Posts Tagged → Dune
DUNE 2 review
Dune captured my young imagination like no other book- not Tolkien’s trilogy, not Starship Troopers, and like Tolkien’s books and Starship Troopers, Dune shaped just about every subsequent sci-fi book, movie, comic book that followed.
Several attempts have been made to capture Dune’s magic in movie form. Prior to the latest two movies, the best known and best produced was the 1984 version with all-star cast Kyle MacLachlan, Sean Young, Sting, Jose Ferrer, Brad Dourif, Richard Jordan, Patrick Stewart, Jurgen Prochnow, Kenneth McMillan, Sian Phillips, Freddie Jones, Linda Hunt, Jack Nance, and other stellar actors. Look up any of these names and you find a talented lifetime actor with lots of real acting gigs to their credit. And as expected, the 1984 Dune movie was very well acted, much better than the latest versions.
Where the 1984 movie was deficient were some of the special effects, and yet some of its special effects were so good that they are repeated in the latest two Dune movies. Fact is, special effects have really improved since 1984, and of course this is where the 2021+2024 Dune movies shine.
If the 1984 Dune movie struggled to get everything just right and onto the screen in a logical flow, which sometimes left it congested, Dune 2 simply ignores certain critical story elements and throws scenes up on the wall, take them or leave them. There is a lot of character and story development in 1984 Dune that is absent in Dune 2.
One scene I was hoping to see is where Fayd Rautha is confronted by the last three Atreides warriors in his gladiator ring, and one of them is not drugged. That fighter just about kills Fayd in the knife fight. In the book that scene takes time to play out, and one gets the impression that Fayd is too used to mock-fighting drugged opponents who cannot possibly bring their full skills or physical power to bear against him. In Dune 2, Fayd just rolls right over his opponents 1-2-3, and there, it’s done. No suspense, no close calls, no embedded darts being painfully but artfully used as improvised armor against Fayd’s quick blade.
The Mentats are pretty much nowhere to be found in Dune 2, which is odd. Dune makes it clear up front that computers and artificial intelligence were banned from human possession, because the computers tried to kill off all the humans and take over their planets. Which gave rise to the Mentats, human computers whose loyalty is first and foremost to fellow humans. Dune 1984 does an outstanding job showing the central role of the Mentats, whereas Dune 2 has none.
One of the biggest deficiencies in Dune 2 is the final battle between Paul and the Fremen, and the Emperor’s forces. Little of the battlefield set-up is explained in Dune 2, and the action just kind of rolls along. The sand worms show up, but not grandly. Maybe the director expects the audience has prior knowledge of the storyline? Plus there are way too many lasers used in Dune 2, because as we do already know, if a laser hits a personal shield, an atomic explosion happens at both ends, killing both parties. Thus, knives and swords were much more handy. I guess lasers look too cool on the big screen to pass up, even if they are not in keeping with the book.
Or Dune 2 could have incorporated the original “weirding” voice module, the Atreides’ secret weapon that is both super high tech and weirdly organic. Dune 1984 did a great job showing how the weirding module greatly enhanced the Fremen fighting ability, thereby enabling them to take on the fully armed Harkonnens. None of this is in Dune 2, strangely.
The 1984 movie ending is far, far superior to the ending of Dune 2: Paul’s raw power is displayed in his fight with Fayd Rautha, whereas in Dune 2 a lot of stuff just doesn’t make sense. Like how does Fayd stab Paul so many times, and why doesn’t the scene follow the book, which is so good, and why doesn’t Paul cut loose after killing Fayd, crushing him and the stone floor with just his voice, thereby demonstrating his overwhelming physical/mystical messianic power…instead of just kind of standing there looking over his defeated enemies….? Curious minds want to know.
Nothing in Dune 2 shows Paul’s slow discovery and then development of his messianic powers, despite that being the entire purpose of the Dune story. Nine hundred generations of careful breeding and genetic modification were supposed to result in the messiah, who could bend space and time on his own, and in Dune and the 1984 Dune, those responsible for creating Paul are amazed that he actually happened. I am amazed that Dune 2 shows its audience almost none of this important part of the overall story. Paul’s emergence and ascent as the universe’s messianic all-powerful super-being leader is the entire point of Dune. How did it evade the producers of Dune 2?
Dune 2 should have just taken the 1984 film and used every scene, every prop, every script and line, and simply updated the actors and the special effects. Oh well. Opportunity missed.
