And Lynch's Dune looks like it does, probably in no small part due to Jodorowsky, Giger and Mobius.
I recommend everyone interested in Dune to take a look at Jodorowsky's Dune [0], the documentary which explains how they did the preproduction of Dune, and pitched it to the studios. All the deals eventually fell through, but the pitch decks circulated all the studios for years afterwards, and inspired countless other movie makers.
The best things about the new Dune installments imo is the art, but all, or most of it feels like copy pasted ideas from what came before them. CGI is a huge asset to actually get it working though.
Mœbius probably has the greatest influence to obscurity ratio of any artist I can think of - his fingerprints are on so, so many things - and irony of ironies Jodorowsky’s Dune was probably one of the greatest catapults for further promulgating his aesthetic into the mainstream through the vessel of Giger. I doubt Giger would have been Giger without their collaboration on Dune. The unmade movie penetrates the popular psyche.
I remember finding Metal Hurlant and The Incal at a vide grenier in France as a kid, well before the days of the web, and just being blown away by the visions of this guy - only years later did I realise that I wasn’t alone in that sentiment. He’s the unseen foundation on which so much has been built. A creator’s creator, if you like.
If you love the Moebius asthetic and are a gamer, do yourself a favor and checkout Sable. The game perfectly captures the vibe and spirit of his works, and was just a joy to play. [0]
>the first season has a 100% approval score with an average rating of 8.7/10, based on 22 critic reviews.
>Andrew Webster of The Verge deemed it to be "equal parts beautiful and brutal, and it might be the most original piece of science fiction of the year"
>In May 2024, the series was canceled by Max
This is so confusing. Making good art must not be profitable.
The problem is the schism of media. If I already have 3 streaming service providers but the greatest show on earth is only watchable on "kufuzu neon plus", I'm just not going to watch it.
Consumers care more about convenience. What they should have done is to integrate into Netflix, stop worrying about exclusive premiere content, and instead focus on outcompeting the others in a common marketplace.
Instead they all conspired to fall on netflix like a pack of hyenas, rip off whatever chunks they could get and then retreat to their dens to enjoy the spoils.
So yeah, screw them. If you're a creative, don't sell your original valuable ideas to companies that are not built on original valuable ideas.
Be warned it wasn’t renewed for a second season, it didn’t have enough people talking about and watching. The creators do have something new going on, called “Common Side Effects”.
The most relevant artists aren't those best regarded by popular audiences or critics, but the ones that do the most to inspire and influence other artists. Both Moebius and Lynch are huge in that regard.
This specifically reminded me of how many popular genre fiction writers point to Gene Wolfe as an inspiration and influence, while he still remains unknown to the fans of these popular writers' work.
+1 for Jodorowsky's Dune. It's a fascinating study of "the greatest sci fi movie never made". You can see its DNA in Star Wars, Bladerunner, Alien and more.
I hope some day Moebius and Jodorowsky's storyboards are published in the public domain
Regardless of whether the storyboards are in the public domain, I'm sure that someone will eventually "make" Jodorowsky's Dune using AI tools. Feed in the artwork, novels, and actors to get a complete movie out. This will be technically possible within a few years. It will probably look good (at least for casual viewing) but the human performances will still seem a little odd.
I'm not claiming that this will necessarily be a good thing from an artistic or legal perspective. But there are enough Dune fans out there with access to AI video tools that someone will eventually do it.
I'd definitely be more interested in seeing the storyboard than the AI generated movie. I guess that says something about how I/we value of AI generated content
Lynch Dune is so underrated. The creativity on display was immense. The new Dune movies have amazing craftsmanship but feel as if they were generated by AI, almost every move and visual predictable.
Lynch hated Dune. Lynch's name is removed from the credits of the original cut (replaced with Alan Smithee) because it's so embarrassing. It's still a Lynch movie, so it's interesting to watch. I would not call it underrated.
The tempo of the movie is completely off, and no cut has been able to fix that. The characters and scenes just run trough the story.
Lynch wanted Salvador Dali to design the set. Instead he had to reuses the set from the Conan the Destroyer (Richard Fleischer, 1984).
He didn't even get the music he wanted and that's big part of his movies.
You got most of your facts mixed up. Lynch's name proudly sits on top of the theatrical cut, the only cut he supervised. Alan Smithee is used for all other cuts, since he supervised none of those and refuses, as is his right, not to be credited for a cut he didn't watch himself.
> Instead he had to reuses the set from the Conan the Destroyer
My understanding is that Conan reused Dune sets, not the other way round. The Dune sets were extremely intricate and expensive, and are definitely one of the few highlights of the film.
> He didn't even get the music he wanted and that's big part of his movies.
Not sure how Toto ended up doing the music for that film. That film was an absolute mess.
Lynch hated Dune because DeLaurentis meddled with it so hard (Jodorowsky famously said they only way Lynch could have made a movie so bad, is if the producers ruined it).
I don't know ... I think it's 'properly rated'. The movie is deeply flawed but it has stayed in public consciousness and is (fondly) remembered. The first half is pretty good. The second half is a total mess and makes the entire plot, characterization and pacing unsalvageable. The visual art style is generally great, but there are some glaring misses.
