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Comment by deepnet | Hacker News Reader

Lynch's Dune is vibrant, transgressive and weird. Every detail is unsettling in the way only Lynch is. The scale invokes awe. Excited frisson and disgust overlap uncomfortably. The emotions evoked are grand and complex. It is a challenging film, a masterpiece.

Villeneuve's dune is an enjoyable film, it conforms to expectations, and easily lauded. As such it is somewhat anodyne and flat. It is only rich where it borrows from Lynch. The scale feels small like tilt-shift does.

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A few comments in this thread, including yours, have made me wonder: are you a fan of Dune and how Lynch adapted it, or are you a fan of Lynch's Dune?

Because the qualities you're describing sound very much like other Lynch films but not like Herbert's Dune.

So many of the negative comments about Villeneuve's Dune in this thread are astonishing to me, but I will just pick this one: surely scale is something that Villeneuve does so brilliantly! From Arrival, though Blade Runner 2049, to his Dune, he has an amazing ability to make things seem vast (space ships, buildings, cities...) - it's almost a trademark of his work, to me, so colour me baffled that you would single this out for criticism.

(For context, I read and enjoyed the Dune books as a child, I've seen the Lynch film several times and find it broadly comical, I love Twin Peaks, and I think Villeneuve is arguably one of the best mainstream directors working right now.)

I think the GP meant Lynch's world (universe) felt bigger, more mysterious. Like there were more things going on outside this story than could ever be told. Not that the physical size of things was too small. I think I agree a bit. But that universe is supposed to be small and claustrophobic I think? It is part of the lesson in the last few books. I liked the scifi miniseries the best but mostly for what came after the first book. Lynch's I liked when young, but even then I found the amount of internal narrative extremely irritating. The new one jas the problem of most every adaptation of a beloved and dense written work. It tries to serve existing fans and the casual viewer with the same movie. It does much better at that than anything but Jackson's lotr I think, but it is always hard.

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