Well, I paid fourteen bucks to go see a Hollywood movie. First one of 2024 and probably going to be the only Hollywood movie I see this year. Regal Cinemas now has assigned seats, which in theory is a nice thing, and which in the theater itself bore no resemblance to the seating map offered on the computer screen when buying my ticket. I did get to sit up front and enjoy the effect of a full size movie screen, which is a lot of fun. It is a shame the movie was not what I expected, or what it could have been, or should have been.
Nice consolation is that I can watch my 1984 Dune DVD at home, as well as watch the excellent cut scenes on YouTube. Hate to say it, Dune 1984 is in many ways much better than today’s Dune 2, but Dune 2 is worth seeing, if you have any affinity for the Dune story. It’s all fun.
Fayd Rautha (Sting) having fun biting Paul (Kyle MacLachlan) in the 1984 Dune last knife fight
Tuesday election results: Voting machines are hacked
So many people are trying to understand what happened on this Election Day Tuesday, how Republicans got trounced across Pennsylvania and in many places across the country, as well.
I can’t speak for other states, where plenty of people are scratching their heads, but I feel quite comfortable speaking about central Pennsylvania. I looked at election results in central Pennsylvania, in Dauphin County, Cumberland County, Schuylkill County, and several others in Northcentral PA and Western PA, and there is a stark statistical signal emitting from Tuesday’s election results: Pennsylvania’s voting machines are not secure, they are being manipulated to achieve results that one side wants.
A couple examples stand out. Several Cumberland County school boards went 100% Democrat in areas where the voter registration cannot possibly support that outcome. In Dauphin County, long time and much liked moderate elected official Chad Saylor lost his county commissioner race by forty-some votes to a complete no-name. This kind of close race is a lot harder to identify as vote machine hacking, and that is why these kinds of outcomes are kept so close by whomever is doing the manipulation. But it is still not a believable outcome in a county that has consistently re-elected George Hartwick and Mike Pries for a very long time.
In the case of the Cumberland County school boards, I believe the outcome is so desperately needed for important political purposes that the manipulators go for broke. Having outposts of woke anti-America public schools in the heart of a conservative Republican County is strategically important, because the public tide has been strongly turning against this kind of outcome. Besides, these school board races are off of most people’s radar screens. It is a crime they can easily get away with.
And as we have just seen in our own PA election this week, verified reports of broken and malfunctioning vote machines (including flipping votes from R to D in front of people’s eyes) get a tiny amount of air time and then are buried and forgotten. Despite these reports being a huge red flag indication of a major systemic problem across the entire vote machine enterprise.
Voting machines are not secure. We saw that starkly in the 2020 election, in the 2022 election, and now we are seeing it absolutely blatantly displayed in the 2023 election. The incentive for hackers and manipulators to illegally use the voting machines is powerful, because most American LEADERS (not the voters, who know vote fraud when they see it and they complain about it) are in denial. So the push-back in the halls of power is minimal. Establishment Republicans like my own state senator John DiSanto are either too timid or simply disinterested in the subject, because there is no direct political gain for them. And so the crime continues.
The biggest impediment to having secure elections in Pennsylvania is the Republican Party itself. This is a group of absolutely useless individuals who by their actions must be heavily compromised. They put up zero resistance to the last second 2020 election law shenanigans (for example, the Republican-dominated House and the Republican-dominated Senate could have impeached and removed the PA Supreme Court members who blatantly disregarded both Pennsylvania law and the Pennsylvania constitution to achieve political outcomes that allowed their fellow Democrats to wildly cheat in the 2020 election), and they won’t even deal with the reports of voting machine problems this week.
Either the PAGOP has nothing to gain from fixing vote machine fraud, or nothing to lose by allowing it to continue. And the fact that the severely failed and purposefully deposed former PA senate “leader” Jake Corman has now set up a political consulting firm in Harrisburg, with no push back from PAGOP leadership, bodes poorly. These people all want business as usual, which definitely does not involve rocking the boat or fixing vote fraud.
A note about voting machines and others: Machines are so deeply mistrusted across the entire world population, especially in the West, that Hollywood movies depicting Machines vs. Humanity in all-out wars of extermination have been wildly popular for many decades. Artificial intelligence is widely believed to be the inevitable downfall of humanity, as stated by those who are most involved in developing it. In the popular and prescient 1965 sci-fi book Dune, computers of all kinds were outlawed because they became self aware and tried to kill off the humans. In Dune, in lieu of machines, a race of humans were cultivated, the Mentats, to perform computer-speed calculations for the benefit of humans, but without the inherent instability and high risk of computer machines.
