re: Having a hard time getting into Dune

quote:

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I’ll try to lay out the universe a bit to give some perspective.

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You have a good, informative post that is long.

Most people going to see "a movie" don't want a homework session assigned to understand said movie, they want to go, experience the film, and then leave (go home, go eat, etc), and then maybe process it a bit.

If you come into the new Dune movies cold, without knowing what's going on, you will miss 90% of what you laid out in the post. You don't, for example, understand what a gigantic and unthinkable betrayal it is for the doctor to turn on Duke Leto.
If you DO know this, it's a powerful moment. If you DON'T, it's like "ok, Doc wants to save his wife, understandable".
You also won't get any info on the Mentats, why they are important, etc.
There's a lot of significant things that are just casually shown, and you need a clue to know when something is important.

That's the hole in these movies. It's covered enough in the old movie that you can watch that, and then watch these and 'transfer' the knowledge and plot twists. And obviously if you read the books, I'm guessing you can follow along.

In a way, it's a very good and refreshing approach. It makes "remakes" relevant, because you can remake a movie to have it look so much better, and ease back on the "story-telling" part. Because you KNOW the story, you're getting an upgraded immersion into the overall world, and you 'see' the story instead of being told or reading it. It can be subtle, because you already know it... so they can focus on making it more real.