re: Watched the first Dune. What a snooze fest

They answer these questions. Heck, spice is answered in the first 2 minutes of the film.

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The second one was worse. It's also a very tired story.

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Lol. What?

90 and 95% audience scores disagree.

like saying harry potter is slow and dull because they could have just started with grown harry and had the fight at the end of one movie.

LOTR is slow and dull, they could have just used eagles.

John wick is slow and dull. Why not just show his wife and dog dying at the beginning and send him to the boss of bosses.

Knowing what was coming I enjoyed it but I can see what you mean if I try to imagine what a casual sidewalk movie watcher would think.

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For that matter, they show lasers cutting through things like butter. Why aren't lasers used more frequently, and instead you see a lot of bladed combat? This also is left out. Don't look the answers up, give me your answers and reasoning. Heck, I will add this: why is spice so essential to this civilization, that major factions will go to war to control it? Do you think it's a drug, and the culture is so decadent that everyone wants to trip out.... or is there more to it?

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Are you serious with this?

Hopefully they don’t make anymore, s**t gets even weirder after the first book.

I love both movies but the lack of explanation for why spice is super important is legit.

Also I’m just pissed there wasn’t more guild navigators scenes

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For that matter, they show lasers cutting through things like butter. Why aren't lasers used more frequently, and instead you see a lot of bladed combat? This also is left out. Don't look the answers up, give me your answers and reasoning. Heck, I will add this: why is spice so essential to this civilization, that major factions will go to war to control it? Do you think it's a drug, and the culture is so decadent that everyone wants to trip out.... or is there more to it?

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Are you serious with this?

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Absolutely serious. Remember, I was responding to someone who hadn't read the books, who said this was the perfect adaptation.

The stuff I asked is relevant, essential to the universe they are building, and they plan to make more movies. It would be nice to actually set that universe's rules up, so you understand what and why things are happening.

This is a very advanced civilization (future humanity). They had computers, but had fought a war for survival against AI (think Terminator, but more advanced). Humans won, and they have completely banned computers of any sort. No google, no navigation, no engineering and design, no spreadsheets, no smartphones etc. All banned and you have to do it yourself.
You would be stuck basically on 1 planet, because even the calculations to go interplanetary would be too much for just a man to do it on the fly.

Spice is the fix... it is mind-altering and enhancing. Those two guys I mentioned, Hawat (Atreides) and De Vries (Harkonnens) are Mentats. They take spice regularly and have become basically human computers. Every House employs a Mentat, to do computer stuff. Remember Duke Leto asks Hawat something early on, he blinks and spits out numbers in reply? That's his purpose, to crunch the numbers and do other computational stuff.
Spice in heavier doses mutates the Pilots, so they are able to do the interstellar travel. They are independent of the Houses, and make a huge profit running that angle, as they are the only ones who can do it.

Thus, without spice, the entire civilization collapses. You probably couldn't even balance your budget without a ton of work, much less handle multi-planet governments or interstellar travel. He who controls the spice, controls the universe.

Re the lasers- this civilization has long had that, but they developed shield technology. Shields and lasers don't mix, you get an explosion of random, undetermined size, up to and exceeding a thermonuclear explosion. Wouldn't do for a small skirmish or raid, trying to take territory, if you zap a guy with a shield on (and lots have them), and you nuke yourself and the city you are trying to take. So, no lasers. The shields block any kinetic energy, so you could shoot them with a gatling gun and it wouldn't do shite. So guns are used, but against shielded individuals they are useless.
If the shields block ALL moving matter, you suffocate in minutes, because air cant get in. That would be counterproductive, so they're tuned to allow slow moving objects through...
and so we have blades. Not projectiles or fast swings, that gets blocked. A slow, steady stab gets through. So you train to fight that way.
The drug darts they were shot with, didn't power their way through the shields to get the Duke. Those darts hit the shield and slowed down, and thus were able to go through and hit him. Bullets would have bounced off.

That's also the reason the bombs floated down to the docked ships, instead of being hit with lasers or missiles, gunfire etc.

This is stuff that makes Dune what it is, the obsession for spice, the knife play, etc.

I knew this, and I thought the new movies are great. But I knew that going in, and it didn't explain much of anything along those lines.

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I knew this, and I thought the new movies are great. But I knew that going in, and it didn't explain much of anything along those lines.

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I think this is the case with any adaptation of material that has an expansive world. LOTR, Harry Potter already mentioned.

I thought Dune 1 built a succinct version of the world, and Dune 2 was very meta about how that world was built and the consequences of how it was built. It was a different emphasis than the source material and I liked it.

I'm convinced you and biglego just don't like movies in general.