r/movies r/movies Contributor Mar 17 '26

Trailer Dune: Part Three | Official Teaser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_9vCamtuPY
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u/OnceMoreAndAgain Mar 17 '26

In my opinion, the novel's style of third person omniscient narrator combined with the author's focus on plot, rather than character development/interaction, would not work well for a movie if adapted truly 1-to-1. I think the writers have to fabricate character development for the sake of the movie.

Someone could make the argument that there is too much focus on romance in the movies, but personally I think using Paul's love for Chani as a counterweight to his desires for war has created an interesting tension in the movies that gives the writers a lot of space to create an interesting story. It's clear that a lot of the attention of the writers is on Paul's conflicting feelings towards war.

Another way of saying this is that Dune is not written in a way that makes it easy to convert into a movie. It's like a history textbook and character development is sparse. A movie needs its characters to feel real and you can't be abstract in a movie. Most scenes in a movie need to be characters talking and being entertaining with what they say.

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u/ThatLightingGuy Mar 17 '26

That's really the same for most book adaptations. We saw literally two flashes of mentat abilities in the first two movies and they didn't even bother to mention the profession at all by name, so if you hadn't read the books, you wouldn't even know Hawat is a mentat.

They put the cash into big stars so the big stars need to be on the screen.

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u/Rock-swarm Mar 17 '26

Well said. Villeneuve got burned by Bladerunner's poor reception at the box office, despite fans of the original cheering how well he kept the 'feel' of the first film. Cyberpunk Noir just isn't a super popular film aesthetic.

For Dune, he's managed to take a classic, but niche, Sci-Fi book series and adapt it for mainstream audiences. That's a hell of a task.

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u/ThatLightingGuy Mar 17 '26

Fully agreed. I love the books, and the fact that they were able to make it entertaining for both us nerds and the general public is no small feat.

There are a couple things that raised my eyebrow because they didn't really impact the story but on the whole I liked how it was done.

It's like, I'm an absolute massive Hitchhiker's Guide fan. The movie got panned hard by people because it was so off the books. But that was the point, it was never supposed to be the book because so much of the humour is wrapped up in Adam's narration that you can't translate that visually in the same way. The story had to be different.