I Can't Stop Rewatching Dune (now on Hulu)

0:01 Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, Dan Bettimore. I'm a producer, writer of film and television and now a podcast producer. And despite having every streaming service, I never know what to watch. So anytime I watch something good, I talk about it on the show. This way, you'll never have the same problem I do. I watched this tonight. There's always something good to watch. Let's get started. Today in the show, we're talking about why I can't stop watching Dune. So the trailer for the new Dune, the Second Dune, came out relatively recently, and Dune has gone from I think it's on HBO right now, it's on available on Hulu. And I realized that, like anytime I see the Dune is available somewhere, if I see that it's on HBO, if I see it's on Hulu, if I see this anywhere, I'm just like, let me throw a Dune on. And I'm trying to figure out why I've seen it at this point, probably like six times, and I'm trying to understand why I keep rewatching it, and I feel like it's gaining in power for me the more times I watch it, to the point that it might be one of my favorite, you know, in terms of like blockbusters. I mean that was the other thing I was trying to think about, like the highest grossing films of recent years. What's better than Dune in terms of being like,

1:34 you know, I don't like the term elevated, but it's just like something that has real weight and real substance and real Like if someone watches this in forty years and they have no you know, they don't really care about any marble stuff or anything like that, Like they're still going to get something out of it. So if you go back to twenty twenty one, the highest grossing movies domestic box office, you've got Spider In, Shang Chi, Venom, Black Widow, Fast Nine, Eternals, So all sort of I think, just to be fair, right, like these are franchise ip I don't think people are gonna be watching Fast nine in like twenty five years.

2:15 No Disrespect, No Time to Die, which I thought was really good, A Quiet Place Part two, which I also thought was good, but I feel like it's sort of receded from the public consciousness. I gotta go back and revisit it. And then you get into movies like Jungle Cruise and Free Guy, Godzilla Versus Kong. You know again, these are movies that I don't think will I don't think we'll stand the test of decades, and then Dune Part one. Now compare that to twenty twenty two. Here are the top grossing films domestically, Top Gun, Maverick, Awesome Movie, Black Panther, Willkona Forever, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, Avatar, The Way of Water, Touristic World, Dominion, Minions, The Rise of Crew, The Batman, Thor Love and Funder spider Man, No Way Home, Sound Like The Hedgehog two, Black Adam, Elvis Uncharted, and you kind of have to go all the way down to Nope to find something that I think, you know, it just feels like it's not one of these ip films that you know, I think most of them will probably be forgotten in like five to seven years. And that's obviously not including Avachar The Way of Water, which I have professed my love for on this podcast before. And then just to sort of round out this comparison, so twenty twenty three, here of the top grossing movies so far. The super Mayer Brothers Movie, Guardens the Galaxy Volume three, Avachar, The Way of Water Again, Spider Man Across the Spider Verse, The Little Mermaid, Ant Man in the Waton, Quantamania, John Wyck, Chapter four, Creed three, Fast X, Puss in Boots, The Last Wish, Scream six, Megan Dungeons and Dragons,

3:46 Transformers, Rise of the Beast, Evil Dead, Rise, Cocaine Bear, A man called Auto says a fear of the God's air. So I think if you look at the last couple of years, So I just kind of rattled off, like, like thirty movies there were the top grossing movies of the last three years approximately. I think I would take the First Dune pretty much over all of those in terms of its staying power, not necessarily to say, like again, it's not not going to any of these movies, right, but I'm just thinking, like, you know, is anybody watching again, No disrespect the Fast and Furious people. I get it. I loved Fast five, Like, there's a lot of Fast and Furious stuff that I really like, But I don't think people are going to be watching Fast X like six times and puzzling over it. And that's what I find myself continue to do a Dune. I've not read the source materials. For me, that's part of it is that I what interests me about it is that it feels so rich. I feel like there's so much there, and when I rewatch it, I feel like I keep finding stuff. There's something in it where Timothy Challamy talks in the beginning about how he's having these dreams, and you feel like him as the viewer, because this is what I think is so interesting about Dune, and it's very much I think a product of Villanev's involvement, Deny villani of It feels like a dream, but it doesn't feel like a dream in like that kind of shitty like this is just confusing, like there's bad versions of that where something feels like a dream.

