Looking forward to it, looking forward to it, after surviving the long outbreak of the epidemic, the latest film version of "Dune" finally premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in Italy on September 3 this year. On October 22, it will officially land on the big screen and meet chinese audiences.
Daniel Villeneuve, a famous Canadian science fiction director who has filmed "Arrival" and "Blade Runner 2049", will take charge of this science fiction classic, and the Hollywood royal composer Hans Zimmer composes the film, which is in the limelight in recent years, and the actor "Sweet Tea" Timothy Chalamei, who has a high degree of attention in China, will play the male protagonist Erridi in this work.
The Black Pearl Zadaya, who has gained attention in the new Spider-Man series, Rebecca Ferguson, "Mission Impossible" girl, Oscar Isaac of "Apocalypse", "Thanos" Josh Brolin and even Zhang Zhen will all join the film.
Famous directors sit in town, star-studded, waiting for two years, and fans are happy. What kind of surprises will this sci-fi classic production, known as the science fiction industry's "Lord of the Rings", be re-screened?
As soon as it was born, it took the "Nobel" of the science fiction industry into its pocket
In 1965, after six years of painstaking work, Frank Herbert finally completed the Dune series of novels. This writer, who once came from a poor family, worked as an editor, participated in World War II, and understood spiritual phenomenology, existential philosophy and Zen Buddhism, began to give up everything in 1955 and devote himself to his beloved science fiction creation.
In his works, he has delved into the problems of reason and madness, foreseeing future world conflicts caused by oil consumption and production, but not foresaw the commercial failure of his most proud works in the future.
In the 1960s, advances in the U.S. space industry led to the development of commercial science fiction in full swing, and Herbert's Dunes began serialization in Simulation magazine in 1963.
However, the release of the single edition of Dune was not smooth. Before a small publisher in Philadelphia took a fancy, Dune was rejected by 23 publishers. Herbert received only $7,500 in advance.
However, the eyes of the market are shiny. This sci-fi masterpiece of story, worldview, connotation and philosophy received unprecedented response as soon as it was released, winning the title of "one of the most important awards in the fantasy novel industry" in 1965, the Nebula Award for Best Novel.
In 1966, Dune shared another of the most important awards in science fiction with another science fiction figure, Roger Zerazini's Immortal, the Hugo Award for Best Feature Story.
As the highest international awards in the field of science fiction literature, the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award are known as the "Nobel Prizes of science fiction literature", and if a novel wins both at the same time, it marks that it has undoubtedly entered the hall of classic works. There is no doubt that "Dune" has been "enshrined" in the history of science fiction literature.
Unlike many typical European tragicomic narrative rules and paradigms, the most appealing thing about Dune is not the popular ethical vendetta of Star Wars; not the hardcore sci-fi elements of Star Trek; not the completely alienated cyberpunk of Blade Runner; nor the daunting core rules of Al Qaeda, but a new worldview and setting.
Herbert will lead the reader to a completely new, vast, bizarre world with a "long-term" and "global" vision.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Herbert, who finally became a full-time writer, began to continue to deepen the "Dune" series, using the new "Dune Trilogy" - "Dune Savior", "Son of Dune", "Dune God Emperor", and continued to expound his own historical, ecological, development and philosophical views.
In Dune, Herbert confronts the laws of the development of real things and always makes a prejudicial look ahead. For example, the "Crusade Expedition" of the new century, the "spices" that caused disputes...
Herbert used a more complete, delicate and thought-provoking science fiction dimension to inspire countless successors to give humanistic care and temperature to science fiction, using science fiction as a cloak to trigger more people's thinking about society, and at the same time, it also successfully faded the coat of business and curiosity for science fiction, making science fiction officially enter the hall of mainstream literature.
Three remakes, but tragically killed By Waterloo?
Screen is always the ultimate destination of every excellent IP. As early as 1984, "Dune" had been put on the big screen by the famous director David Lynch, which was also the first work in the "Dune" series to be screened.
At that time, the more common translation of "Dune" was the Hong Kong version of "Star Trek". Released in 1984 and filmed in the desert, the costly film was definitely an S-class investment masterpiece at that time, but unfortunately, the old version of "Dune" almost lost all its money.
