Let´s talk about Dune...

I think two scenes annoyed me most in all the Herbert saga: that Miles Teg thing, and when Leto was said to be able to lift very heavy things at the end of Children of Dune (my memory may fail me here).

Usually, yes the Atreides line, coming mostly from BGs' manipulations over the centuries, produced remarkable individuals, with incredible abilities. It is in my opinions that these abilities were mostly mental ones, about intelligence, wisdom, seeing fat into possibilities in the future as well as into the past, etc...

The two scenes above remind me too well how Paul was treated in the movie: it ended with him actually commanding rain on the desert planet.

Most of the times, Herbert did keep his characters as mostly and simply humans after all, yes with enhanced abilities, but most of the time it was outside of the "Steve Austin" kind.

And I loved him for it.

Just my two cents.
Just read Heretics and ChapterHouse only once though, and maybe if I read again it wouldn't be that weird to me.

Well to me, the bad thing aboug Heretics is that the end feels like it suffers from massive editing. At the end, Miles Teg is plotting to steal a No-Ship and escape from GAmmu. Chaper ends. New chapter starts and Miles Teg is flying a No-Ship over Rakis. He picks up Odrade and Sheana in the middle of the desert (how or why they are there you don't know, last time you saw them they were getting shot at by the Honored Matres).
Teg and his men get out of the ship and put Odrade in, tell her to fly to safety and they are going to stay here and defend Rakis. Chapter Ends. new Chapter starts and Odrade is lamenting the death of Miles Teg! Book ends. It gets really stupid. No payoff at ALL.

From the pictures on the web site it doesn't look promising. Paul looks like a complete WEIRDO, and Duncan Idaho, my favorite character in the books, looks like a street bum. I always imagined him as a trim and proper Atreides officer in a military uniform, not with long hair and stubble!

there's a mysterious force thats chasing the honored matres which brought them to a confrontation with the bene gesserit. Kralizek is leto 2's way of defeating this mysterious force.

is kralizek the same as the golden path?

anyone with an idea what the mysterious force might be?

i heard it will be revealed in dune7

paul isn't a product of the bg simply because lady jessica was ordered to have a daughter. she disobeyed.

paul used a special type of voice to kill feyd which he only has because he's the kh. he didn't use the secret word feyd got distracted.

What is this Kralizek that you are talking about? I just finished reading the entire series and I don't remember hearing that ever mentioned.

Leto's Golden Path's ulimate purpose was to scatter humanity throughout the universe so that they could never be totally destroyed. It succeeded as after his death there was a "scattering".

The force that drove the Honored Matre's out of the scattering is revealed in the last page of the last book of the dune series.... but is not made clear. Evidentally they are some sort of super powerful Face Dancers, at least that is what I get from it. Duncan Idaho has been seeing two of them in his visions for awhile, but doesn't understand what they are. Apparently the Face Dancers became independent from their masters and developed some kind of super abilities.... the way the last dune book ends it seems like Hebert intended another book to explain this.

The Dune miniseries starts Sunday night....

Well, I have watched and taped the miniseries, and was disappointed. But then with a book that complicated as a background I rather expected that. There were some improvements in the script/dialogue
over the movie and the sandworms were great, but the casting was off, the acting was not so good as in the movie, and the whole thing screamed "cheesy low budget television!" even though the sets were mostly good. I even wanted to get up and reach thru the screen and strangle Alia (who we are supposed to be scared of, after all) by the end. And they hamstrung the Bene Gesserit, as well. These are a powerful group of women, supposedly, and they kept rolling over to get their tummies scratched. Even Mohaim had no gumption, IMHO. Never mind that Sting made a far better Feyd-Rautha.
Now, for some praise: I liked this Dr. Kynes rather better, the costumes were pretty good, sets were good also, and the plot much more understandable. The Guild Navigator was great, and the scene of space being folded was an enormous improvement. No backlit blobs throwing off globs of light and moving aimlessly about the screen here. I wish we could take the good stuff from the movie and the miniseries and put 'em together. I'd like that.

I couldn't sit through it. It was on the mediocre side, plus it kept breaking for commercials every 3 seconds.

Ok, just watched a 6 hour video, the miniseries taped by a friend of mine on the canadian premiere of the miniseries (space channel or something)...


Well, i have to agree that the BeneG were again underdevelopped...
The fact that they planted the Mahdi legend into the Fremen was mentionned, but imho not enough underlined.
Ramallo(sp?) was great though!

I'm pleased though to see that Paul wasn't made totally into a super-god at the end, and that he didn't make rain come down (although at some point there's a scene were he's on a statue and water comes flowing through its hands... I wished then that this scene would end with a shot at Lady J opening some kind of gate to let the water through... But no...)

One constant: Lady J was well portrayed both in the movie and the mini-series.

The CGI were at times oh-so-bad! Very basic and amateurish. E.g. when a ship landed on the sand... And the mouse...!

And wasn't Irulan given much more importance than in the book?
Well, I kind of liked that...


That's all i have for now... maybe more later...

Ummm, I think they combined Irulan with Margot Fenring for the miniseries, and that's where she got all that extra time. I'm sorry, but the whole thing just seemed cheaply done to me. JMHO.

Yes the books are more rich in description but I thought some of the special effects well done. After all even Jurassic Park didn't cope with Paul's world.

I asked a Muslim who'd read Dune what he thought of it. He shrugged, saying that the Fremen were a very odd people.... he can't think of anyone he knows who thinks or feels like them.

