bigtoughralf wrote:saxitoxin wrote:I saw Dune II ... thoughts follow with spoilers (not sure how you spoil a 60 year-old story but whatever) ...(1) WOW ... absolutely epic. That said, I don't understand how anyone who hasn't read the book or books would find it entertaining as it would be difficult to follow if you had not, I think, particularly with all the psychedelic flash-forwards.
(2) Christopher Walken did a good job as the Padishah Emperor in the sense that everything Walken does is good. However, I sort-of feel like this wasn't a role that only he could play and there were probably other actors who may have done an as-good or better job.
(3) A subtle moment of wokeness: We never have an appearance of Baron Harkonnen's gay sex slaves. (They can't have a homosexual be a villain, I'm assuming.) On the other hand, I was expecting they would cut out the concept of the forced marriage of the Princess Irulan to Paul Atreides but they didn't.
(4) The costuming didn't hit it out of the park like it did in the first film. The baroque elements were gone and it became a little sci-fi'ish. Princess Irulan was dressed like Lady Gaga in her prime.
(5) The music was as-good or better than in the first film.
I'll keep political observations for the Israel thread.
I saw it yesterday. Overall I thought it was great, although on point 1) I definitely thought parts of the story felt very accelerated. Some of the relationships and dynamics that developed felt like they could have been given a bit more time (the main guy and Johnny getting into a relationship seemed to happen out of nowhere, the badass new Harkonnen nephew went from new character to dead without much development in between etc). It feels like they tried to cram a bit too much in and therefore couldn't give everything the time it deserved.
There was also that weird comment about how men would die if they tried taking on the sorrow of the planet, which there may be more context to if you read the book but in the film it felt like a slightly on-the-nose attempt at being girl power (your point number 3).
The first movie was almost entirely about the politics and power dynamics between the houses and characters, whereas the second felt a lot more like a straight action movie.
Yeah, they chopped a lot of the politics out of this part (apart from the obvious parallels to the Israel-Palestinian conflict: the greedy, conniving Harkonnens who came from far away are the Zionists; the oppressed, indigenous Freymen are the Palestinians; the resource extraction colony of Arrakis represents the resource extraction colony of Israel; the Padishah Emperor and the Landsraad are the West, manipulating everything behind the scenes). Notably, the CHOAM Corporation (oil companies) and the Guild Navigators (military industrial complex) never make an appearance, and they never explain why there are no computers in either film. May have needed to make it a trilogy otherwise, I'm guessing.