Monster Zero x SciFi Japan - Archive Only

http://www.variety.com/VR1117982560.html

:-\

Dune is my favorite line of books ever, I've read each one multiple times (except for Sandworms of Dune, haven't picked it up yet.)

Let us hope this is better than that Sci Fi channel miniseries. I couldn't even finish watching that travesty.

From Collider:

Dune has the potential, in the right hands, of being something close to Lord of the Rings in its scope, if it ends up in the right hands, but something along the way will FUBAR it up.

I say "close" to Lord of the Rings, because that property was handled by people that loved the material and did their best to treat it with respect while still realizing they had a movie to make. DUNE seems to have less "universal" appeal, is more cerebral...even esoteric.... and while I appreciate the look of the Lynch version (up to a point) and the effort of the SyFy miniseries (up to a point), both of them fell way short of the mark.

The novel, sprawling as it is, has its faults, but everything is there that is needed to tell an epic story with plenty of intellectual as well as emotional resonance, in spite of its strangeness. There is a glimmer of hope, if done right.

I haven't much faith in that happening though.

I was able to get hold of a copy of the FIRST draft screenplay for the Lynch version of DUNE. That was written primarily by Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergen, the screenwriters responsible for Lynch's Elephant Man. After 6 months of writing Lynch parted ways with them over "creative" differences, but I tell ya....from what I have read, it would have been one hell of an improvement over what we've seen to date. This was a time when the plan was to break the movie into two parts.

The script is 125 pages long and ends with Paul and Jessica being thrown out in the Arrakeen Desert after the Harkonnen/Sardaukar attack on House Atreides. It incorporates passages by Princess Irulan that were used to open chapters in the novel. The dinner scene is in there. The Arrakeen Palace greenhouse is there. There were even scenes that carried a lot of emotion, mainly between Leto and Jessica.

I got my copy of it on ebay, and it's xeroxed onto goldenrod paper, adding one more step in hindering the ability to make a direct copy or scan of it, but with digital scanning/photography and some basic photoshop trickery I intend to make a PDF of it. Once done, I'll probably put it on rapidshare and email the link to anyone interested. It'll probably be sometime early next year. (I am NOT going to transcribe the thing ). Let me know if you're interested.

The horrible Alan Smithee extended version of '84 Dune is interesting for only one thing, and that is the few actual scenes shot by Lynch that indicate a movie with a better understanding of the novel than what we actually got.


The SyFy miniseries (along with pretty much anything else SyFy does) just looked cheap, and came off as terribly boring and just OFF, in its visuals, casting, and everything else, really. YES, they had the time to explore the Duniverse at more length, and I want to appreciate that, but I felt they screwed the pooch as much as the '84 version did, just in different positions. (eeww. ) I did like their treatment and expansion of Princess Irulan, for the most part.

I could go on, but not just yet.

From Variety:


[quote="Mike Fleming"]
Paramount Pictures has set Pierre Morel to direct “Dune,â€

From AICN:

I think Legendary could finally be the studio to get Dune into theaters again.

I think the David Lynch version is a pretty solid adaptation, it has it's share of flaws and most of those are are issues common with adapting any book to film. Lynch's film could have been better, but as book adaptations go I think it does a pretty good job. I don't particularly like the SyFy mini-series though, it has all the common flaws in the Lynch version and does it's own share of changing and adding new material.

I've seen the Jodorowsky's Dune documentary and I remain dumbfounded every time I see someone hold up Jodorowsky's ideas as culminating into the perfect Dune movie. Sure there's some interesting visuals, but Jodorowsky knowingly turns Herbert's story into a nearly empty shell in favor of the story he wants to tell. EG

I think the reason Dune has proven so difficult to adapt is because much of the story occurs inside the characters' heads. The book was written in omniscient viewpoint, so we always knew exactly what everyone in the room was thinking, who they were planning to betray and why; the tension grew from not knowing if anyone else would figure out what the reader had been told. Lynch took a stab at this by letting us hear some of the characters' inner monologue, but it was fragmented, and we ended up with a movie that faithfully presented much of the book's sequence of events, but we didn't know why people were doing what they were doing, or what it meant in the bigger picture. As someone who saw the movie first, finally reading the book was a case of, "Ahhhh, so that's what all that was about."