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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

It was before I was scheduled to have my wisdom teeth extracted, when my dad suggested I "should prepare by staying up late and getting some good books to read because afterwards all I'll want to do is sleep or read." I stopped by the bookstore and looking around came upon Dune. It had a couple sequels and seemed to be well recommended, so I bought all three. It was the weekend with the surgery scheduled for Monday. I made the mistake of reading the dust cover and before I knew it, had finished reading the first book before having the operation!

With all the stories on the COVID-19 virus, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the first half of Dune is being newly brought to the screen. Vanity Fair presents an exclusive first glimpse into its actors, history, and production. Though the film is currently scheduled for release on December 18, 2020 I thought others might like a little distraction, as well. If so, read on!

Necessarily, there will be spoilers. So, if by chance you're unfamiliar with the story, consider yourself warned and stop here.

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Wikipedia provides this background on the story: [wikipedia.org]

Dune is a 1965 science fiction novel by American author Frank Herbert, originally published as two separate serials in Analog magazine. It tied with Roger Zelazny's This Immortal for the Hugo Award in 1966, and it won the inaugural Nebula Award for Best Novel. It is the first installment of the Dune saga, and in 2003 was cited as the world's best-selling science fiction novel.

[...] Herbert wrote five sequels: Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune. The first novel also inspired a 1984 film adaptation by David Lynch, the 2000 Sci-Fi Channel miniseries Frank Herbert's Dune and its 2003 sequel Frank Herbert's Children of Dune (which combines the events of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune), a series of computer games, a board game, songs, and a series of followups, including prequels and sequels, that were co-written by Kevin J. Anderson and the author's son, Brian Herbert, starting in 1999.[8] A new film adaptation directed by Denis Villeneuve is scheduled to be released on December 18, 2020.

Since 2009, the names of planets from the Dune novels have been adopted for the real-life nomenclature of plains and other features on Saturn's moon Titan.

Vanity Fair has the first peak on what is to come. Behold Dune: A New Look at Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, and More [vanityfair.com], complete with some gorgeous set photos:

Timothée Chalamet remembers the darkness. It was the summer of 2019, and the cast and crew of Dune had ventured deep into the sandstone and granite canyons of southern Jordan, leaving in the middle of the night so they could catch the dawn on camera. The light spilling over the chasms gave the landscape an otherworldly feel. It was what they had come for.

“It was really surreal,” says Chalamet. “There are these Goliath landscapes, which you may imagine existing on planets in our universe, but not on Earth.”

They weren’t on Earth anymore, anyway. They were on a deadly, dust-dry battleground planet called Arrakis. In Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 sci-fi novel, Arrakis is the only known location of the galaxy’s most vital resource, the mind-altering, time-and-space-warping “spice.” In the new film adaptation, directed by Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, Chalamet stars as the young royal Paul Atreides, the proverbial stranger in a very strange land, who’s fighting to protect this hostile new home even as it threatens to destroy him. Humans are the aliens on Arrakis. The dominant species on that world are immense, voracious sandworms that burrow through the barren drifts like subterranean dragons.

For the infinite seas of sand that give the story its title, the production moved to remote regions outside Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, where the temperatures rivaled the fiction in Herbert’s story. “I remember going out of my room at 2 a.m., and it being probably 100 degrees,” says Chalamet. During the shoot, he and the other actors were costumed in what the world of Dune calls “stillsuits”—thick, rubbery armor that preserves the body’s moisture, even gathering tiny bits from the breath exhaled through the nose. In the story, the suits are life-giving. In real life, they were agony. “The shooting temperature was sometimes 120 degrees,” says Chalamet. “They put a cap on it out there, if it gets too hot. I forget what the exact number is, but you can’t keep working.” The circumstances fed the story they were there to tell: “In a really grounded way, it was helpful to be in the stillsuits and to be at that level of exhaustion.”

It wouldn’t be Dune if it were easy. Herbert’s novel became a sci-fi touchstone in the 1960s, heralded for its world-building and ecological subtext, as well as its intricate (some say impenetrable) plot focusing on two families struggling for supremacy over Arrakis. The book created ripples that many see in everything from Star Wars to Alien to Game of Thrones. Still, for decades, the novel itself has defied adaptation. In the ’70s, the wild man experimental filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky mounted a quest to film it, but Hollywood considered the project too risky. David Lynch brought Dune to the big screen in a 1984 feature, but it was derided as an incomprehensible mess and a blight on his filmography. In 2000, a Dune miniseries on what’s now the SyFy channel became a hit for the cable network, but it is now only dimly remembered.

I must confess that I did not find the sequels Dune Messiah and Children of Dune to be as mesmerizing as the first book, but it could be the after-effects of the oral surgery had something to do with it, too. I've had no exposure to the story since reading it back then, and so this film adaptation has me very much interested in how they will portray such a complex story. If nothing else, I want to see the sand worms!

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