HypnoHub - Dune (Spoilers)

AcidPanic

11/07/21 11:45PM

Dune (Spoilers)

Just saw Dune (2021) and haven't yet read the books.

Thought it was quite good.

I couldn't help but notice that a very significant part of the plot revolves around the protagonist's and a religious order's ability to control people's actions (and possibly minds?) with their voices.

Seemed like it would be worth a forum post for those who are familiar with the series or saw the movie.

lifmcs

11/08/21 12:15AM

The movie's depiction of the Voice was really well done. Like, impressively so. I'd recommend seeing the film on the big screen regardless, but the couple of Voice scenes in it serve as nice little Easter eggs for us.

P.S. Obvious spoilers for one of the early scenes in question, but this <<youtu.be/GoAA0sYkLI0|Gom Jabbar scene breakdown>> was an interesting watch.

TheMadPrince

11/08/21 01:50PM

Could anyone maybe describe some of the uses in spoiler tags here? I haven't had time to check out the movie.

lifmcs

11/08/21 06:54PM

[spoiler=The Requested Spoilers]
* At breakfast, Paul's mother Lady Jessica pours them some water and exhorts him to use the Voice to make her give him the glass as practice. He has a go, and we see a dreamy visualization of her handing it too him, but in reality she was able to shrug it off and hands it to him of her own accord.

* One of the leaders of the Bene Gesserit comes to test Paul in the middle of the night. He is understandably incensed about getting woken up and brought before this stranger. The Reverend Mother is having none of his cheek though, and uses the Voice to make him come and kneel before her. They do a slick camera move from his perspective of him moving towards her and his awareness fading out, before a jump cut to him dropping to his knees in front of her.

* Paul and Jessica are being taken out into the desert in an ornithopter to be left for dead. Paul finally uses the Voice successfully to get one of the Harkonnen flunkies to un-gag Jessica, and then she makes short work of them with her much greater command of the Voice. She orders one to kill another and untie Paul, before the third tries to knife her. She commands that one to stop, give her the knife, and she sticks it back in him. Rebecca Ferguson was in full-on witch mode for this scene, and with the help of the audio effects it was really great stuff.
[/spoiler]

TheMadPrince

11/08/21 08:30PM

lifmcs said:
[spoiler=The Requested Spoilers]
* At breakfast, Paul's mother Lady Jessica pours them some water and exhorts him to use the Voice to make her give him the glass as practice. He has a go, and we see a dreamy visualization of her handing it too him, but in reality she was able to shrug it off and hands it to him of her own accord.

* One of the leaders of the Bene Gesserit comes to test Paul in the middle of the night. He is understandably incensed about getting woken up and brought before this stranger. The Reverend Mother is having none of his cheek though, and uses the Voice to make him come and kneel before her. They do a slick camera move from his perspective of him moving towards her and his awareness fading out, before a jump cut to him dropping to his knees in front of her.

* Paul and Jessica are being taken out into the desert in an ornithopter to be left for dead. Paul finally uses the Voice successfully to get one of the Harkonnen flunkies to un-gag Jessica, and then she makes short work of them with her much greater command of the Voice. She orders one to kill another and untie Paul, before the third tries to knife her. She commands that one to stop, give her the knife, and she sticks it back in him. Rebecca Ferguson was in full-on witch mode for this scene, and with the help of the audio effects it was really great stuff.
[/spoiler]

Much appreciated, kind sir or madam.

akaece

11/08/21 09:08PM

Haven't seen the movie, but I will say that it is maybe the lamest kind of mind control I've read in a book. I do have the (weirdly, to me) unpopular opinion that the book is shit in general, but "the voice" in particular is just the laziest get-out-of-jail card I've ever seen handed to a protagonist. If it was used for something other than that, or had any greater interesting implications of it explored when it was used, I might not think so. But in the half of the book I read before dropping it (which happens to line up pretty closely with where the movie apparently ends, actually,) all it did was break off the end of an act so that the protagonist could escape. All it has is a loose connection to the general theme of ascending past the modern picture of humanity to support it. And the victims didn't even react in a way that gave me a boner. Horrible!

lifmcs

11/08/21 09:38PM

"Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man."

I'm not here to debate Dune's place in the cannon of significant literary works, or say that the movie is worth seeing solely for the few MC scenes, but as a visual spectacle with solid acting, an intriguing world, and (sadly) an as yet incomplete story, Denis' version is hard to beat. YMMV though.

As for the Voice: [spoiler=more about one scene already discussed.]The way Paul and Jessica's escape is depicted in the movie, the Harkonnen's have her gagged because they know she's a Bene Gesserit. Paul they don't bother with because there has never been a male heir to that order, and they are just taking them on a short flight.

So while you could still nitpick if you really wanted to, the Voice is not used as a completely lazy plot device either. Hell, the end result is basically the same, in that they have to survive in the desert for a while, but this way they get some juicy revenge and are able to take a few critical supplies with them.
[/spoiler]

akaece

11/08/21 11:18PM

I'm sure the film's fine, the director's good. But it is absolutely an asspull that relies on the dumb villain goons both knowing the intricacies of the order's abilities and being stupid enough to not just restrain both their captives similarly. (Did they add a line about running out of gags? That would be funny.) On the whole, there's a problem in Dune (the book) with stuff just happening by coincidence, or due to random moments of characters acting stupider than they otherwise do in very suspicious ways. A scene can be logically consistent with itself and still represent a lazy plot device to warp characters from point A to point B, which is my complaint about it.

lifmcs

11/10/21 09:26AM

No point in arguing any further. However, I would urge some consideration of how much value shitting on art you have a subjective dislike for really adds. There’s plenty of negativity on the Internet already.

akaece

11/10/21 08:51PM

I'm not trying to argue, we haven't even seen the same version of the story. I'm just posting my thoughts on a mind control scene on a mind control site. Where else am I going to be able to review it and conclude with "also, it wasn't hot"?