Dune: Prophecy lacks the spice.
Watched the first episode last night, and was left underwhelmed. There’s a lot of lore they pack into the first 5 minutes of exposition, which was fine, explaining the origins of the War against The Thinking Machines, and the Atredies/Harkonen feud.
But watching the show, a couple things struck me which took me out of the narrative they were trying to tell:
- The CGI is just ok, and far more noticeable in the show than it was in the movies, and this is understandable given the difference in CGI budget, but it wasn’t as immersive.
- This story having taken place 10 THOUSAND years before the events of DUNE, humanity is already mining spice on Arakis? Already fighting the fremmen?, The Bene Gesserit is already in ALL the major houses in the galaxy after only 130 years? Valya has personally developed THE VOICE as “something I’ve been working on” lol? I’m sure this is all in service of how Herbert wrote the book (*edit: this just in, the writer has just learned that DUNE PROPHECY isn’t actually based on a Frank Herbert book, witch makes a ton more sense as to why it’s so disjointed narrative) , but I was stuck by how little the DUNE universe seems to have changed in 10 Millennia. Just seems like “hey folks you know all the stuff you loved about the DUNE movies, well, here’s a TV show that’s not meant to step on that cash cow’s narrative, but it’s the same, just you know 10 thousand years before, really … ta-da!”
As an aside I once saw a YouTube video, which tried to explain the lack of technological advancement in the Game of Thrones universe, due to the overwhelming threat Dragons posed, and how that affected the development of modern weaponry, and stymied almost all forward technical engineering progress. Also while I’m ranting, so “thinking machines” are out, to the point of almost publicly executing a little boy for playing with a transformer toy, but the Emperor has a 3D vid holo projector, how exactly does THAT work without thinking machines, i wonder.
Now lastly, and this is a personal preference, I’ve never been a Emily Watson fan, I find her difficult to watch.
I’ll most likely keep watching every Sunday, because for all it’s foibles, it’s still top notch scifi, though not nearly on the same level as FOUNDATION or THE EXPANSE
It’s weird how you criticise this show for not being lore faithful, then hold up the Foundation as a shining diamond…
(I haven’t watched either, so this is just an outside observer musing)
Foundation is not a faithful adaptation of the books, but the show is at least internally consistent.
Based on OP’s description, it seems like there are a few things that viewers of the Dune series will have to suspend their disbelief on, or else it may fail to meet logical consistency with the newer movies.
And let’s face it, a faithful adaptation of the Foundation books would be incredibly boring.
it’s not the lore i have a problem with, it’s the sloppy writing hoping those who notice will overlook for the grandeur of the effort. it’s the physical and logical timeline they’re attempting to shoehorn in reverse while obviously presenting what is essentially the same universe in the same way, just … you know … so outside of any timeline that might intersect with the movies they can, wacka wacka wacka
I haven’t seen the show yet, but the hard stop at technology does make sense. It’s one part of Paul’s vision, to break out of the stagnation that humanity has put themselves in. I can’t say if the timing of that makes sense with canon sources, but from my understanding things were already slowed in progress and set in stone by the time of the Butlerian Jihad. Spice was a thing, it just wasn’t centered for space travel until the loss of AI.
I think the loss of human progress is a very common theme in these long range scifi stories. Star Wars, Dune, Foundation (both before and after the fall), Warhammer, even the Bladerunner/Alien universe.
On your unrelated A Song of Ice and Fire note, dragons would absolutely spur technological innovation in weaponry. Other countries would desperately look for a way to defend against them.
In real life, the ballistae used in the final battle were invented in ancient Greece around 400 BCE, basically about 1,500 to 2,000 years earlier than the technological level of Westeros. Bow to crossbow to ballista is a pretty logical evolution and there are intermediate links between all of them in the historical and archaeological record.
Some of the plot you outlined is straight out of the Dune prequels that were written by Herbert’s son. In the prequels, Arrakis was discovered by a group of escaped slaves that stole a ship during an uprising, about 10000 years before the main plot if Dune, and they were called Free Men.
Not defending the show at all, it sounds like another snoozfest from HBO, but I have read most the books so I’ll probably give it a watch out of curiosity. Can’t be worse than the 2000 Dune miniseries.
Okay, the part where you say it’s not as good as Foundation really puts it in context.
