Dune (2020)

Blitz said:

Really happy that the BR2049 fiasco, or "under performance" relative to budget doesn't seem to have hurt his funding.

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It wasn't really a fiasco, like a 13th Warrior / Justice League -$100m box office bomb, it's just that the film was poorly marketed, has a 2h50 length and didn't appeal to a lot of people. Blade Runner fans didn't really care about it at all (they're still debating about which Scott version is the genuine one) and it wasn't action-scifi enough for the new audience to get a grasp on. We're talking about a 35 years old film, to most people it's a "dad movie".

2049 wasn't a good operation for both Warner Bros and Sony because they wanted the film to build upon the Blade Runner universe, maybe starting a new trend, where Villeneuve intention wasn't really about making anything else than a nice movie. I'm a huge Blade Runner / Ridley Scott fan and I loved Villeneuve's. I also completely understand why people wouldn't care about it nowadays, Ridley Scott is now a shadow of himself and there's so much done about Philip K dick works the demand isn't there anymore.

Yeah I don't know anyone that was a big fan of Bladerunner not liking the new one. If you like the genre, it's hard to imagine not liking it.

Furry said:

I hate the original blade runner and thought the new one was actually and surprisingly good.

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what a thing to say the day after rutger hauer died

spronk said:

what a thing to say the day after rutger hauer died

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That is an amazing gif.

The original Blade Runner will always have a place in my best 30 of all time. The ambience, sound track and story were incredible. I feel it actually has held up pretty well for its time. Very few movies truly create an atmosphere that a person watching can actually feel. The movie was slow and detailed in its direction. This kind of directing rarely exists now. 2049 was an excellent sequel that attempted to mimic that form of directing, and succeeded. Villeneuve's 2049 is the reason I am excited for Dune. I am hoping that the same attention to detail is placed into Dune as was 2049.

Dune is one of the few that I will go to the theater to watch.

Szlia said:

Hot take: the weirding modules are more interesting and sound (pun!) a lot less stupid than the weirding way.

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The weirding way was done well already in film, and it was spectacular.


All the weirding way is, is the idea that the mastery of the rules any given environment/system allow someone to cheat the system some. That's why it was in part reliant on prescience/spice. They were essentially trying to communicate what the Matrix did, that the mind can alter some rules if you know enough about them. "Stop trying to hit me and hit me" is taken right from the kind of philosophy the books pushed with "My mind affects my reality"...Or "There is no spoon" (There is only my perception of the spoon. Once someone realizes that, they can affect both their own and their opponent's reality, which is why "the voice" and other tricks were part of it)

Cynical said:

When broken down simply like that, yeah it sounds like superspeed kung fu or something. In the book however it was more than that, although I admit I forget Herbert added a lot more to the Bene Gesserit lore in later books, so I tend to get it all mixed up.

I could have sworn I read years ago that was part of the reason why Lynch didn't go with the book. It seemed too much like kung fu type stuff, and the market was oversaturated with martial arts shit at the time.

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I mean in the end, weirding is just going to look be like super speed Kung Fu. Because, from how I understood it, the goal was to use the voice and a limited prescience to limit other's perception while enhancing your own. So to everyone else, you appeared to be flashing from one place to another, perfectly predicting movement.

As said above, I always imagined Weirding looking like the first Matrix film. Very precise "kung fu" with near super human strength that was dotted with bursts of super speed where the practitioner used the "weirding" aspect to fuck with his opponent and seemingly teleport.

Furry said:

I'll say it again. Original blade runner sucked.

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I agree. Blade Runner is one of the most overrated movies of all time.

Coincidentally watched Blade Runner and 2049 before Hauer died. Both are fresh on my mind. Don't recall the first time I saw Blade Runner, I was too little. All I remember is it was weird, much weirder than Dune to me, and I didn't like it. The second take as a teen was essentially: flat, boring, don't get it. What's the big fuckin' deal.

Somewhere soon after that I started picking up the details. Blade Runner 1, somewhat opposed to Star Wars, is one of the reasons I learned that rewatchability/re-examination is one of the most important aspects to storytelling. Dune for instance got better the more I saw it. Star Wars always remained the same. Conan the Barbarian was fucked up and violent once but Conan the Destroyer was cool when I was four. The Barbarian got better as I aged while Destroyer turned into shit.

Blade Runner is a movie that rewards intelligence and does not hold your hand. You can break down Blade Runner's faults and awesomeness in three ways.

1. Visual aesthetics. Grime, noir, dreariness. Indisputably influential since its release, specifically but not limited to the sci fi genre. You don't get Altered Carbon, Matrix, AI nor a thousand others without Philip K. DIck/Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

2. 80s cheesiness. You can chalk up most but not all subpar shit in the movie to filmmaking techniques and technologies that were standard practice at the time but have since either fallen out of favor or aged quickly and poorly and look shitty to a modern eye. Its editing is at times abrupt and lacks fluidity. Its music is another example; the music is genuinely good but state of the art synthesizers from back then sound primitive today. Some things age well or better over time, some don't. It's easy.

Another good example is the replicant running through glass after Deckard shoots her. Clearly a stunt double with one of the worst wigs of all time. Typical 80s shit.

3. The story is too simplistic. Bad guys want to escape, good guys hunt them down, by the end the bad guys aren't so bad, the good guys might be the bad ones. What does it mean to be human? A trope today, maybe not when Blade Runner was released. The subtext is too vague, not explored enough. Personally not a fan of allegory but a fan of applicability, yet that is what gives Blade Runner its tone and style. It is one its greatest qualities. The movie is rife with surrealism, hard sci fi and philosophical themes, cold details under the surface, and the more you watch it the more you get it. Daryl Hannah acting like a doll, Roy Batty killing god, misquoting William Blake, good shit about C beams and Tannhauser Gates. Not bad.

2049 extends the same themes and is arguably better in every way. It is visually more advanced, the story is bigger and much wider (reproduction but also Joi), measured throughout till the mythological action of killing Luv in the shadow of the Sea Wall and the ocean waves in the night.