Frezik
Celtic Anarchy
Anarchy Empire
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Posted - 2007.03.09 01:37:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Patch86
I read the original 6 books by Frank Herbert about a year ago. Very very good stuff. Never seen the movies or TV series before, though. I keep meaning to get round to reading the "prequels" by Brian Herbert and such, but haven't worked up to it yet.
They any good?
No. Frank Herbert himself was one of those writers who had one fantastic book and everything else is meh. He therefore gets eclipsed by more consistent SF writers, like Asimov and Clarke.
Brian Herbert has written nothing of note. Kevin J. Anderson is a total hack who's personally responsible for the dumber parts of the Star Wars book series and worked very hard to ruin the rest.
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Frezik
Celtic Anarchy
Anarchy Empire
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Posted - 2007.03.09 16:24:00 -
[2]
Originally by: Iesha Macabre
The film was OK, but doesn't do it justice. Though to be fair it's a lot of material to try and squeeze in. I didn't like the guy playing Paul/Maud'Dib much which surprised me given he was uber in Twin Peaks 
The thing with the Lynch movie is that there's just too much material to cover. They spent most of the movie covering events up to the Harkonnen attack, then realized that they still have two-thirds of the book to get through. So the most interesting parts are extremely rushed. Then they used "weirding modules" as a replacement for Maud'Dib teaching the Fremen Bene Gesserit fighting styles, which just didn't work at all.
To Lynch's credit, I think he had a solid vision of what a Dune movie should look like, but he couldn't do it given the limited time and early-1980's special effects technology.
The miniseries almost had enough time to do things properly (though an extra hour per show wouldn't have hurt). It was low budget, but 20 years of special effects development helped a lot. But it suffered from a lack of vision and bad casting.
Dune is such an unfathomably complex book that transferring it to a movie properly would take a combination of time, budget, and vision that is severely lacking in Hollywood today.
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