i saw dune

[twoeleven]

and it was great! i plunked down a pile of money to see it in IMAX, and it was certainly worth it. villeneuva really grasps the scale of things in dune, and IMAX made them look suitably awe-inspiring.

as a simple measure of how much i liked the movie, i bought some fizzy sugar water, as it came with a straw, so i could drink it without taking my mask off. it wasn't until the movie was almost over that i realized i hadn't drunk any.


i thought david lynch's previous adaptation did a couple of things better:

* his blocky, bottle-brown slow shields look more like an unknown technology working on unknown principles, and they allowed showing some useful things, like fast-moving knives getting hung up in them. villeneuve's looked like 1980s dr. who low-budge SF/X. bleh.

* he also had a better vision for paul's precience, which was also truer to the book. paul didn't just see the future, his visions were like somebody moving on rolling to rugged terrain, so he couldn't see "over" hills representing major events, and would sometimes find himself in canyons where he couldn't see anything except what was right in front of him.

but villeneuva had some great attention to detail -- or just got it right -- with respect to the sequence of the dracothopter in the sandstorm. (it's hard to call it an ornithopter, since it flies like a dragonfly, not a bird.)

regardless of why paul stops trying to fight the storm, that's pretty much real advice for light aircraft caught in powerful storms: pull the power to idle, trim the plane to hold a reasonable airspeed, and let the storm do the driving. light planes can't overpower winds and updrafts, and trying to is a good way to break the plane.

likewise, i was very pleased that paul flew his "plane" all the way to the ground as it was shedding parts. that is verbatim advice for off-field landings: keep driving the plane, controlling it as necessary, to get the best landing possible.

i've never tried the litany against fear, but the one time i got close to having to ditch a plane in a swamp, flying it all the way down kept me coherent and functioning, and ultimately got us out of a bad situation.

Comments

[ivy]

I loved the visuals, I thought that was a strength of the production. I thought Jessica was too wimpy (who lets their 16 year old kid be in charge of desert survival? Aren't you a member of an order of consummately competent people?) -- the only time I saw the Jessica I recognized was the kidnapping scene. I liked their casting for Leto and Gurney, I thought their Duncan was too young and didn't give as much consideration to strategy as I would have expected. The Baron flying scene has never gone well in pretty much any adaptation that I've seen.