I was thinking further about Dune last night, and realised that the story has one major difference with basically every other story - there are no "good guys". Try and think of one group who are the "good guys". There is a good individual here and there, but even most individuals have very obvious flaws. The elite range from "overtly evil" (Harkonens) to "have good intentions but fall into evil" (Paul). Even the Fremen themselves, the common people whose interests are supposed to be being defended, are evil, as they're ultimately willing and enthusiastic about engaging in a jihad against the universe. And almost everyone, either elite or common, does what they do under the direct or indirect influence of the witch-nuns of the Bene Gesserit, who are undoubtably evil.Took my two oldest boys to see Dune 2 over the weekend. They never go to the cinema, largely because of the cost but also because there's no reason to, all modern movies are crap. So the one probably epic movie to come out in a long time was worth going to see, and it didn't disappoint - mostly. It was as well made and epic as anticipated, cinematically it's a great film.
There was one annoying change from the book regarding the relationship between Paul and his women. But this specific change was done to more clearly emphasise that Paul is NOT a hero and is actually slipping into evil by the end of the story, a subtlety that could easily be missed otherwise, so it's forgivable.
If you're looking for a good movie to see, that isn't preachy wokeness but just a story told well, I can thoroughly recommend it. There is one tiny hint of a sex scene as you see Paul and Chani in bed together very obviously a few seconds after they've been busy, but they are entirely modest - the filmmakers have wisely avoided overt sexual content to make their potential audience as wide as possible.
There's a good article on it and tonnes of memes over at Not the Bee:
View attachment 6555"Dune 2" had a banger of a weekend and I'm here to review the film with the spiciest memes
Dat spice be flowin'!notthebee.com
This makes the story far more compelling than any other simplistic Hollywood script, which is usually a bunch of "goodies" fighting a bunch of "baddies". And it is far more realistic, as in the secular world around us there are really no "goodies" either, the elite on all sides are evil to a greater or lesser extent, and the commoners are also to the extent that they are willing to go along with the plans of the elite and even kill to advance those plans.
And in reality, each individual is simply pursuing their own interests. The combination of many individuals pursuing their own interests, interests which happen to take them in a similar direction, creates a current of movement which is almost unstoppable as it has no single leader who can be stopped. Every individual in it is compelled to travel in that direction for their own reasons, remove one "leader" and the flood will continue and produce another. How do you stop the flood? Paul is irresistibly drawn towards jihad because the whole of society is primed to move in that direction, he just happens to be positioned as a leader at that time. Sure the flow was begun by secretive individuals - the Bene Gesserit - but once begun even they couldn't stop it. Even killing the apparent leader Paul would not have stopped the jihad.
We see the same in the world around us. Our whole society is being drawn towards a form of bureaucratic fascism, centralisation of power, using excuses like "democracy", "global warming", "diversity" and so forth. How do you stop it? Everyone who is in a position to do something about it is themselves drawn in the same direction. Everyone in authority would need "power" of some form in order to change the direction of flow. But the only way they can gain more power is to go along with the flow, because the flow is growing the entire bureaucratic machine and giving more power to every individual in it. Sure this may have been triggered by some secretive individuals originally, and be still prodded along by them, but what they have started is a deep current that is very difficult for anybody to even steer, let alone reverse.
As the Reverend Mother Gaius said to Jessica at the end of the movie "You of all people should know that there are no sides".