Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Why I Have Hope For Dune" video.

@shawngillogly6873 "Show me a revolutionary and I'll show you a closet aristocrat." Herbert had a much bigger story to tell, and a lot of people lost interest after the first installment, where the good guys win and Paul is made Emperor. I think it all holds together very well until possibly the last installment, published after his death, by his kid and a co-writer (Poul Anderson's kid). The prequels which came along later are faithful to the canon, but much weaker than the original DUNE, itself. Lots of people don't "get" God Emperor of DUNE," but I think it's possibly the best of the bunch, tying everything together in a nice critique of human nature and political power. The PURPOSE of Leto II's empire was its destruction, and the MANNER of its destruction (and Leto II's death), the development in humanity that Leto II was aiming at, was key to humankind's survival against the return of the machines. Leto II didn't know how it all would end up, millennia after his demise. He just knew that if he departed in any way from his Golden Path, that the end of all human life was inevitable. It wasn't that the Golden Path was all that GREAT. It was that all other paths he used his prescience to explore, led inevitably to human extinction.
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@nicholasleclerc1583 Well, if you're going to deny that Paul and Leto II were actually prescient, then why did you even bother reading past the first book? Paul and Leto II both saw the extinction of humanity within a few thousand years. Paul lacked the ruthlessness to do what was needed. Leto II, born a Fremen, had the necessary ruthlessness. It cost him his humanity, but as the books tell it, humanity DID survive, due to Leto II's sacrifice. Of COURSE it's fiction. And I really enjoyed Herbert's systematic dissection of theocracy, monarchy, and even representative republicanism. How they all start out with the/a good idea, but time and human nature always find a way to corrupt them, assuming they weren't corrupt from the word "Go." Leto II's main message was "Humanity will NEVER AGAIN put all its trust and faith in one leader, after what I'm gonna do to 'em." He WANTED to be overthrown, and it took 4,000 years for humanity to find its way around him, an eventuality that he met with great joy, hope - and utter despair for himself. He NEEDED a Delilah (Hwi Noree) to bring him down, and he embraced her arrival with all his heart, because she proved humanity's next stage of evolution had been achieved. Anyway, I thought the entire series did Asimov's Foundation saga one better, although if you're familiar with Asimov's works, you see how he's wrestling with very much the same sorts of concepts and resolves them in very similar - and similarly unjustified - ways. None of these questions will be resolved in OUR lifetimes, but guys like Jordan Peterson are at least sketching the outlines of "What is the proper balance between the rights of the individual, the responsibility of the individual to the whole, and the responsibility of the whole to the rights of the individual?" There's a balance between the collectivist and the anarchist that each generation must strike. Most of human history consists of the surrender of the individual to the collective in some way, shape or form, to the detriment of the individual and the collective. Historically, it's fear of outside threats, but at various times, internal threats - like contagion or the Jews - serve as the rallying point for those who hunger for power over others.
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Actually, Paul does have to surrender to his feminine side in order to stand at the fulcrum between past and future. Before Paul, only women could survive the drug, and they could only use it to access the past through genetic memory.
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@viniciussardenberg706 Paul achieves functional omniscience and then dies of it, because he can't achieve his lofty goals without sacrificing his own moral compass. He's at the fulcrum, and cannot give without taking. In the books they say he "died of prescience."
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@erubin100 And without Leto II's tyranny and the eventual Scattering caused by it, Humanity would've become extinct.
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@mayoite160 The Fremen were supreme in that thing the Germans call "Spannungsbogen," which is the time between the ideation of a goal is worthy of seeking and the manifestation of that goal in reality, working for GENERATIONS with a single-minded purpose for the Greening of Arrakis. And to kid you a little bit, I share the one quote I can muster from the original Kynes: "Remove yourself." Uliet promptly fell on his knife, and was honored in the naming of Pardot Kynes's son, Liet-Kynes.
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@shawngillogly6873 It's pretty much a foregone conclusion throughout the 3rd book, "Children of Dune," and later confirmed in the 3rd book, if there remained any doubt, which few readers hold by that late stage.
