Here are my first (and probably last) impressions after watching Dune 2. It’s almost three hours long, with ponderous pacing. The shots of CGI landscape are all too long, and it felt like a third of the runtime was just staring at particle animations. The dialogue is mostly wooden exposition dumps with characters reciting stuff they already know to each other. I’m almost surprised someone didn’t say “As you know…” Elements of the book are thrown onscreen at random, and poorly. Despite all of the exposition dumps, spice and spice-addicted navigator people have no role in the plot at all. -Did you forget to explain the entire point of the conflict? -Yes I did, whoopsie.
I have to wonder if someone told ChatGPT to read Dune and generate a two-part script based on it.
All of these problems were present in the first chapter of the film, and were even worse in the sequel. It’s mentioned that Paul’s mother is pregnant, but ChatGPT apparently forgot that the fetus was eventually supposed to turn into a character with her own lines of dialogue. Paul’s native girlfriend Chani scowls throughout the whole runtime, like she needs to poop but has to wait until the speech is over. In the last scene Chani runs out of the room, like that was in fact the reason she looked so uncomfortable.
Really, I have to wonder if ChatGPT strung together a bunch of words from the book plus whatever other nonsense it scraped off the internet, and that was the whole script. The movie itself often felt like that was generated with AI too. A lot of the CGI looks terrible, literally worse than sci-fi movies from 50 years ago, and the same visual cliches are used over and over and over again. Watch this AI-generated clip:
Now imagine this clip, but 550 times longer. That’s Dune 2, not even an exaggeration.
AI is competitive with human creators not because AI has gotten better, but because humans have gotten worse. Even our concept of what AI means has deteriorated. If we asked a computer scientist from the 1950s what AI is, I’m sure he would absolutely not agree that it is simply the ability to string together random bullshit from a library of content.
Ian Kummer
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The cgi mouse was cute. It would be the only character to miss, should they kill it.
Well, the first part looked like a kinda faithful adaptation of the book to me, at least on the level of actions and dialogue. TBH I read the book in the 80s. Anyway, I thought this would be boring and non-understandable to anyone who hadn’t read the book, ‘cos most of the lore was missing together with the dreams of the main character, an important part of the book. I think the material is so big here that you have to select, and they selected too much, in a wrong way.
Nice Post, Ian. I reproduced it on my “Chimeras” blog. And thanks for the insights you keep giving us!
https://chimeras.substack.com/p/teolawaki-the-end-of-literature-as
Very good, thank you! I’ll take a look at your blog too
Thanks for the review. I was undecided about seeing this, but leaning against, since I never got into the book, and though there were many positive reviews, they all emphasize the spectacle and acting over the story, which is usually a bad sign for a well received movie.
“Despite all of the exposition dumps, spice and spice-addicted navigator people have no role in the plot at all.”
The equivalent for another fantasy epic would be doing a set of “Lord of the Rings” movies and leaving out the Elves.
Just to be sure everybody knows about it. Spicediver made an incredible fan edit to the Dune of 1984 mixing the theatrical version, the three-hours-made-for-tv adaptation, and various other little pieces.
The result is phenomenal, take three hours, few beers, pop corns, a bunch of friends, a big screen and enjoy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faHQA_0d9Mo
I finally saw both movies and I kinda feel like Paul after drinking the water of life, I can see the points of people liking it and the points of people hating it.
(SPOILERS FROM NOW ON)
Compared to the crap we saw in the last years (decades?) the movies are nice. There are real characters, real sacrifice, hard choices, and not everyone cares about the difference compared to the book, plot holes, or the insane military strategies.
On the other hand, all you said here is true. Parts of the book are throw in the screen at random, motivations are unclear or even absent. Important ideas from the books are just cameos. It is never shown that Leto convinced Jessica to have a son, he never says “the sleeper must awaken” so from a character that knows much more than it seems he becomes just like a bee drone, of course also Paul won’t say “the sleeper has awoken!”; the Spacing Guild has no function at all, it is the Bene Gesserit that wanted to exterminate the Atreides and yet for some reason they ask Harkonnen to spare Paul and mother this brings to the failure of a plan in action since hundred of years and yet are totally dismissive… even simple details like Mentats having red lips is lost, they do have a little black square on the lips but it is hardly noticeable, their work as computers is just a cameo anyhow. Important scenes like the different reaction of Jessica and Paul in front of Leto’s death is really really poorly done (Jessica cries, Paul feels nothing until he understand what he is). The blue eyes of Dune denizen are barely noticeable and as far as I remember Paul do not have these at all in the end…
Spicediver’s Lynch Dune is just better.