Key Points
Lost in Translation: Does Denis Villeneuve's Dune series live up to Frank Herberts vision?..
Most reviews of Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two so far have been generous, to say the least..
Perhaps it would have been better if the text was adapted as a series extending over a period of time, for a sudden plunge into the water-pumping and tear-tasting world of Arrakis elicited many laughs from the audience, who could only read Fremen's obsessive act of preserving water as some kind of water fetish (the scene where Stilgar tells Jessica to hold her vomit calls for a Freudian reading)..
Because of such gaps in context, the sacred waters water collected from the body of the dead that hold the key to changing the entire topography of the planet (and simultaneously reshaping the intergalactic power dynamics with curbed production of spice) fall flat on the screen..
Towards the end of Villeneuve's Dune, when Paul has to choose between his mother and his girl (a choice which is depicted all too easy for him), it is implied how he could have turned his fate if only he had not chosen the fascist path that his grandfather walked on, and simply took a backseat to the prophecy...