Hacked and manipulated vote machines are now so blatantly misused to achieve criminal outcomes that we should do something about it. We must fix it, if voting is going to mean anything at all. And of course, with hacked elections and your vote meaning nothing, your representative government isn’t, and your vote isn’t, and your citizenship isn’t. What is the outcome is a single-party totalitarian country, and that very much is happening in front of our eyes.
The fix to this open problem is easy: Paper ballots, voter identification, and hand count if necessary. But that requires at least half of the political leadership to actually care about this subject, and if they won’t, then the electorate must vote in new leaders who do care about it. Or, you voters can go ahead and give up representative government.
Some Middle East FAQs
Wow is the Internet burning up as a result of the “troubles” in Israel and Gaza. And not just the Internet, but the public streets across Europe, London, Washington, DC, and New York City. Marches full of people shouting about killing the Jews and destroying Israel, and carrying signs about destroying America, and battering the gates of the White House in Washington, DC, and tearing down flyers on lamp posts showing the faces and names of Hamas’ hostages – innocent people from 28 different countries and multiple religions and aged from 6-month-old babies to 80-year-old grandparents – show us that the so-called “occupation” thing is just another fake excuse for the same old bullsh*t religious hatred and violence.
So in response to what I see and read on the news and on the Internet, here are some absolute facts. You will not hear these mentioned by the mainstream media, which is an arm of Hamas (which explains why the mainstream media is constantly trying so hard to destroy Western Civilization), but these are true facts, and honest people want to know the truth, however uncomfortable it is.
- Jews are the indigenous people of Israel/ Judea/ Samaria/ Judah. They have been living there in an unbroken chain for 4,000 years, albeit not always the masters of their own political fortunes. The region’s greatest history for 4,000 years is written the entire time in Jewish blood. This is their home and their land.
- Arabs are from Arabia, AKA the Arabian Peninsula.
- Muslims are from the Arabian Peninsula
- Most of the so-called “Palestinians” are Turks who arrived in the area with the Ottoman Empire, which oversaw and administered the area they called the “Sanjak of Jerusalem” from around 1500 to 1920
- Turks are from…Turkey, and its surrounding region. If you are a Turk living in Nablus or Jenin or Jabaliya or Gaza City, you are not indigenous to anywhere except Turkey, regardless of how you self-identify or what language you speak
- The “Apartheid” that exists in the Middle East is the Muslim Arab countries’ unwillingness to allow Jews to live anywhere in the Middle East, despite Jews living there long before any Arabs showed up.
- From 1946 to 1956, one million Jews were ethnically cleansed from across North Africa and Egypt and the West Bank and Jordan and Syria and Iraq and Iran, forced out of their homes by bloodthirsty mobs and greedy governments, and forced to take refuge hundreds of miles away in the new state of Israel. THAT is the true ethnic cleansing that has happened in the Middle East.
- There is zero “occupation” of Gaza. None. There were Israelis in Gaza from 1967 until 2005, but then any semblance of an occupation ended. In 2005, Israel pulled its own people out of Gaza, left everything behind, and Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin was killed by one of his own bodyguards over it and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was struck down by a “hand of God” stroke as a result. There is no justification for Hamas, except what their charter explicitly calls for: The murder of all Jews and Christians around the world.
- Israel controls electricity and water to Gaza out of necessity, because Gaza diverts all of its money and resources into building terror tunnels and rockets out of public water pipes.
- Gaza could easily have been transformed into its own beautiful oasis, similar to what the Israelis had done with their part of it. Gaza has everything it needs to succeed – beautiful beaches, the Mediterranean, adjoining the majestic Sinai and close to the beautiful Red Sea, and next to high tech powerhouse Israel. When Israel abandoned their Gaza settlement in 2005, they left behind incredible greenhouses and seawater desalination plants. Entire communities that ran on sustainable re-use of limited resources, something out of Dune. What did the Gazans do when the Jews left Gaza? They destroyed the desalination plants and the greenhouses, they scrapped everything made of metal, and ruined everything beautiful that was handed to them for free.
- We must be honest. Gazans are a backwards people, educated to hate everyone and kill everyone, and live miserably amongst themselves. They are indeed a sad case, but they and their misery are of their own doing. Maybe they should go back to Turkey and start anew.
Midsummer report
My apologies for the long absence here. Summer is in full swing and our family has been operating at full tilt speed. Time only for doing things, and none for writing about it all, until now.