I like the current movies, but I’m not really a big Dune fan. So I’ll just give this a pass.
I mean, the first ep is an hour long, you can check it out, make your own judgement, and as I said, I was underwhelmed, but it’s in my rotation, and wanted to share some of the stuff which irked me
I loved Frank Herbert’s Dune books but his son’s prequels were disappointing. I’ve got no interest in movies or shows based on them.
I don’t trust HBO to make shows with full arcs and endings. They bombed GoT so hard that the echoes still reverberate from the walls, and House of Dragons did absolutely nothing to rekindle the simple joy of watching a well produced, written, and acted play.
If anything HoD solidified that HBO has lost the thread of entertainment amidst the wash of CGI, fanciful scenery, and dreadfully dull, plodding characters. Viserys was the only shining light of the show and with his passing, the remaining cast and characters desperately attempt to fill time and space with plot that feels tedious at best.
HBO is desperate for a hit to pull themselves back into the hearts and living rooms of the world, but they seem to think that the calculus is pageantry and computer generated fluff, rather than cornerstone fundamentals of story telling. And that is why I expect they will continue to fail.
Their Chornobyl was rich. I guess it depends on how much they care about the quality and who they employ to do the job.
I will not forget what they did to westworld either.
Yo dawg we heard you like robots. Now how about ninja robots!
They should have put GoT on hiatus when they ran out of material to adapt and put the pressure on GRRM to finish the damn books.
For this, I dunno, is it actually adapting Herbert material? Or is it another thing like “Foundation” where “we like the names, but fuck the original…”
It’s not Frank Herbert material.
“The prequel series based on the 2012 novel Sisterhood of Dune by Kevin J Anderson and Brian Herbert, the son of Dune creator Frank Herbert.”
I actually didn’t mind Brian’s books, they weren’t as exciting to read as Frank’s, but they did add a lot to the story.
I liked it. I’m the rare person who prefers the Brian books to the frank books, though, so… 🤷🏻♀️
It did stick pretty close to the source with a couple differences.
It’s 10000y after present, 10000y before Paul… and they were called free men, not freman. But yeah they were mining spice at this point, they had only realized how valuable it is in that last hundred years or so. Valya DID invent the voice. Though she was much more of a bitch in the books.
Still no guild yet, so youll notice there are no heighliners
I hope they do the Norma Cenva arc!
Hell yeah!
Well it does feel like a TV series alright. The sets look cheap and lots of enclosed spaces instead of the expansive and “everything is huge” feel of the movies. That’s understandable though, since this is obviously not a movie with a movie budget. That aside, the older cast are great, but I’m not impressed with the younger cast yet, as with most shows with new, young actors. The full blown exposition in the first 10 minutes was a bad sign for me, because they’re leaning on tell-don’t-show. I know they have a lot of info to get through as a background, but the films were able to do that without just narrating everything. All the more for a series that has more than double the runtime in total.
I read the Frank books but not the Brian ones, so I’m going in blind except for the info I already know from the original books. So let’s see, we’re just in the first episode. I’m looking forward to the next one and hopefully it picks up.
Don’t be too harsh on the TV writers until you know how far they’ve moved from the source material. I read all the mainline dune books earlier this year, while I do recommend the chronological order read through, sometimes the writing struggles to do the concepts justice. But the world is big and interesting and gets more standard space opera like and less Warhammer-like in the prequels and more Warhammer like in the sequels. I’m excited for the show. Lots of good stuff to go with if done well.
I liked it. It seemed like the first episode was all about exposition. Can’t wait to see more with what they do with the universe.
Sounds Brian Herbert as fuck.
Based off of “Sisterhood”, so that tracks.
Im waiting for the 3 Body Problem spin off series. Because why not right? It would make just as much sense to make.
I mean I don’t even know where did they get the materials. Also I’m guessing it’s a fan-service-fest like no other.
I read it was based on Brian’s books, which just about every Dune fan I’ve ever spoken to has completely ignored. I know I have. Hell, I haven’t even finished the last two Frank books (frankly it’s just a weird slog after God Emperor).
Idk I’m not terribly surprised. I’m here to see the main Dune saga brought to the wider public finally, so non-readers will at least get to see the point and not just be left watching Paul “win” again. Anything else is unnecessary until we get there IMO.
Is that Emily Watson on the poster?
