Dune

[Sigma]

Unless you're trying to make the audience buy into the idea that the planet is so dry that a single tear is significant and you dare not waste the moisture of your breaths. Seeing Fremen huffing and puffing in the desert, open mouths gaping... just didn't work for me.

I'm not saying that Lynch's movie was flawless, just that the decisions that he made regarding costume design were in general correct from a filmmaking perspective. As a testament to my fondness for Dune I should say that every weird or bad part of the book stems from David Lynch taking too many liberties with the material, not with him trying to accurately interpret what Herbert wrote. The good parts come from Lynch's masterful understanding of filmmaking, the bad parts come from his either not understanding or not particularly caring about the source material.

Same goes for the masks.  Yeah, of COURSE they should have had masks.  But you lose the actors' faces, even the TV series had everyone with the masks off for most the time.  Lack of any kind of headcovering, now, I found odd, but whatever, artistic vision and all. 

Not even Lynch was ballsy enough to try and suppress Kyle McLaughlin's hairdo in that film.

[Unorthodox]

Unless you're trying to make the audience buy into the idea that the planet is so dry that a single tear is significant and you dare not waste the moisture of your breaths. Seeing Fremen huffing and puffing in the desert, open mouths gaping... just didn't work for me.

(keeping in mind I didn't read the book here)

I don't think the movie was really pushing that, though.  We start running through the desert after it's revealed the Fremen are sitting on HUGE stores of water.  "Enough to change the landscape."  Water we're about to USE.  Enough to unleash thunderstorms later in the movie.  The Fremen have water to spare, others, not so much.  They can AFFORD to go screaming and running. 

This may not line up with the book, but there you have what I was seeing way back when. 

[Valka]

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[Sigma]

The thing is, the stores they had of water were not intended to be used immediately, or even soon. A few generations in the future, at best...

And the rain at the end of the movie was utterly the WORST thing Lynch did. Frank Herbert himself was not pleased. Sure, it looked cool. But it also killed the sandworms. Every last one. It killed the spice cycle. WATER KILLS ADULT SANDWORMS. That's something firmly established in the Frank Herbert novels.

I don't recall that being said in Dune though. I think that was a later addition.

Besides the Fremen don't really care about the spice as much as they care about transforming Arrakis into a place that isn't horrible for all living things.

[Buster's Uncle]

It was not a later addition.  In Dune it is explicitly mentioned that the spice essence was created by drowning a stunted worm they kept for just that purpose.  It was shown in the movie - blue worm vomit, remember?

[Unorthodox]

The thing is, the stores they had of water were not intended to be used immediately, or even soon. A few generations in the future, at best...

And the rain at the end of the movie was utterly the WORST thing Lynch did. Frank Herbert himself was not pleased. Sure, it looked cool. But it also killed the sandworms. Every last one. It killed the spice cycle. WATER KILLS ADULT SANDWORMS. That's something firmly established in the Frank Herbert novels.

Again, this is the movie, not the book.  You have to separate them. 

These things are NOT established in the movie. 

Though I did wonder what the heck was going to happen now that it's raining, at age 8 when watching this, so that's a glaring enough oversight, I'll admit.  I recognized at 8 that the genie was out of the bottle and there's no putting it back in, and some serious ecological reprocussions were about to ensue.  Water in sand doesn't exactly puddle up real well and all.  I always assumed a sea or two would form and maybe the rockie areas become able to be terraformed.  (again, the thoughts of an 8 year old at the time) 

[Unorthodox]

It was not a later addition.  In Dune it is explicitly mentioned that the spice essence was created by drowning a stunted worm they kept for just that purpose.  It was shown in the movie - blue worm vomit, remember?

The god-baby-water bottle stuff?  Didn't come off as killing that worm to me.  And that thing was in a big puddle.  I don't know that a little rain is going to do that to a bunch of worms in the sand. 

[Buster's Uncle]

There being no evidence in the movie that the stunted Maker survived the experience, I, familiar with the source material, am comfortable asserting that it was DEATH god-baby-water bottle stuff.

They really react badly to water.  The stunted worm was stunted by raising it in the same cave as the reservoir.   The humidity barely let it live.


There all sorts of stuff embedded in the story in the book about how the ecology works - it even makes a little sense.  You'd like that part.  You're exactly who Herbert wrote all the ecology stuff for.

[Sigma]

It was not a later addition.  In Dune it is explicitly mentioned that the spice essence was created by drowning a stunted worm they kept for just that purpose.  It was shown in the movie - blue worm vomit, remember?

Doesn't mean that water in and of itself kills worms, just that drowning kills worms, kind of like it does for most oxygen breathing creatures.

[Buster's Uncle]

Sorry; it does mean that water in and of itself kills worms.  That fact's explicit in the book and not contradicted in the movie.  All cannon not contradicted is still cannon by default, surely.

[Unorthodox]

Gotta be a pretty crappy job to go find a baby worm to put in the cave...

[Valka]

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[Buster's Uncle]

SPIICE OORRGY! 

[Sigma]

And you cannot separate the book from the movie. It doesn't matter what was "established" in the movie. The movie was based on a book published over 20 years before. The movie was meant to be as faithful an adaptation of the book as possible, within the limits of available funding, then-current filmmaking technology, and David Lynch's direction. If you want to totally separate the two, the movie would not have been Dune, but a ripoff just basically stealing the name to suck people in.

That's not really true though. Film makers, when adapting a book into a movie, are at liberty to change whatever they want if it means the film will play better. Saying that an adaptation's success is based upon its accuracy to the source material is ignoring the reality that taking the story, facts, characters and mood from the source material and translating it into a new medium allows, and at times demands, that elements be changed in order to make a better product. That doesn't make it a rip-off. A ripoff would be Lynch claiming that his Dune movie is wholy original and his own, unrelated to Frank Herbert's books.

Case in point: Blade Runner. That movie bears barely the faintest resemblance to the book that inspired it, but it's a triumph of both filmmaking and science fiction, so much so that Phillip K. Dick, who saw it only a few months before he died, declared it far superior to his own book. If Ridley Scott had adapted Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep as a word for word transliteration, the end product wouldn't nearly have been as good.

On the other end of the spectrum is No Country for Old Men, where the action in the book is translated with near perfect fidelity to the screen. But both works stand totally on their own because the people who created them are masters of their craft and know how best to manipulate the strengths of their medium to get the intended effect. Reading No Country for Old Men and watching the film are two completely different experiences, even though they cover the exact same events.

[Buster's Uncle]

Much as I love a good argument, and this is merely a personal opinion, not the Man speaking, I wanna talk about the movie, and I wanna talk about the book, but I don't think talking about which is better is a very fruitful line of discussion, even though everything the movie got so very very wrong was very important to me at the time.

I'm still trying to get around to my own overview of the movie.  (Multitasking a lot these days.)  1986 me would be put out at how it isn't the trashing I used to think the movie deserved.