re: Watched the first Dune. What a snooze fest

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why is spice so essential to this civilization, that major factions will go to war to control it?

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It facilitates interstellar space travel. The Space navigators use it. It is pretty essential. It’s basically space oil.

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I knew that going into the movies, and yes this is correct.


The point I'm bringing up is this:

If you knew nothing going into these current movies, how much did they actually lay out, that the viewer would pick up?

Spice is important... well everyone is fighting over it, so it must be. I don't think they ever said why.

I don't think they mentioned anything about Mentats, so you don't understand the importance of those characters.

I don't think they explained the significance of Doctor Yueh being a Suk, and why his betrayal is shocking.

I don't think they explained the relevance of shields, and why lasers are a no-go.

It's world-building stuff, and they want to build out that world to make more movies. In my own opinion, those interested in these movies have either read the books, or have already seen the Lynch film.... so like a Batman movie, we don't need yet another origin/introduction. We already know, and these new ones look fantastic. You just move on to the action.

But if you come in completely cold, I can see it being confusing. I've laid out a lot of things that you'd probably wonder about.

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utside of Tigerdroppings, I don't think I've ever heard a person mention Lynch's Dune. I asked some people in our office if they had seen it around the time Part 1 was coming out and none of them had seen it. You never hear people talk about it and even on here I can't recall a thread on it prior to the new movies (obviously haven't seen every thread lol).

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It's somewhat age-related, I guess. What's the age of people at your office?

I've accepted that I'm getting old
I was in high school, then college in the 80's.

People my age, we ALL saw the Lynch film...
a) sci fi was big, as we were still riding the initial Star Wars wave.
b) David Lynch was big too. He was stylish, which brought in a good bit of female viewers who might not like sci fi, but would want to watch a Lynch film.

I accept it's a 40 year old movie, not necessarily on everyone's rotations anymore. But for a long time, it WAS... and that crowd didn't die, they just aged. So if you saw middle aged folks going to see Dune in the theaters, they almost certainly saw the Lynch version decades ago, and that's part of the reason they wanted to see these new ones.

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they did the shields and spice in part one.

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We got the shields as far as "you can't get shot, but you can get stabbed".
I don't think any movie has explained why you can't use a laser on a shield... and the new movie did have a couple scenes where lasers were key (chasing Duncan's ornithopter, and cutting through the door before Duncan's sacrifice).
*it might be trivial, but I think it does need to be explained. Otherwise, you're randomly flashing a weapons class that seemingly would be effective, and not explaining why it's not used a lot more.

Spice, we all know it's 'essential'. I really can't remember if they explain WHY.
It would take less than 30 second of exposition, and set the table for everything that comes.

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If you want in-depth world-building, read the book.

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Sounds all fine and well, but they're talking about building a film franchise. If you want it to be more than casual action, you're going to need to world-build.
And maybe I want more information and immersion into the world, before I proclaim a film to be a masterpiece.