First off, our oldest kid was married on Independence Day. Held at a pretty and historic farm, it was a fantastic wedding, and we feel like we acquired a wonderful addition to our family. However, the preparation necessary for that event took up a lot of time and energy, for many months. And then there was the recovery week. And then there was the vacation week. Hence no blog posts. Full credit to my wife for all of the wedding planning.
At least I myself am back in the saddle, while other people around me are still recovering from their vacation. Not everyone does well with the surf fishing bum lifestyle, including sleeping on the beach, eating questionable food from a warm cooler that has been pawed over and drooled on by feral raccoons, and drinking fetid water. I myself thrive in this kind of environment, and so I am back to report back to our three readers.
What can I say about the wedding other than I fired our small black powder cannon seven times, for good luck. It was Independence Day, and while the venue does not allow fireworks, they did allow the cannon (it’s a cast iron, steel sleeved replica swivel gun with a 1.75″ bore). And in my speech as the bride’s father, how could I miss an opportunity to point out that Independence Day was brought to us by citizens with guns? That is a fact, is it not?
And (of course, I guess) I heard back afterwards that some of our wedding guests were offended by the cannon and also offended by my mention of the origins of American freedom – citizens with guns. You can’t make this stuff up if you tried, like it’s a Hollywood movie script caricature of spoiled rotten children who get everything that Planet Earth can provide and yet nonetheless complain about it. Something like “The food here is terrible and the portions are so small.”
Are Americans now really offended by Independence Day fireworks? Are they offended by displays of patriotism and mentioning of historical facts that unfortunately run contrary to some evil political narratives that privately owned guns are bad and our freedom was brought to Americans by a immaculately conceived federal government that descended from Heaven? Are some wedding guests now so crass that they actually complain about the bride’s father setting off his celebratory toy cannon for the enjoyment of all the normal fun-loving people in attendance?
I have a hard time believing these things, but I did get to witness this stuff. America is in big trouble when its own citizens, young and old, hate its founding and can’t give a proud father his one moment and some space to celebrate it. Jiminy crickets.
Just returned from a subsequent beach trip to a a long spit of federally managed property on the east coast. The National Park Service rangers were 99% normal, nice, intelligent Americans, thank you very much, Gage, Donald, and Stephen.
In this national park there is a problem with artificially high numbers of deer, foxes, and racoons. They have no natural predators and they are multiplying at breakneck rates and having huge negative impacts on the environment and local ecology. Vegetation shows a distinct deer browse line about four feet above the ground, and the racoons are everywhere, aggressive, and aiming to ruin your trip. I watched a red fox steal a camper’s breakfast sausage meal right off of his plate on the guy’s picnic table. We had raccoons patrolling our campsite and under our table as soon as we broke out our food. They will grab your food right out of your hand. It is a fact that raccoons are host to some nasty parasites they excrete in their poop, which was abundantly displayed all around the campsites. Raccoons are also the number one vector for rabies among wildlife.
Aside from posing health threats and incessantly badgering the humans who are trying to enjoy the park, the foxes and raccoons also eat the eggs of rare nesting shore birds. These rare birds enjoy huge swaths of cordoned off human-free dunes and beaches in the park (and also on federal and state lands out on Long Island, like Orient Point and Montauk). And yet the same exact NPS staff enforcing the human no-go dune zones policy are absolutely fine with the overabundant nest-raiding foxes and raccoons that render all the no-go zones meaningless. The staff do not support hunting or trapping these destructive pests, either to improve the park visitor experience or to protect the natural environment.
How can the rare birds successfully nest on the ground and hatch their chicks there when the artificially super overabundant egg-eating raccoons and foxes are allowed to roam at will?
Talking with various National Park Service staff about this problem resulted in exposure to various levels of education and serious/unserious mindset. Most of the NPS staff acknowledged there is a wildlife problem on site that must be addressed. Hunting the deer and trapping the foxes and raccoons is the normal and responsible way to deal with this artificial human-caused environmental problem. These are the responsible and serious ways of addressing a visitor problem on land that is owned by the US taxpayer and whose management is entrusted to taxpayer-paid bureaucrats.
However, when I mentioned the above normal solutions to a young, handsome, tall NPS Park Policeman patrolling our campground, he responded “The same can be said about humans — there are just too many humans. And your solution to the overabundant raccoon problem is not humane.” He would get rid of the humans and allow the artificially high numbers of nuisance wildlife to proliferate. With taxpayer-paid federal employees of this guy’s low caliber and high wokeness quotient, the park visitor experience is going to degrade. C’mon, NPS, you can screen your employee applicants better than this. This foolish people-hating young guy should never have a gun and a badge, much less wear an NPS uniform.
