Dune

“My desert. My Arrakis. My Dune.” I really regret not going to the theatre to watch this more often. Visually, there’s nothing to complain about. Dune heavily relies on the score and the visuals for the world building and creates an atmosphere I was immediately sucked into the first time around. The Bene Gesserit is a part I feel was surprisingly well explained. In the gom jabbar scene, the part were Jessica is outside in order to stop anyone from coming in, isn’t shown in the book from her perspective and it’s great to show that no matter what, the sisterhood comes first and her love-hate relationship with it, which is very important in further books. However, the traitor part should have been more focused on. A big part of the story focuses on the characters knowing there is a traitor amongst them from the beginning and trying to figure out who it is. Almost everyone suspecting it is Jessica at some point does play a significant role later on and I wonder how they will cover that in part two. Also, how Yueh’s character was treated throughout the entire movie: having barely any screen time and his justification for being the traitor being just thrown at you with him being murdered two minutes later. I feel like the translation from his character to the screen didn’t work that well, because of much of the book being inner monologue and Yueh’s character not being able to reveal much about his intentions through interactions with other characters. He betrays Leto because he thinks he is doomed either way and needs to get closure about his wife, whether she is alive or not. This man was literally driven to insanity by the Harkonnens to break his Imperial Conditioning, which was huge itself because it’s the first time the Conditioning has been known to fail, for his storyline in the film to be “I want to see my wife, let’s betray the Atreides”. Nevertheless, I think most of the things I dislike about this would’ve been solved with a larger runtime and most of the things I missed (such as more Fremen and Harkonnen) will be covered in part two, which I am so excited about. It’s true that the more you compare it to the books, the more issues you have with it, but I think if I hadn’t read any of them and watched Dune for the first time, I would’ve done it then and that’s what matters to me.