The old Dune is far better than the new Dune in telling story

Anything will do these days to attract audiences back to the big screen, but the trend to remake great movies with rewritten and poorer storyline's won't do. Create a new movie. Don't ruin a great one

By Ray Hanania

Free/Entertainment/Saturday March 2, 2024

I hate this trend where people in Hollywood believe that they can take a great classic movie and make it better simply because the computer technology allows them to generate complex images and scenarios.

I know that a picture is worth a thousand words. But sometimes, those thousand words are jumbled and incoherent.

Too often, some wealthy producer or movie company thinks that they can make money simply by taking an older established movie and remaking it, using Computer Generated Images (CGI).

What they often fail to do is improve the script, because oftentimes the scripts and story already told are phenomenal and compelling. You can change stories but you can't always make them better. A good story should never be remade and rescripted. It usually doesn't work.

I know many people only care about the visuals. They don't care about the storyline. And there are even people who never appreciated the original movies and great stories they told because they have become used to high-tech CGI to dominate their limited imaginations.

For me, though, if a story is great, the images around them are only secondary. And if you have to gin up the images, then the story apparently hasn't been told well.

Dune, produced in 1984 starring Kyle MacLachlan as Dynasty leader Duke Paul Atreides, is a great movie that told a tight and compelling fictional tale about rival dynasties on different planets in a universe which can be quickly traveled by "folding space." It is based on the novel written in 1965 by Frank Herbert.

The film included all of the necessary ingredients including a dark sinister adversary, the evil Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, played by Kenneth McMillan.

The Harkonnens thrived on human blood and viewed the Atreides as their rivals.

The Atreides dynasty is destroyed in a conspiracy orchestrated by the evil Harkonnens and the equally sinister Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, played by Jose Ferrer.

A standard tale of goodness undermined by evil, betrayed by friends resulting in a survivor, in this case the Duke's son, MacLachlan, who rises through the oppression and hate to not only restore his dynasty but to free the oppressed Fremon who oversee the production of Spice Melange which fuels interstellar travel on their planet Arrakis.

The Fremen, a humble desert people, live in the dunes which filled with giant "worms" that attack based on sound and swim in the sand like water.

It even involved a religious woman's cult with mind powers. Dune, the original, has all the makings of a compelling science fiction inter planetary story that fueled the imagination.

It's great Science Fiction imagery, producer by Dino de Laurentiis. That made it a phenomenal movie when it was produced in the dawn of the computer age and movies had to rely on great stories and scripts, not expensive and cheap imagery.

The problem with CGI is that it replaces the exercise of individual imagination. A good story propels the imagination to great exciting heights. Imagination is endless and can be amazing. But when you gin up the imagery with fake computer generated backgrounds and scenarios, the imagination is numbed, especially when a great story is rewritten into ashes. You know what the magnificent building (story) looked like before it was burned to the ground in a rebuilt flimsy tale.

It's just not the same.

And that is the problem with the new Dune, Part One released in 2021 and Part Two released this week (2024).

The new Dune is based on the rewritten story ginned up with CGI. The CGI is phenomenal but it draws away from the story line weakened by rewrites and changes.

They drag it out to make greater profits. Greed is the driving force of failure, oftentimes, and produces offspring that are imagination disabled.

And the new Dune is making money because the quality and variety of movies today is so paltry that anything will drive big screen movie sales these days.

I love going to the movies even when the movie isn't so great just because there are not that many great films out and you yearn and hope for something to break that ugly failed run.

The storyline of the two-part new Dune film, which clearly sets the stage for a 3rd film, is a distortion of the original. Changed just enough to lose audience imagination. It's filled with great CGI. But with if the imagery and CGI are so great, why do you need actors and strong dialogue or storylines?

Dune 2021/2024 is disappointing. Although it adds some details from the novel that were not clearly explained in the first movie -- such as that Paul's mother had the child of the Harkonnen tyrant and Paul is a cousin of the evil dynasty.

The actors in the original Dune are great. Sting played the son of the evil Harkonnen leader, Feyd-Raitha Harkonnen. It included Patrick Stewart, Brad Dourif, Dean Stockwell, Virginia Madsen, Jose Ferrer, Linda Hunt and Max von Sydow.

Several attempts were made to produce the original film a decade earlier including by Ridley Scott, the great SciFi producer and director of the Alien series, but those efforts failed. The original film became a cult classic, meaning it didn't win over the public to produce the profits that were anticipated, although it grew into popularity over the years. The film barely covered its budget.

Yet does money and profit drive a movie's success?

The French Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve was brought in to create the new Dune Part One and Part Two. He made "Sicario" and "Blade Runner 2049". I liked Sicario and its sequel.

Writing and a great story line are the key to success. And if you can create a movie with a great storyline, it is enjoyable.

Imagine if they try to remake It's a Wonderful Life. That would be sacrilegious.

The new Dune Part One and Part Two is worse.

Go see the two to waste away an afternoon and enjoy the big screen, but don't think that it is a better film than the original. It's not.