Because the storyline of "Dune" is too large, many of the branches in the original book are not shown in this movie, and what is more unfortunate is that this movie can only be regarded as half of the "David Lynch" movie. The operation of the business and the compulsion of the producer made Lynch lose the editing rights of the "Dune" film. Ming ming created a legend with the lens, but did not really let the legend on the big screen, but let the painstaking efforts become the "pain of a lifetime" that only scored 6.1 points in Douban.
It is worth mentioning that although it did not get a good reputation in North America, the old version of "Dune" caused a high response in the Far East thousands of miles away, providing countless teenagers in the 80s with unlimited reverie about the universe.
In 2000, the thriller director who had filmed Dawn of the Living Dead remade Dune Castle into a miniseries with only 3 episodes. The actors have good looks, the plot and setting are relatively restored, and they are called the perfect "supplement" to Lynch's version. Unfortunately, the rhythm and scheduling are still reckless, and due to too much emphasis on the plot, ignoring the original idea and the game between the characters, it only received a 6.6 rating.
In 2003, based on Herbert's original novel, the last two installments of the Dune Trilogy, "Dune Savior" and "Son of Dune," were adapted into the TV series Son of Dune, which tells the story of the second generation of "Dune", a series of events that took place after Paul Yatridi ruled the planet Dune, a tragicist struggle that was doomed to extinction.
James McAvoy, who was in the midst of the "Beauty of the Ages", played one of Paul's dragon and phoenix sons. Whether it is the costume road or the set lighting, compared to the 1984 version, there is a great improvement. The most memorable thing is that under the unique "dune orange" filter, the blue eyes of "One Beauty" and "One Eye Ten Thousand Years", and the healthy and toned figure.
Similarly, the "sandworms", "spices" and cult elements in the original work have all been restored in the play, which is very friendly to the original party. However, the B side of the restoration of the original is the loss of the commercial market, there is no "Lord of the Rings" god-level audiovisual effect, the drama version of "Son of Dunes" for the audience who has not seen the original and the previous work of "Dune", there is no doubt that it is a "big boring film". Fortunately, there is a beautiful appearance that turns the tide, and in the end, the rating of "Son of the Dune" rose to 7.3 points.
How is the new version of "Dune" broken, how to stand?
The huge gap between the original novel and the movie version makes the die-hard fans of the "Dune" IP base their last high hopes on this large-scale new version of the "Dune" movie. According to the current situation of the Venice Film Festival and North America, although it has experienced the decline of the old director David Lynch, the word-of-mouth performance of the 2021 version of "Dune" is still relatively bright.
Douban opened with a score of 8.1, and then 67.27 million viewers scored 8.0 points, which is already a very eye-catching existence compared to the two previous works.
In the short reviews written by the audience who have already watched the film, we can see that the unique audiovisual atmosphere is a highlight of the "Dune", and the innovation of audiovisualization is also the reason why Villeneuve can "enshrine the gods".
In addition to audiovisual, the new version of "Dune" is more anticipated at the narrative and scheduling levels. After all, "human design" is not the highlight of Herbert's original work, so the joining or appearance of the star may be regarded as a simple gimmick of a commercial movie. And it just so happens that both previous works failed on the narrative.
Under the more critical eyes of the audience in the 2020s, how the director should choose and deconstruct the original work, how to "restore", or continue to develop this magnificent space opera on the basis of "restoration", is still highly anticipated.
Secondly, after experiencing a variety of global events such as the epidemic and anti-globalization, the audience will definitely examine and judge this forward-looking work with a new eye.
Similarly, in the midst of tragic ptsd and survival anxiety, people need a meaning or thought to support the inner emptiness, and philosophy is precisely the advantage of the original "Dune". Therefore, how to effectively "build on the strengths and avoid the weaknesses", play and excavate the ideas of the original work, rather than reducing the "god work" to a "big boring film", is also one of the breakthrough difficulties of the new version of the movie "Dune".
Finally, unlike the original, the new version of the movie "Dune" will appear on the screen in the form of an independent film, that is, there will be no combination of "Dune 2" and "Dune 3" and other series, and the director needs to tell this huge and vast epic in only two and a half hours, which once again adds difficulty to the scheduling and narrative of the film.
In any case, as the first truly "international blockbuster" on the Chinese screen in 2021, the 2021 version of "Dune" is highly anticipated. May this masterpiece truly achieve nirvana on the big screen in 2021.