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I thought the casting was terrible. Charles Durning as The Baron? Really? Ugh! Weirding modules? Really? Ugh! The Weirding Way was mind-over-body, control of every nerve and fiber martial art. Not a maguffin you wear around your neck and shoot people with.
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@withnailsghost9999 She could've punched his ticket with a maula pistol that first meeting, due to his lack of movement skills in the desert. But yeah. But if they could show his shield conditioning making him hesitate, which happened in his first actual fight against Jamis, it could be semi-OK. But Paul and Chani never fought, and Paul was never defeated in a 1-on-1 fight with any Fremen.
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@lukemaskarinec9970 It's more about our respect for the Hugo- and Nebula Award-Winning Book. I get the impression you haven't read many books. I read Dune with I was 13, and it was a totally immersive experience that I'll never forget and you will probably never experience, yourself.
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@JD-wb3pb She keeps him connected to reality, but at the same time, she's one who WANTS the jihad and doesn't understand why Paul holds back. One of his biggest disappointments is that she starts seeing him too much as the messiah and war-leader and loses sight of the man.
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@86zerueldososo64 Chani was WAY more ruthless than Paul, who in the later books proved to be too soft to make the tough choices necessary for human survival, even though his prescience clearly showed his chosen path to be a dead end. It was the Fremen piece of his own son, Leto II, guided in large part by Chani within, that put him on his Golden Path. Paul was too "civilized" to take such a brutal and ruthless path, because it would cost him his humanity and everything he loved. Leto II took that path, KNOWING where it would lead, and how excruciating and ignoble his own death would be at the end of it, some 4,000 years later.
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@DigitalCHET Arbitrary gender swap. Woke Trash Radar Blaring!
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@TheBelrick I can see where the MUSLIM Fremen culture would go against the grain!
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Frank Herbert took postmodernism out for a ride, took it to its logical conclusion, and got us all back to the Enlightenment in one tour de force saga.
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Pretty much my expectation. Mini-series for DUNE is about right. Not too short and not too long. It's just hard to get Hollywood to do ANY kind of Sci-Fi without messing it all up with their classic set-piece, Flash Gordon scenes that made a very good Jon Carter movie into something less good. Hollywood even BEFORE Hollywoke can't resist a totally vomitable costume ball. Why does the future always have to include impractical clothing and settings? *sigh*. It's like they never got past their High School theatrical production stage, at heart.
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Dune Messiah and Children of Dune are tough reads, especially for a younger audience. I was just old enough to hang through the classic Hero's Journey in the first book. You really have to dig deep to appreciate the later books, although after God Emperor, they become more formulaic and accessible, even for readers who don't pick up on the continuing themes.
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@baizuo_6246 Good point. But aren't you tired of movies being made by Sunday-School teachers who still think like Sunday-School teachers, despite denying God? "And here's where we put the 'Jesus loves you' message. Here's where the fat man is punished for his gluttony. Here's where the faithless one gets their comeuppance and we can put the quote from Ecclesiastics in..." Social/political messaging is pretty inescapable. Deranged messaging by lunatics, be they Christian Puritans or Woke Puritans is always non-entertaining.
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@jcb3393 Couldn't do it justice in one film. And whose idea were the "weirding modules," anyway? Made me gag.
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@danielrichwine2268 He was showing his readers the fatal flaws in ANY form of governance, even the most enlightened, by the nature of power and humans' greed for more.
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@Anoneemus Noename Hollywood is incapable of not fucking this up.
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I wanted to see an ugly lump of a man as Gurney Halleck. Somebody with a nasty inkvine scar, busted nose and cauliflower ears, like a light-heavyweight MMA fighter, with the soul of a poet. Didn't like the casting choice of Stewart.
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DUNE was a smash hit when it came out in '69/'70ish. Won all the big awards for sci-fi that year. Dune Messiah which followed, not so much. Fans didn't much like the de-construction of their hero.
