A lot of the action scenes, especially later in the movie, felt pretty weak to me. I get that the Fremen are supposed to be the scariest fighters around, but they steamroll everything
so effortlessly that it actually weakened the ending for me; the Great Houses show up and I couldn't help but think "so?" Like, what are they going to do? Land on the ground, pull out swords, and get mauled like everyone else?
Feyd-Rautha doesn't get enough screen time or cool moments to be an interesting or intimidating villain. His main accomplishments are killing three dudes in an arena, two of them being drugged, and then bombing the sietches in a way that mostly just made me confused as to why they didn't do that sooner. Didn't feel like he was significant enough to deserve the final fight. Yes, he's very creepy and evil, but how does that make him different from every other Harkonnen we've seen so far? They
tell us that he's smart, but they don't put in the work to show it.
The Fremen presumably have, like, actual cities and industries somewhere? But we don't really get to see that, and I think that hurts the vibe a lot. The sietches look more like big sepulchral temples or something rather than somewhere anyone actually lives. Actually, it feels like we
only see the Fremen culture in a religious or war-fighting context. I get that those are big aspects of their culture, but come on, it's an entire planet of people. There's got to be more to them than that.
...The Fremen don't use shields. The Harkonnens
know the Fremen don't use shields, because they've been fighting them for ages. The Harkonnens apparently have shielded ornithopters with machine guns, and one of them comes pretty close to killing Paul. Maybe go all-in on those? Instead of having foot soldiers slowly patrol around your giant harvester robots, waiting to get stabbed...
Look, I get that the setting is designed to make swords the weapon of choice. So the Sardaukar obviously use swords. And they're in unfamiliar territory and unable to use shields of their own, so they're at a big disadvantage. But can't they at least... fight in formation, or something? Watching them just kind of run across the sand in a disorganized mass and get cut down in seconds was downright comical. Are they
supposed to not be taken seriously as a threat...?
Honestly, I have no idea if these complaints are reasonable. Paul's unstoppable, possibly predestined rise to power and the fact that the Fremen are just that much stronger than the decadent Empire may be the entire point. But there's an awful lot of time and budget put into these battle scenes... If the Fremen are supposed to be unstoppable, maybe spend less time showing me faceless soldiers getting stabbed in sandstorms and more time making me care about the Fremen as a people, and Feyd and the Emperor as villains.
Originally Posted by Eurus
Saw this the other day, and... I don't think I liked it as much as the first one, and I think like 80% of that comes from the action scenes. There were parts I liked a lot, and I really enjoyed most of the character-driven moments, but a lot of the action just did not work for me, and there was a lot that I felt was missing, even though I haven't read the books so I don't know what specifically was left out.
Re: Dune II
Tali avatar by the talented Thormag.
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