+3
Tickets in hand for the Sunday afternoon showing at the massive DLX theater. Yes, I am tempering my expectations, as I still think this material can't be fully adapted to screen without making lots of concessions. It's too layered, too complex, and has too many subtle aspects that frankly could never be conveyed properly in even three feature films.
Even though I consider the first film to be one of the best science fiction films of the last decade, I couldn't give it a perfect rating due to a couple of the choices that most likely had to be made, but still detracted from the film. I normally dislike exposition, but Dune almost requires a certain amount of background information to properly establish the world. Both Lynch and Villeneuve used a similar method to convey some of the set-up for the universe, having Paul study some educational materials that helped fill in some of the details. This is clunky but I think it worked well in conveying the information. The extended edition of the 1984 version famously tacked on a bunch of storyboards at the beginning of the film; that version easily conveys the largest amount of exposition, but ends up being terrible cinema, so I avoid it completely.
Lynch takes it further in using a voice-over to illustrate what people are thinking, but this rarely works without coming across like a cop out or just being straight up bad. Villenueve, probably at great pain to himself, either didn't write much exposition in, or just cut most of it out eventually. On paper, this is better cinema, but some of the ideas, such as the function of the mentats or the nature of the Guild, especially how they fit into the political scheming and manipulation, will be extremely difficult to convey in purely cinematic terms. He minimized the mentats in the first film, and I expect the same treatment for the Guild in the second half. I've read the books, so it tends to still click into place for me, but after coming out of the cinema in 2021, my friends who hadn't read the books had quite a few questions.
As I type this, I think the odds of this all getting pulled together properly in the second film are pretty long. My hopes are that Villeneuve is able to create an engaging piece of cinema out of the material he was able to adapt, and it will be up to me to temper my expectation in regards to the complex details of the story just not all being present.
Anyway, enough prattling for now. I will report back in after seeing the film on Sunday!
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It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance. ― Thomas Sowell