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That's cool. Paul Atreides has received deep training in memory skills (Mentat training) single combat from two very unforgiving schools, total mind and body control, and military generalship his whole life. He's already a bad-ass with a world class education before the story begins.
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It is DEFinitely a classic hero's journey. They don't start de-constructing Paul until the next book.
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@justinsherman9350 You're wrong. If Paul had failed, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen would've been the one to lead the charge. Paul prevailed over Feyd-Rautha and then he refused to do the Sisterhood's bidding. The Sisters definitely had everything distilling down to a point, but the fact of the DUNE monopoly over the Spice and their successful harnessing of Desert Power meant that there was going to be a Holy Jihad, because the Fremen had the means to DESTROY the Spice, which all forces in the Imperium feared more than anything else. Paul was the biggest victory and the biggest defeat for the Sisterhood, who thought they'd be running everything, once they bred their Kwisatz Haderach. Paul took that away from them and his SON rubbed their noses in it for millennia!
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@OddityDK What did he play, a squire? Because ARCHERS were pretty buff. They HAD to be to draw a war bow.
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@azmc4940 When DUNE opens, Paul's an under-sized 15-year-old, from a family of 6-footers. I haven't seen anybody get that right, yet.
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@mish375 I would imagine someone trained by the BG's in prana bindu (nerve and fiber) would be someone much like a court guard from medieval China. Strong and wiry. Not movie-star muscle definition. Probably wouldn't look very tough, unless you saw the calluses on their fingers, toes, feet and knuckles, or you noticed they had pretty thick wrists for such a skinny guy, or you were still alive looking up at them after you got on their wrong side. Pound-for-pound strong, but not cage-fight strong, like MMA. And QUICK, with superb body control.
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@karencoyle3011 Chani and all Fremen were much better-trained to the rigors of the desert, silent passage through the rocks, and the non-rhythmic way of walking on the open sands, to fool the sandworms. But from the trailer, it already looks like they're taking it places Frank Herbert never did. The idea of a male Bene Gesserit being able to peer into the future, where women dare not, is probably a tough sell in feminist circles. We'll see how they handle that. My take on the Bene Gesserit is that their pursuit of their Holy Grail - a male Bene Gesserit - is pursued without regard for human cost, human rights or human progress. They basically run everything from behind the scenes and the best they could come up with was feudalism for the masses? Really? Within their own ranks, they have something like a democratic republic, informed by all their genetic memories and the ability to read each others' minds while Sharing. But as a practical matter, they treat their own sisters like serfs. All humanity must be subordinated to their One Goal, kind of like COVID-19 priests in our major institutions of today.
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@StudSupreme Long as we're talking male and female in the Dune saga, I'd like to point out that the most powerful and transcendent character in the whole story is Norma Cenva, who basically invented suspensor technology and made interstellar travel possible without "thinking machines." She is the main protagonist throughout, even though her presence isn't explicit until the later books, where she's revealed as The Oracle. Of course, Herbert (and his kids) make the final installment your basic, "trust your heart" Hollywood ending, where Duncan Idaho (with ALL his reincarnations inside of him), rather than DESTROYING machine intelligence, BONDS with it, for the betterment of human and machine civilization and the survival of both. I think the Oracle is the implacable foe of the machines from the prequels clear up to the end, when Daniel and Marty are revealed to be Omnius and Erasmus, respectively. Erasmus plays the female aspect "Marty," and "she" turns out to be the key to the eventual hybrid solution. The Oracle DOES, if I recall correctly, sit back and let Duncan Idaho decide. In the end, I think there's a clear recognition of strengths and weaknesses of masculine and feminine. Herbert, himself, takes jabs at both. Men fight their wars, while the women pick up the pieces. Leto II breeds a bad-ass female army of SHE-Men, on the grounds that females attach their loyalties to the leader more than their sisters in the ranks, AND women do not RAPE.
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@halmyrach Pretty much, Halmy.
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@fearlessfreap8093 Yes. You get it.
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@josephharwood4226 Yup. "Zensunni wanderers."
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@carldavies4776 Astute observation. Tyranny of the bureaucrats.
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