become royalty, whereas movie-Paul skips straight to the latter. (Note: I’ve yet to see Lawrence of Arabia, but I wonder if that movie fares better in 2024?) Dune is certainly better than “modern” “conceptual” “instant SF classics” than Avatar or Prometheus or even Interstellar, but Inception, Her, and, let’s face it, Arrival, are a full tier above new-Dune. And Dune isn’t fun enough to stand with the likes of Snowpiercer, Dredd, or Pacific Rim, so it falls short in the popcorn-movie slot as well (though the less said about that popcorn bucket the better)! I’d rate it around Blade Runner 2049, in that it’s a promising-yet-flawed movie(s) that almost-almost!-was something great, but misses the mark, mainly due to comparison with other, better movies.
TL;DR, I think that Villeneuve made the best, if perhaps the most racist, Marvel movies of the last decade.
Oh, and Vince, my vote is for French with a Boston accent.
(Please FEEL FREE to edit for the whole brevity thing! One of my friends is a huge Dune nut and my favorite board game, Twilight Imperium, is a pretty direct Dune ripoff, so I can yap about this thing for a while.)
Uh-oh, looks like I’m the one with the problematic word count–sorry about that! Just popping back to mention that another problem with new Dune is that Paul is implicitly shown to be a good guy. In the books and the David Lynch movie, Paul Atreides is emphatically not a good guy. He’s the victim of terrible circumstances, but unlike Hamlet or Simba is never shown to be anything other than a monster. Kyle MacLachlan, say what you will about him, manages to convey a sense of menace, especially in the showdown with the EMPRAH, that Timmy could never match.
This is also a larger critique of recent movies in which the protagonist MUST be portrayed as sympathetic, at least through the filmography, editing, and sound design, but that’s another story. (Okay, teaser–it’s necessary for modern media marketing. Suffice it to say that Dune is a terrible story for this style of storytelling.)
Again, cut for time!
As I point out to Vince, Käse Junge, there’s nothing problematic about your word count at all! Give us all you got, then bring back more!
VERY interesting point about the historical context of the original novel as pre-moon landing (and everyone knows David Lynch was the second choice after Kubrick to film the fake landing!), especially vis a vis the technology. And I’m right there with you about how poorly the book has aged (white savior Mauad’Dib, anyone?). Tons of good stuff here for the show, thanks! Yes, we may trim it a smidge but it’s going to be hard to choose. Much gratitude!
I can’t disagree with your points Ned! I was reading something about the works of Villeneuve, especially his sci fi work this week and the author was making a case that he takes some very difficult stories to visualize and brings them to a larger public by finding ways to change them enough to make them enjoyable and meaningful to a general public without throwing out the essentials of the story which is fair, he is more making a film version of a story than trying to reproduce the print version precisely. I am curious what his Rendezvous with Rama will be like… its not something I ever imagined being a film.
I’m really looking forward to Rendezvous with Rama! Even having only read it a couple of years ago, I thought that it would make a great movie, perhaps because it feels so simple. I think you’re on to something about Villeneuve’s ability to visualize scenes for us!
His film 2009“ Polytechnique“ was a little too visually beautiful for me as it was depicting an actual massacre that happened here… a little too artistic maybe. Could be it just struck a nerve with me.
Huh, I haven’t heard of that one. Sounds difficult and offputting. Is it worth watching? I’ll admit that I’ve only seen his mainstream movies.