He said that the Fremen weren't very convincing at all. And also that their pseudo-Arabic was simply atrocious. No desert Arab in his right mind would greet you saying "Subah al Nar" which means literally "Hellish Morning!!" The desert is hot enough without adding hellish mornings to it.

A more likely greeting would involve "God give you long life" or "peace" or "water and shade" (like the Aiel).



Now he's worried, wondering "Is that really how those folks see us? Oh boy."

[afro-elf]

Don't forget that the Dune series is 50,000 years in the future and that the Fremen were ZENSUNNI.( Buddhist Islamic sects of today merged together) Which would be an afront to present day Arab/Muslim.

So the Fremen are DISTANT descendants of the Muslims today.



Gwaihir

In the books it mentions Duncan shaggy black hair and rougish looks.

I did not like the movie.

By English co-workers here in the desert couldn't sit through the mini series and they have the satellite so I was SOL. The little that I did see I was NOT impressed.

BUT the worms looked cool in both.

House Atriedeis I throroughly enjoyed. House Harkonen fizzled out for me. Very trite.

But Duncan has always been my favorite character.

[Alethes]

Originally posted by Sith Acolyte
What is up with the incessant use of Duncan Idaho? I mean, the guy's hardly in the First Book before he gets run through by Sardaukar, and yet he's the character that constantly recurs, book after book, ghola after ghola.
It gets a little tedious...

I also am getting a little sick of Duncan Idaho. I didn't mind the Duncan Idaho in the second and third books, but by the fourth book he had almost no personality and was rather dull.

I read the first 3 Dune books and loved them -- they're some of my favorite books--but then I read God Emperor of Dune and had to force myself to finish the whole thing. It was quite boring. I am halfway through Heretics of Dune and don't know if I will finish it -- it's somehow more depressing than the first three books; I don't really know why. Someday, I want to finish the series, but I really don't want to have to read Heretics of Dune in order to do that.

[afro-elf]

I like Duncan BUT the whole series sort of drug on and on. The pleasure of reading them was not the same as earlier ones. I sort of felt obligated to finish the whole thing.


HOWEVER, I did like the FIRST prequeal, House Atredies.

[Arathorn]

I didn't know there was a thread on Frank Herbert. Yay!

I'm just starting on Messiah, though; but I got all the 6 books. I got sidelined last december when FOTR came out and almost forgot about Dune.

I have faint memories of the movie which I didn't understand. I did get a DVD copy of the mini-series, though; as well as the game from Westwood Studios.

[BeardofPants]

I just finished reading them a couple of months ago. I loved the whole series so much, that it only took me about 3-4 months to read the whole thing! I have just read this thread (there is justice - a dune thread! ), and quite a few people have mentioned that they didn't think heretics, or chapterhouse were up to his previous works. This is strange to me, because I really loved both of these two books. For me, my order of favourites would be:

1) Dune.
2) God Emperor of Dune.
3) Chapterhouse.
4) Heretics.
5) Children of Dune.
6) Messiah.

Messiah, for me feels tacked on, and expanded beyond a simple story, dragged out, if you will.
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Regarding Duncan Idaho, I don't have a problem with him, at all. He is a tragic character, who has spent all his lives paying back (and paying back), again, and again, his debt to the house of Atreides. In chapterhouse, it is suggested that the BG are fearing that he is the Tleilexu version of the Kwisatcz Haderach. We never really find out whether or not this is true, because unfortunately, Frank died before writing his 7th book. But I digress, in chapterhouse, or heretics, I can't remember, it was hinted that the Tleilexu masters were deliberately breeding the Duncan Idaho for a reason. And there was also the nullentropy tube that Scytale had. Some of those genetic materials would have been quite hard to come by. What if, the Dune scattering, (and series) was not the first cycle in the scattering? What if, it was just another step in the Golden Path, and that Leto didn't forsee it, he saw it in the past? This would explain why the Duncan gholas were so crucial in the breeding program. Leto must have seen (either in the past, or the future), the necessary genepool needed for that no ship.

Also, I don't have a problem with Teg's abilities either. He is the product of millenia of breeding. He is yet another 'key' in the no ship, leading to the next "Dune" cycle.

I'm guessing that the combination of Miles Teg, Duncan, and possibly the offspring of Murbella & Duncan breeding with Miles Teg (to produce a super human mentat, with the abiility of speed, and Honoured Matre prana bindu), Scytale with his tube, were the exact ingredients needed to overthrow the Face Dancers who had become as gods (and were using biological warfare on the honoured matres). And on the other end of the spectrum, the BG and the Honoured Matres were interbreeeding, etc taking on each others skills, (sexual, immunity etc), to combine, to become more powerful than the fish speakers of the Sianoq.

These all seem to be very important parts of the puzzle that may well have explained exactly what Leto's Golden Path really meant, in the 7th book.

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I don't know if I'll read the prequels. I've read too many complaints about them. I'd much rather try and track down the Dune Encyclopaedia that is now out of print.

[TwirlingString]

Duncan does sort of get annoying after a while. I prefer the prequels and the first 2 of the origional series.

[bropous]

I guess I'm one of those folks who actually like Duncan.

When he fells to the Sardaukar on Arrakis the first time, I cried. Herbert had really made the connection between Paul and Duncan LIVE. Honestly, each time Paul was reunited with loyal members of his father's entourage, I also wept, because the joy of reunion was so well-related by Herbert.

It tore at me, over the series, to see Leto II so damn callous towards not only Duncan and his loyalties to House Atreides, but also at the total lack of care he had for the fates of the "common people," whose lives were arguably not even effected by the assumption of House Atreides to the Throne. Maybe a thread discussing Paul and Leto II as rulers would be a good idea.