Dune vs Lord of the Rings

[Khephra]

[supernova]

1. LOTR

is a decent adaptation. I don't think there's been a decent DUNE adaptation yet.

[Blue-Jay]

2. Which Dune?

The Lynch version was kinda silly. I actually bought the Sci Fi Channel production. Good stuff.

Still voting LOTR, though.

[Rabrrrrrr]

3. Books or movies?

Or just the stories?

If just stories, I'd need go with Dune, since it's so much more relevant, and in many ways, has much more depth.

But then, Dune isn't trying to be mythology, either, so one almost really can't compare them at all.

[Khephra]

5. I really meant the books

But have at it either way!

[Blue-Jay]

8. Oh, the books!

Still LOTR, but not by as much of a margin.

[everythingsxen]

9. Since you meant books...

I am glad I voted for Dune :D

But I liked all the Dune stuff til now. Yes, especially the Lynch version. It was so awesomely cheesy. But it just had a quality to it... what I can't say. I thought it was better than the Sci-Fi version. The characters seemed so much more passionate in the Lynch version. Children of Dune was great though.

[Rabrrrrrr]

22. Thanks!

Khephra offers to Rabrrrrrr: 'Have it either way'. Rabrrrrrr unsure how to respond...

on edit: missed a quote mark, put it in.

[Khephra]

4. I actually have a theory about Dune vs LotR

I think whichever one you're exposed to first usually guides your tastes through your genre reading life.

[bread_and_roses]

14. Not mine

I read LOTR before I read Dune, but I went on to read far more SciFi than "Fantasy." In fact, the only other fantasy I ever really enjoyed were two series for young readers (which I read as an adult), "The Dark is Rising" by Susan Cooper and the "Wizard of Earthsea" series by Ursula K. LeGuin. I voted for LOTR because the three books make a complete entity with I think remarkably consistent quality over the three. I think that "Dune" is terrific, a remarkable acheivement, but the follow up books did not (IMO, these things are all totally subjective) maintain the standard. These days, I cannot read fiction, only non-fiction...my loss, I hope to regain that pleasure some day.

[Emboldened Chimp]

6. Dune the movie sucked

I was bored silly. I think Lynch has disowned it.

[Khephra]

11. Dino D took away the editing process from Lynch

There's supposedly a 6 hour (without ads) version that he edited together for his daughter. I do know he's admitted to there being a lot of lost footage that never got in because of Dino.

[MojoKrunch]

16. Oh man... does it include

The final attack on the Emporers city, the blasting of the shield wall with nukes, that *doesn't* include a "laser" battle?

And an ending *other than* one where Paul makes it freaking rain?

Because other than those two *HUGE* glaring mistakes, I quite liked the Lynch version.
The costumes were *wonderful* and the interior sets were dead on.

//There's supposedly a 6 hour (without ads) version that he edited together for his daughter. I do know he's admitted to there being a lot of lost footage that never got in because of Dino.//
I never understood how someone thought they could adapt such a rich novel for a 2 hour movie and do an adequate job.

For any book like that the mini-series is the only way to go.

Though I must admit the current LOTR adaptation is the exception.

Mojo

[Khephra]

17. NO idea...but it could have been...worse? Better?

I LOVE Jodorowsky's work...but this version (which almost got made with the help of Pink Floyd, Giger, and Dali) would have been sooo out of synch with the books that they might have made a new movie without the Dune connection.

THE MOVIE YOU WILL NEVER SEE
by Alexandro Jodorowsky

"To show the process of illumination of a hero, then a people, then an entire planet (which in turn is the Messiah of the Universe since in abandonning its orbit, the holy planet leaves to spread its light through all the galaxies)...

I didn't want to respect the novel, I wanted to recreate it. For me, Dune didn't belong to Herbert just as Don Quixote didn't belong to Cervantes.

There is an artist, one alone among millions of others artists, who one time in his life, by a piece of divine grace, receives an immortal theme, a MYTH...I say "receive" and not "create" because works of art are received in a state of mediumness directly from the collective unconcious. The work overtakes the artist and in some way it kills him, because humanity, in receiving the impact of Myth, has a profound need to erase the individual who receives it and transmits it: his individual personality hampers, stains the purity of the message which, at the root, asks to be anonymous... We don't know who created the Notre-Dame cathedral, nor the Aztec solar calendar, nor the tarot of Marseille, nor the myth of Don Juan, etc.

One feels that Cervantes gave HIS version of Quixote--of course incomplete--and that we carry in our soul our total character... Christ didn't belong to Mark, Luke, Matthew or John... There are many more gospels called apocryphal and there are as much lives of Christ as there are believers. Everyone of us has their story of Dune, their Jessica, their Paul... I feel fervent admiration towards Herbert and at the same time conflict (I think the same thing happened to him)... He hampered me... I didn't want him as an advisor of technique... I did everything to keep him away from the project... I had received a version of Dune and I wanted to transit it: the myth had to abandon the literary form and become image...

In the film, Duke Leto (father of Paul) would be a man castrated in a ritual combat in the arenas during a bullfight. (The emblem of the Atreide house being a sacred bull...) Jessica--Bene Gesserit nun--, sent like a concubine to the duke to create a daughter who would be the mother of a Messiah, falls so much in love with Leto that she decides to blow a link in the chain and create a son, the Kwizatz Haderach, the saviour. In using her powers of Bene Gesserit--as soon as the duke, madly in love with her, confides his sad secret--Jessica lets herself be inseminated by a drop of blood of this sterile man... The camera followed (in the script) the red drop through the ovaries of the woman and accompanied its meeting with the ovule where, by an miraculous explosion, it inseminates the egg.