Overall the surf fishing was fun if mostly unproductive. Probably due to the high heat and ferocious sunshine. I can report that catching cownose/ bullnose rays on strong surf tackle is a hoot, but then safely decoupling that animal from the tackle is a whole other thing. They whip their barbed tails around trying to nail the fisherman, who is trying to release them back into the ocean (I learned to place something heavy on the tail while using heavy pliers to remove or break off the hook). We did witness a large shark violently feeding close to shore, and it would be a fair guess to say it was probably eating these rays, which we caught and saw in abundance on both the bay side and the ocean surf side.
So that is the mid-summer report. Fast action, lots of family, some big family celebration and lots of family movement across the beautiful American landscape for work and vacation. I hope that you the reader are also enjoying your summertime. Summer is such a glorious time to be with family and friends, to visit new places, to camp out under the stars and cook over an open fire, to think through life’s normal challenges and to spend time with people we love…and then it is over just when we are all starting to really get into it.
So make the most of your summer.
Campsite neighbor Steve, a PhD engineer ex-patriot Brit and defiant leftist, helped MAGA Maniac Josh fix my malfunctioning headlamp, demonstrating that it’s easy to be enemies when separated by keyboards and easy to be friends when living side by side
Nice level NPS campsites with fire ring and grill
Each campsite has a pavilion and a picnic table. Is this really camping?
Asbury Park Brewery is a local flavor that I was happy to support. No sign anywhere of Bud Lite or Budweiser anything, thankfully
Symbol of foolish National Park Service policies seeking to protect rare shore birds by excluding people from their habitat, but allowing artificially overabundant populations of nest-raiding raccoons and foxes to roam at will.
Beach goers nonetheless entered this area because there were zero nesting birds in it and there were literally tons of foxes running around in it. Come on National Park Service, you can do much smarter than this
Ahhhhh… summer vacation on the Atlantic Coast
Time for a new Dune movie
The 1965 book Dune was to a great extent the basis of most futuristic science fiction books and movies that followed. Star Wars is based on Dune, even beginning on a desert planet where the hero, Luke Skywalker, has been tested and hardened into a ready warrior by the harsh landscape around him, like the Fremen of Dune’s desert planet Arrakis.
“Dune” author Frank Herbert was an eclectic guy, a deep and creative thinker. One might say he was unusual, even by modern terms.
He was against racism but believed in the importance of human genetic improvement through select breeding. Focusing on the importance of tribalism, Herbert nonetheless elevated the self-reliant individual as the highest achievement a person could aim and hope for.
He was for the concretely purposeful use of mind-expanding drugs, such as religious experiences, saw warfare and killing as hardly noticeable inevitabilities in a well-ordered human universe, believed in God and the power of prayer, supported the ongoing evolution of technology, but then elevated the supremacy of human evolution and the human spirit, including personal fighting skills, over that same technology.
If his amalgamation of nearly all current religions on Planet Earth into one or two future strands of religious thought is any indication, Herbert is suggesting that all religions pretty much point us in the same direction, though some are scarier than others.
Herbert was firmly against artificial intelligence and the delegation of human decision making to machines. In Dune, it is the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ that wipes out most computers and all AI, leaving only those computers that could perform the basic elementary functions in lieu of humans, after a close call where AI and its robots nearly took out all humans. On this subject, it could be said that Herbert was prescient and, like many other sci-fi writers, ahead of his time. Even now we childishly rush into AI as if it is just a silly game, when in fact it could quickly kill every human and every other life form on Planet Earth.
In 1984 director David Lynch produced a pretty good movie that captured a lot of the book Dune. No small feat, as most great books result in terrible movies. The David Lynch movie was good because it embraced the book and did not try to dance around it. Its acting was mostly excellent, and some of the scenes are perfectly gritty. But in other ways the 1984 movie is very weak. Its special effects are almost sad, even by the standards of that time. Very 1950s.
A miniseries was attempted years later, and many Dune devotees believed it was a failure in every way. Lacking even the punch of the 1984 movie, it certainly was not what people had hoped for or imagined.
We need a new, updated Dune movie. No, we demand one. A Dune movie that is absolutely true to the book, that has the same quality actors as the 1984 version, and which has updated technology, sets, and special effects. It will have to be long, three hours, to capture the most important scenes and subtle nuances that make the Dune story so powerful.
C’mon, Hollywood, do something good for once. Give us a new Dune movie that is worthy of the name and the book.