Ever notice how much it looks like Lucas directly took the Dune 1984 imagery of the landing on Arrakis and turned it into the Trade Federation landing on Naboo?
For me the best film of recent years is Hundreds of Beavers - not because it will revolutionise cinema or human thought, but because it was clearly made by people who love what they are doing and had nothing to lose but a tiny budget, so went absolutely hogswild on the creativity. It fills me with joy.
There is an argument to be made that the new movies are better visually than they are as a complete package. That was certainly my reaction the first time through #1. I now am inclined to think that's not really fair and I do think they're clearly the best entries in the Dune movie list.
>The new Dune movies have amazing craftsmanship but feel as if they were generated by AI
Except for Arrival which owes a lot of its humanism to Ted Chiang's source material that's something that I've noticed about Villeneuve's work. Technically well made but there's something inhuman and cold about how he writes characters and scenes, as if they're surgically made. I think it really stands out too if you watch the old and new Blade Runner back to back.
What I sense with the Nolan films that I've watched is that he packs a lot into the runtime, even accounting for how they generally are long films to start with. He has to be very efficient with how he uses the time, every shot and dialogue carries some information that is useful in some way, there's little spare space or idling. In a way I wonder if it's a bit deliberate to overwhelm the view a little on the first viewing so they can't take it all in and analyze as they go so late revelations have the impact they do, if it was spaced out as a TV series the writing would need to adjust.
I’m a big fan of Lynch’s Dune. Have you seen the Spicediver fan edit? That’s quite fun, too. (It was hanging out on YT for the longest time, but the Villeneuve Dune sort of muscled it off the platform.)
That’s such a great way to put it. Maybe I’ve just seen TOO many films, but there’s a modern homogeneity in big budget films that is installed as safety guardrails so that audiences aren’t too turned off. It’s visual predictable. I like that. Lynch said bollocks to that.
> there’s a modern homogeneity in big budget films
A lot of that is due to the nature of studios milking franchise properties like the MCU or SW. Directors of big budget films are now often selected to be a caretaker of one franchise episode. They inherit a pre-existing style from the franchise while also having a bunch more 'input' (aka supervision) from an army of executive producers who work across more than one film and are focused on "don't fuck up the franchise."
Another part of the modern decline in the diversity of cinematic looks is from the economics of streaming. Streamers like Netflix, Apple and Prime are focused on risk reduction by funding either "big name star" properties where the stars make more by being their own executive producers or "big name IP" properties with built-in audiences from books, games, etc. In neither instance is the director usually a central element in packaging the deal. The role of these directors is to be more of a journeymen shepherd like Marquand than a visionary like Lynch, Kubrick or Coppola.
It's a worrying trend because many "bankable name" directors like Lynch whose name at the top of the movie poster could guarantee an audience are dying and not being replaced by new directors that have broad name recognition.
As it turns out, having just one blockbuster sci-fi franchise wherein Anya Taylor Joy fights Milk Boys in the sand is not enough for the 21st century. Villeneuve needed an Anya Taylor Joy Milk Boy sand fight sci-fi blockbuster he could call his own.
I wonder if it might also be tech related. Like how aaa games these days all have the same “default unreal engine look” thanks to its out-of-box settings being good enough to not motivate further tinkering, your run-of-the-mill Hollywood big budget action films also use the same de-facto default equipment and out-of-box setups?
I think there is a lot to be said about the technology factor to it. On the movie side special effects heavy stuff is still largely the wall-to-wall green or blue screen sound stages. Motion capture and motion tracking tools have all got insanely good so studios can do a lot more than say in the days of Lucas' Star Wars prequels (which were notorious wall-to-wall green screen films of their era), but also the budgets and time constraints and "crunch" still provide a lot of barriers to how well the digital/analog integration is and the overall look of all the effects. Also, there's only so many ways to light a green or blue soundstage so that things are readable and you don't get extra ugly color spill that the special effects have to work even harder to remove. (I think the base lighting options being so mostly homogeneous is a subtle but huge factor in the overall things always feeling that way. Differences in lighting have always been one of the biggest "cinematic languages".)
Special Effects houses working on those sorts of movies are probably using heavier, slower renderers than Unreal Engine today, but given the average life span of an effects house is still appallingly close to 2 years and scenes scattered across 1.5 movies, those renderers are still generally off-the-shelf or borrowed from other companies. Industrial Light and Magic is about the only effects house that no one wants to kill, so also becomes something of a homogenizing factor in whatever tools it white labels for sale/rents to other effects houses. Disney owning ILM seems to be like an obvious factor that almost everyone working on an MCU film is trying to rent or ape the ILM house style at all times.