Paul was born of a virgin, and not by the sperm of his father but by his blood... In my version of Dune, the Emperor of the Galaxy is mad. He lives on an artificial planet of gold, in a palace of gold constructed according to the non-laws of anti-logic. He lives in symbiosis with a robot identical to him. The resemblance is so perfect that the citizens never know if they are facing the man or the machine... In my version, the spice is a blue drug of a spongy consistency filled with a vegtable-animal life endowed with consciousness, the highest level of consciousness. It doesn't stop taking all sorts of forms, shifting without cease. The spice continually reproduces the creation of innumerable universes.

MORE.............

http://www.hotweird.com/jodorowsky/dunestory.html

[Rabrrrrrr]

23. That's pretty damn weird

it sounds cool, but it has its moments of weird-ass 60s style faux-intellectualism, such as "non-laws of anti-logic". So much LSD-induced hyperbole that sounds deep if you're stoned and out of it, but means nothing if you are straight and have your faculties together.

But damn, I wish he could have made the movie. I'd love to see it!

[baldguy]

28. Ornithopers flap their wings.

and the sonic disrupter "weirding" modules - where did that come from?

Lynch's Dune sucked.

[MojoKrunch]

29. Oh man, the "weirding" guns... yea, forgot about those!

I was ok with ornithopters not wing flapping... the SFX budget obviously wasn't that big... just look at the horrible "blue eyes" for the Freman.
Ick.
Bad, bad, bad.

Mojo

[THUNDER HANDS]

7. LOTR

I never got Dune.

[WindRavenX]

10. LOTR

w00!

[Cat Atomic]

12. Dune.

It's such a well thought out universe.

[Salviati]

13. I'll have to go LOTR in a series to series match up...

but Dune takes all comers in a single book fight...

[kodi]

15. LOTR, the depth of pure literature in tolkien's work is unsurpassed in SF

the detailed histories, the languages of middle earth, all self consistant with their own grammars, imagry and characters grounded in fundamental archetypes of mythological dimenstions.

all done by a master craftsman who loved what he was doing.

dune is a good book, a great story, but it focused on using SF to illustrate current problems, and while it certainly was like LOTR in using achetypical characters and contexts, it dealt more with how the arhetypes moved in a futuristic society. LOTR stayed home so to speak and was really the stuff of myths itself.

thanks for the jog, i am about to watch TTT .

BTW the sci fi channels dune and children of dune series are excellent, i have both dvds and they are much better than lynch's dune.

[Leados]

18. I disagree

I think the Dune series was much more interesting than that of LOTR. Perhaps its just my geekiness, but the incredibly complexity of Dune (a feint within a feint, etc.) is just so much better than Gandalf and the Valar (although the Silmarillon was awesome also). Especially awesome is how Leto finally manages to finish himself off. Good stuff.

[Khephra]

19. Welcome to DU Leados!

Thanks for making my thread one of your early ones!

(I got suckered into posting here by a Babylon 5/Bush Admin thread. ;-) )

[kodi]

20. yes, perhaps you are right, apparently it is your geekiness

the complexity of a particular situation about spice, who has it, who wants, and how they get it may be fascinating, as well as paul's son doing the leto shuffle in leto, god emperor of dune, but it is pretty shallow compared to the monumental reinterpretation of fundamental archetypical characters and themes in an entirely consistent fantasy world replete with detailed histories and geneologies, completely original and internally consistent languages, and epic storylines.

LOTR is not, nor was it intended as a statement about anything. it was written to be a good story in the tradition of ancient stories which people heard as they sat around the hearth or campfire.

tolkien was a world recognized master and expert in this field of literature.

i can imagine LOTR being retold as a spoken tale and myth alongside of story of gilgamesh, the illiad, odyssey and the aeneid. i do not consider dune to be capable of enjoying such company.

it is because the details of the dune books are as important as the story itself. if the details are stripped away there is essentially little story there compared to LOTR.

nevertheless, to me, dune ranks third in the genre behind LOTR, and star maker by olaf stapledon.

great no doubt, but not greatest.

[Ramsey]

21. Dune, if books

The Dune books in my humble opinion are among the best books ever written by human beings. LOTR are also excellent, but Dune has a class in itself.

Now if we are talking movies, even if you take the SciFi version as opposed to the idiotic David Lynch version, (my undying lust for both Kyle MacLachlan and Sting notwithstanding), then LOTR wins hands down.

[Elidor]

24. Tough Choice

Both of them are excellent. The Dune series (print) has some great moments. (Sci-Fi Channel's version was nice, and was made doubly so by not having Sting in the cast.) I thought God Emperor was especially depraved and witty. The most cynical character ever created.

LOTR is better, however. The consistency of the world-view and the intricacies of multi-racial geopolitics, history and war set against the richly detailed epic quest of nine companions at the end of the world. You can argue with Tolkein's somewhat effusive prose, but his characters come to life in a way that Herbert can only aspire to. Where Herbert is cold and clinical, Tolkein is warm and green.

Dune has geopolitics, to be sure (Oil and Islam), and it's rich in detail, but many of the characters are far removed from our sympathy. It's hard to know who to root for when everyone is irredeemably evil and misguided. Dune is a series of collective downers that chronicle the incredible slide of a society into the depths of hell.

LOTR is ultimately uplifting and positive. Triumph in the face of incredible adversity, against all odds. Friendship and teamwork. What's not to love?

[Rashind]

25. Dune for books, Dune for movies, Lynch version.

Not knocking LOTR, but I always really liked the Lynch version. If you don't compare it to the book it's an awesome movie.

The books are amazing, though. Chapterhouse:Dune was the longest orgasm I've ever had.

[jus_the_facts]

26. how can anybody say they both suck is beyond me...

.....but I'm biased...they're both exceptional..but have to say I liked LOTR best! :)

[DoNotRefill]

27. Other...

they're both excellent. Different from each other, but excellent.