That’s fine by me, I’ve never read a sci-fi novel and don’t ever plan to. Not my thing.
But in terms of cinema, A New Hope and Empire are so far superior to Dune 1 & 2 that it’s not even fair to compare them, IMO. ...
Wow. ***Actually laughing here***
I don't know, it may not even be possible to make a statement about films worse than this one. With the context of my views there, stating you those two Star Wars films over these new Dune films may be facetious, hyperbolic out of some anger about the latter, or a personal “bold strategy” but there is wrong and there is what some people called, "Not Even Wrong." it prompts my response and the following attempt to show that your preference, even the comparison,is to me absurdly wrong, as in out of any realm that can make basic sense.
While we have agreed on a large number of films over many years now, it's always been clear you have a bias against what I take to be important, and valuable as art: science fiction films. That is fine, as I recognize I have biases, like pretty sharply against standard romantic films, finding them thousands-of-times-over repetitive, and usually not truthful about the way people actually behave. I also think we differ in that I strongly see film as a visual medium, and have high regard for complexity of the task of presentation. I do not think films should be shots of two people talking at each other--that is theater. Film must accomplish visual art, in delivering narrative. So I am going to deal with this by offering a video to show the Dune films are on a far higher level than anything in the Star Wars films. I offer this, and if you care (to watch and learn about great visuals) you care, and if you don't, you don't,
then we move on to narrative content. This is one example of dozens of what Villeneuve did in visual accomplishment, I don't think you can find in any film since Oppenheimer.
Narrative quality: In Star Wars stuff (I will use that collectively), you have an automatic good outcome because the good god (this is functionally what it is, even though thinly renamed as the “force”) is always going to win in the end over the bad god, the devil (the dark side of the force). This is magic, god(s) invocation to action, by its right name, is fantasy in which a set of people we root for are always going to win, because, and a set of people we hate are eventually always going to lose, because wrong god force is finally always inferior. This pablum appeals to what Kubrick called, with disdain, "a conception of an audience." A studio conception. But in Lucas's stuff the god force stuff is also random and completely nonsensical. Luke can lift a large space ship out of water with it, but can't just burst a tiny blood vessel in an enemy's brain which would drop him to the ground dead on the spot. In fact the god force is lots of fun to throw big heavy things at enemies. This kind of nonsense
is continuous, and a connected problem of bad writing is often instead of characters thinking a way out of a problem, the instant fix, get out jail card of the god force is always used. There are skills in the Dune world that are beyond our current understanding, but they
are skills, bred into humans and developed by humans beyond A.l. capacities, but they are skills, not god magic. Problems must be solved with minds, thinking and reasoning.
The Star Wars stuff is simplistic in part because it is derivitive. There is certainly material pilfered from samurai films, but also things stolen and trivialized and simplified from Herbert's Dune works. Those are far more face-palm inducing. The key though is as kids films for adults too, all the gravitas and meanings about the troubles of human instincts and power corruptions is dumbed down to the flimsiest melodrama, with no intent but to get sequential, repeated big applause from the audience. A million subsequent comic book films have traded on this form as a result, and they keep on coming. Dull Hollywood product like
Gladiator II, which appallingly and inexplicably, you liked, do the same. I cut off your influence part of the Star Wars stuff in quote, because it matters less (especially now), but yes, this is a big and sad influence.
Let's just get to the truth on the basic failure of your comparison. Lucas slapped his first project together as his
Buck Rogers type serial for the masses, but 25 years later and with a bigger budget. I don't dislike the first three
Star Wars films, as fantasy “kids movies” designed to please an audience. They are fine for that. But the fact they are huge in pop culture popularity, are loved, and mined financially to an unprecedented and incomparable degree
does not signify anything of real value to me. The fact that they have things like the little teddy bear ewoks who defeat storm troopers with laser weapons, and they have a Star Wars Christmas Special are other examples of what takes the measure of this. It is
terminally unserious material no matter how you evaluate it, from the early domination of white males, and through all the stuff, of humans (let's be clear), to the constant domination of human forms over other“humanoid” ones, to dismissal of A.I. life as inferior. These things define the works as not about the truth of the human condition and not about basic reality. It is not about the great ideas of science fiction, nor even the great ideas that can work in fantasy.
I don't think you detect what I find of value in science fiction, nor its increasing importance in allowing educated people to think through the rapid tech changes we face. This thinking through part is essential to quality; the father of science fiction, H.G. Wells did foresee things like tanks, hand carried phones, automatic doors, but he also saw changes science understanding would foster, on social fronts like women's emancipation. Science fiction at its best deals with ideas just exactly that big, routinely, as
A Clockwork Orange examines government controlling human behaviors,
1984, government control of what is truth, and all allowed thought, and with blazing pertinence to headlines today, what real artificial intelligence means morally to us at to it (a part of
2001: A Space Odyssey, and that specific part expanded later into the masterpiece
Ex Machina). The people who dislike or dismiss science fiction can be blind and deaf to all this, but in point of fact there is
not much more narrative fiction, regardless of genre, can ever possibly do in addressing important ideas. Ones that can only be brought up in realms like the future of our species and the conundrums and complexities of advancing technology (especially when our morality clearly does not seem to advance).
Good science fiction films of this kind are very rare. About 98% of science fiction films are garbage, and another 1% aren't science fiction films at all, but are
called science fiction films, a problem you have in my view with seeing Star Wars stuff as such. It is not.
But wait, there's more, that's bad. Your comparison of them with the Dune films is akin to comparing a supermarket romance novel to
War and Peace. You can like one more than the other but you can't call them the same level of seriousness or the same genre of fiction, and be taken seriously. Again, Star Wars is derivative of the Buck Rogers short serial movies, as hero melodramas, essentially to please kids. Works for adults too, as I said, I like them as kids stuff. That is a mostly unchanged template of what Lucas copied into seventies level special effects movies. There is death, but nothing carries
any emotional gravitas at all. When Luke sees his only family as burned corpses, all that happens is he tilts his head down a moment and the forgets it and asks to become a Jedi. When Princess Leia has the same non-reaction--not just to her family being killed, but her home planet being destroyed--shortly thereafter she is cracking jokes with Han Solo. The acting reflects this triviality mode, and is blunted and cardboard, partly because a lot of them as talents are not up to much more, but at bottom because the material is written as just as cardboard. The whole story is haphazard and duct taped together, as when in the first film Ben tells Luke Vader killed Luke's father, then that was lie when in thee next film we have the contraption that Vader is Luke's father. This is a dumbed down version of bloodline complexities taken from Dune (a sad tactic Star Wars stuff did with a lot of things from other higher quality sources as well).
Your saying the Star Wars stuff is better, is an opinion I find absurd, but more objectively it's just a category error, in attempted comparison to Villeneuve's Dune films; that people will compare them does not mean that people should. It's deeply absurd for the reasons above in contrast to what is in the Dune films. I am not going into that. Instead, just as an open door, I offer a video below to address ideas going on in Villeneuve's Dune films, and this is on a completely different level. It's up to your ability to consider some actual ideas that it looks like you completely missed. What you write suggested you did not understand anything in Dune Parts 1 and 2 about humanity. Again, watch this if you care about learning one aspect of what Dune is about, that matters to truths about the human condition. If you want to stay cut off from it because science fiction (or whatever) then don't watch:
No doubt confronting this as I lay it all out may strike you has overly dismissive or harsh towards your opinions, and that is not the intent. The fact that I took some time to write this is a reflection that I respect your opinions on films in general.
