Dune, a thousand times yes for Dune. Prefer the Lynch version but the Sci-fi miniseries would be fun too.

Also, the original Stargate

Add Blade Runner to the above list of "Cinematography + Music trumps Story"

Barry Lyndon is definitely Kubrick's best film.

Blade Runner is one of my favourite movies... the Casablanca of science fiction movies. It's such a delicate and subtle film. A film noir set in the future. The direction, the visuals, the script, the performances... it's all fantastic. Rutger Hauer's "tears in the rain" speech is so fucking sad...

I think Blade Runner would be a great one to do, especially as opinion is divided as it so often is with the film.  I'm firmly in the "love it" camp, but I digress...

Dune - the novel, was divided up into several parts i.e. 'books' and the 1984 movie really needed the 3 x 3 hour LOTR treatment to convey all the richness of Frank Herbert's vision.

The other political issue with DUNE today is that it makes the Fremen proxies for the Taliban/insurgents i.e. religious desert people fighting a foreign invader that wants to exploit them for their resources (used for transport).

As for the intended remake, which studio is going to greenlight a big budget for a movie that romanticises fundamentalist freedom fighters? Last one was Rambo III.

Last edited by avatar (2012-01-23 13:16:05)

I've noticed a difference between British v USA sci-fi since the 1980s & 1990s, in that the perspective of rebels versus empire is much more prevalent in England (Blakes 7) whereas USA sci-fi (Star Trek, Stargate, etc) generally the perspective is from the military/empire/centre of power.

Firefly/Serenity tried to flirt with the rebels v empire theme, but it didn't really get that political and then got cancelled anyway. They were more smugglers trying to earn a living rather than guerillas/terrorists blowing up government installations in cause of liberty.

So if a DUNE remake was greenlit, you'd have a sequence of desert-dwelling religious freedom fighters engaged in a systemic sabotage campaign of shutting down spice (oil?) supplies. Unless the screenplay writers just de-emphasised that, like Firefly did.

I'm a big fan of Dune, but if I re-read it now, I couldn't help associating the Fremen with the Mujahideen.

The case of Avatar is an interesting one, as there's considerable overlap with Dune. Religious natives having their lands exploited for their resources, a dude going native and leading them to overthrow the empire. However there was no sabotage campaign - which would have undermined the simple black v white morality (actually pink skin v blue skin). The 'message' of ecological stewardship was prevalent.

Only in the very beginning, when Jake first arrived on Pandora, did you see arrows in a giant truck's wheels - the only subtle hint of a concerted resistance.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed, and there's only one superpower, I don't think movies like Rambo III would be possible today.

Last edited by avatar (2012-01-24 18:23:05)

>However, Dune was written by a particular man in a particular time frame, with specific ideas in mind.

I wonder how much Herbert was inspired by Lawrence of Arabia. He wrote Dune in the mid-1960s and the Lean film came out early 1960s. Once again, an outsider leads religious desert-dwellers to overthrow a powerful, corrupt empire. There's a sabotage campaign, there's uniting the tribes, there's 'going native'.

Yes, I'd love to see the battle of Arrakeen on film - giant sandworms breaching a gap in the cliffs created by atomic weapons and pouring into a city. The 1984 movie forgot to add in the city during this sequence. It'd be expensive.

I just watched that for the first time last night.

...I have no interesting watching that movie again, even for comedy purposes. 

I saw The Dark Crystal when it came out in my hometown theater at the age of 15 or so and found it weird and unsatisfying. In theory it was exactly the sort of thing I should love (being myself weird and unsatisfying) but instead it sort of felt like watching an awkward off-Broadway stage show.

I showed a few minutes of it and Labyrinth to my 8-y-o niece and nephew recently, and they picked Labyrinth without a second thought.

RE: DUNE
To give it justice, they'd have to include all that political intrigue and powerplay between the various Houses, the Guild, the Bene Gesserit, and half a dozen other institutions, then there's all the religious commentary (manipulating the gullible with hocus pocus), the background of the Butlerian Jihad, as well a great adventure yarn of mother & son in the desert. The screeplay writer will have his work cut out for him - it's at least as challenging as the LOTR screenplays, which needed a prologue and lengthy exposition at Bag End and the Council of Elrond.

But the reality is, the bigger the budget the more it boils down to good guys in the red corner, bad guys in the blue corner, and they slug it out, in between hour-long chase sequences.

I'd love to see it happen (i.e. 3 x 3 hour treatment) but I'm sceptical.

Last edited by avatar (2012-01-31 14:56:34)

Because if there's one thing we know sci-fi audiences can't get enough of, it's space politics.

I kid. Sort of. I haven't read Dune (though I've tried about a dozen times and I'm going to try again this year), but I wouldn't have thought I'd be interested in fantasy politics until GAME OF THRONES, which had many of the same challenges facing Dune, from what I've managed to read of the latter: most significantly, most of the story takes place in characters' internal monologues or is background information conveyed by the narrator, which would have to be externalized and finessed so it doesn't feel like as-you-knows, speaking the subtext, or grinding everything to a halt for an exposition dump.

Give Dune the 10-hour HBO treatment -- where they can take their time and don't have to give a damn that the desert terrorists are the good guys -- and I bet it'd be awesome.

Um, confused here. You just listened to the Alien 3 DVD commentary? Our ours? Because I remember being on that one.  I don't remember Trey mentioning that he worked on that film, but my memory is getting rusty these days.