5:10 This feels like a dream in a way that adds to it because it also feels grounded. And to explain what I mean, when you see the spaceships in Dune and how they are designed and animated and shown you visually, they're design in a way that's very smooth, very naturalistic. It's not calling attention to itself, and it makes it almost feel like like a magical realism, like you feel it feels more real because they don't make a big deal out of it, and they don't kind of overdo it. If anything, the design of the spaceships feels very grounded in like form and function, and I just I just find it very interesting the way they did that. The movie is a mixture of like mysticism and reality, has this weird mystical quality to it. And I thought another good example that so the Skellon Scars guard character, who you know, I assume might have inspired Job of the Hut.

6:03 It's pretty well documented that George Lucas is very inspired by the Dune series, and tattooing is a bit like Aracus. The sand worms are a bit like the sand worms, I mean, And so do you have this Scone Scars character who is basically this extremely fat villain character. That's the character, and in Star Wars that's Job of the Hut, who's very cartoonish. But in Dune, the way that the character is portrayed is very It's treated very seriously, right, and because it's treated seriously and in a way that's sort of grounded in reality, you start thinking about it differently and it almost becomes this visual metaphor for greed and brutal capitalism to like a gluttonist degree. And again that dreamy quality. Right, So there's a part when he's talking and he just levitates as he's talking, but like for no real reason. That's one of the funny things when you watch the movie five six times, Why is he levitating? It's very cinematic. But again it's that thing where it's like in the moment, you sort of go with it. That's that dream equality.

7:09 Another point that like that, and this is with the Hearkenin's which is part of Skull and Scars Guards like faction. He has this insane spider gimp creature that's never explained. I gotta look up. I've no idea if that's part of the source material or what. But the fact that that's just like a tossed off aside, that they have this creature that's like a pet, it's like insane. But that's what I'm talking about. That's why it's so fun to revisit this movie. All the little weird visual things, all the subtlety of it, all the things that are suggested, implied, alluded to. There's so much going on under the surface and it feels so rich, you know it does. I mean, obviously it is rich. It's based on such rich source material, and it is so visually spectacular. That's the other thing I would say is that every frame of this movie is like a painting. There's a part where they have this spaceship that looks like a giant thimble basically, and these little dots are emerging from it and they're tiny like specs, right, and we tilt up towards a planet that is sort of behind them, And that one shot is doing so much because we know that we eventually know that those ships are huge. Those ships are little specs, which means that the carrier thing that they're coming out of is like almost it's almost impossible to comprehend how big it is. So there's that, and then you have the light in dark contrast of the darkness of space versus the planet, and that's all happening in the same shot. And there's just so much like that in the movie that I think it is a really just enjoyable for me to revisit. I find myself just throwing it on as like almost like

8:43 wallpaper, Like I just like looking at it, I like hearing it. I like the sort of like if you put the subtitles, they call it lamentation, where you hear the voices. Ah All, that's the whole mood of it. I mean, obviously, look, I am technically North African. My parents were Wren, Morocco, so you know, the Fremen very clearly our bedwins. You know, I have some cultural history that that might explain some of it. But I think that as time has passed, I've continued to be more and more impressed with the First Dune, and I think it's it's reached a place for me where I think it's one of the best blockbuster movies, meaning like big, big movie, theatrical lots of money, a huge budget, etc. Best movies like that, not just the year came out, but in the last couple of years. And that's why I mentioned all those other movies because with some exceptions, to be clear, definitely there's some exceptions in there, but a lot of those movies are movies that will be lost, I think, to the sands of time, and I don't think that this one will be so yeah, that's why I've just been it's a it's a watch this tonight of like you never have movies where you're like, I liked it the first time, and then I just found myself continue to watch it again and and again, and each time I kind of like it a little bit more. It's that kind of recommendation. So if for some reason you didn't see Dune, or maybe you saw it but like not under ideal circumstances, like you're in a bad mood that day, or you watch it on your TV in the middle of the day or something, I really would encourage you to turn the lights off, watch it again.

10:18 And I think there's so much there. So yeah, it's sort of a weird and it's not a new thing, and it's not a classic, but I think within the next couple of years, you know, this will be considered a modern classic. I just think it's extraordinary. I would love to know what you think if you saw Dune the New Dune, I mean, what you think, And I would love to know your thoughts on the upcoming second film, which I'm very excited about. That is a show for a day. As always, if you enjoy the show, please leave me a five star review and Apple Podcasts that's the best way to support the podcast and You can always find me at Benamardan on Twitter, watch This Tonight on Instagram, watch This Tonight podcast on TikTok, or you can join our Facebook group. Thank you for listening, Until next time, by m