It's also interesting that right now TV can't afford as much time with the motion tracking/motion capture tools and studio spaces of wall-to-wall green screen, so in the effects heavy shows we're seeing a lot more experimentation, some of which I'd argue look better than the movies currently. For big instances, right now ILM's TV efforts with The Volume (and CBS Paramount's copycat AR Wall and other studios have copycats now too) are fast changing the look of TV. Because these LED walls are their own light source which dynamically reflects what the background should be doing it seems like there's a ton more options for lighting scenes in these rooms/volumes/spaces or doing shots that would be tricky or expensive even with how great motion tracking and motion capture have gotten. Of course the trade-off there is that the real-time background rendering requires a rendering engine more in the vein of Unreal Engine, and allegedly in most cases is definitely Unreal Engine, so "default unreal engine look" starts to apply literally to background elements in TV shows.
It's not just CGI, background replacement and other effects work. Some cinematographers have been noting that the increasingly flat, uninspiring look of much modern content is partly due to the amazing dynamic range of modern camera imagers as well as HDR production workflows. While wonderful, this also enables a kind of laziness (or expediency) when shooting. You don't have to specially light many scenes as much (or at all) as long as there's enough ambient light. While this can enable styles like cinema verite to be higher-quality, it also lets film-makers just go with ensuring there's enough flat light overall and call it good enough. Intentional lighting is hard and time-consuming but it's also one of the most expressive visual elements of film-making.
Another factor is that dramatic lighting tends to dance closer to the edge in terms of quality. Lighting a high contrast scene with inky blacks in one area and your hero elements in moody shadow means that those very dark areas are at risk of slipping into the floor of imager noise. The same is true when there are extremely bright elements near the upper-bound of clipping. While modern imagers and HDR capture give film-makers more latitude than ever to avoid these problems, perversely, the same luxuries seem to be making younger film-makers less skilled, or at least less confident, in their ability to dance close to the edges of too dark or too bright.
Newer post-production color grading tools also enable new degrees of what's possible to "just fix in post." Once again, this is wonderful when we need to fix a mistake or for amateur and hobby productions which don't have the time, budget, gear or even knowledge to do creative lighting. The downside is it creates an ever-present temptation when under time and/or budget pressure to take the shortcut and just bounce a key light off the ceiling and a fill off the wall and call it done. It's sad because modern imager sensitivity and battery-powered, micro-sized lighting instruments now make it easier, cheaper and faster than ever to do intentional lighting at a Vittorio Storaro level. Storaro might spend half a day with a crew of six gaffers lighting one scene that a four person indie crew could largely recreate today in an hour with $1k of lights, clamps and stands from Amazon.
That's a great example of each director being given too much freedom, or alternatively, creating a trilogy sequel without writing the story beforehand. I have no idea how they managed or allowed to mess that up so bad. It feels like they were just winging it, a creative outlet more than making up for the interesting choices they made in the prequels or the backdrop of the next decade of a multi-billion merchandise franchise.
To be fair, the original trilogy winged it just as much, including a very similar pattern of writer and director shifts with the original director coming back for the third part as a last minute fill-in, and a lot of people at the time complained Empire Strikes Back to Ewoks was a tonal shift as bad or worse than people complain about Last Jedi and Return of the Jedi.
Contrary to all of George's talk of a "grand plan", Star Wars was always an adventure serial where winging it was the plan. (Also, George's "grand plan" itself still cracks me up as a kid who guessed to much of it reading the weird novelization, especially since Ars Technica got him to admit to it. Have you heard about the Whills?)
For me the nadir was the prequel series although I also think The Phantom Menace poisoned the well for the other two which weren't terrible. The more recent films have been a mixed bag with them generally being better the further they are from the original story arc.
For me at least, there's also a certain fatigue factor. While I like The Mandalorian and Rogue One, I'm pretty much done with the franchise. See also Star Trek and MCU. That said, I know that there are a lot of fans who will take pretty much anything you throw out even if they like to belly-ache about it.
the entire sequence of scenes on Giedi Prime were far from visually predictable. Denis is a master and flexed it a number of times in Dune. i think a fair take is Dune 1 and 2 are doing more creatively than any other big budget blockbuster franchise has since Avatar 1
Giedi Prime was the only sequence that held me transfixed during the movie. Funny, I was considering mentioning it as an exception with my first comment lest someone point it out.
Inception would be another one that springs to mind, I notice that came out the year after Avatar, although I think Inception probably took it's lead from the Matrix.
if i throw out the "franchise" qualifier then Nolan's a great example of visual novelty in big budget blockbusters. i enjoyed TENET more than anyone ive met
I think Tenet could be enjoyable in the same way that Primer is enjoyable, but I found it unwatchable at the time I tried to watch it. I'm sure if I watched it at the right time I would like it.
It was gladiator in black and white with the contrast cranked to 11. Take away the overexposure and … just like everything else the sci fi bad guys build in the last three decades of film. The Lynch Giedi Prime was terrifying.
But that’s probably because I’ve been watching sci fi films for fifty years.
First it’ll be animation upscaling. Using the current season of The Simpson, South Park, Toy Story 4 along with the first season or movie as a controlnet. Then will come applying an aesthetic like Star Wars or Mad Max to an extinct movie.
This is so true. The recent films and the spinoff series all look like his Dune.