Dune

 What did I think?

I think I went in with very high expectations, and the film met them. Exceed them? I don't know about that. But again, those expectations were high.

Frank Herbert's novel is a doorstopper, and in two and a half hours, Denis Villeneuve's Dune Part One only covers the first half of the book - which is not to say that anything is even remotely spread thin here.

The movie is huge, grand, epic in scope. So it might come as a surprise to hear that I think the biggest success of the film is its restraint. Herbert's novel is one of extensive inner monologue. As I had just read through the extant books of A Song of Ice and Fire when I picked up Dune (about ten years ago) I likened the story to an epic of actually grander scale (though fewer central characters and locations), in which every character was operating on a Varys/Littlefinger level of political intrigue.

I started watching David Lynch's early 80s adaptation, but could not bear to even get past its prologue because of a pernicious instinct: to try to explain everything. Villeneuve thankfully understands that some things just aren't going to fit. But for those of us who enjoy those details, nothing in the film contradicts the existing backstory and inner thoughts - we just don't need to get all that stuff in there for the story to make sense.

As an example, at no point in the film is the term Mentat uttered, nor any backstory of the Butlerian Jihad. But both Thufir Hawat and Piter de Vries have small tattoos on their lower lips to signify the role they play. A viewer unfamiliar with the story will get that they're some sort of special advisor to the great Houses, which is ultimately what a Mentat is.

Lynch's film also gives voice over to most characters to allow the audience to hear their thoughts, but this film allows us to watch their actions and infer.

Naturally, it will be hard to avoid comparisons with the previous film adaptation. But what can we say uniquely about the movie itself?

First off, I don't think there's a weak link in the cast. Timothée Chalamet is believable as a teenaged Paul, carrying with him a quiet intelligence and wisdom beyond his years without losing an overall sense of youthful innocence. In the famous Gom Jabbar scene, his transition from pain and fear into resolve and, one imagines, plans for future wrath, is played note perfect - one senses that Mohiam suspects she's made a deadly enemy, even if she thinks the situation is still salvageable.

Jessica, of course, rivals Paul as the most important figure in the novel, and her characterization feels to me the most deviant from the novel - but out of necessity. Through her training as a Bene Gesserit, in the books Jessica rarely displays the powerful emotions that surge through her, but here she is much more visibly distraught, for example, when she has to stand guard outside the library where her superior might be about to kill her son. She and Paul are total teammates through most of the movie, even when he feels manipulated by the Bene Gesserit agenda. She will, of course, according to the book, remain his stalwart supporter, but the end of the movie, when Paul chooses to commit to his father's original plan of making the Fremen into their allies, is a moment where she realizes that she's not as in control of the situation as she perhaps previously thought.

Again, it's been a decade since I read the book, so this might be from it, but I like how Paul's visions mislead by being more metaphorical than literal. He sees visions of Jamis well before the two meet, and in the visions, Jamis is the friend who will teach him the ways of the desert. In practice, of course, Jamis "teaches" Paul by fighting him to the death, and showing that the Fremen people don't have the same concepts of mercy and conflict de-escalation - a duel is always one to the death, and a human body has to prove itself more useful than the water it contains.

Periodically, Paul sees a little desert mouse with giant ears (which it uses a bit like a stillsuit to collect moisture). Never named, readers will of course recognize this as the Muad'dib, which will come to be Paul's Fremen name and a symbol of his messianic role.

Now, about that:

Paul's role as a white guy (or at least one who reads as white, and certainly is of a privileged class within the setting) coming to a land of an oppressed minority and receiving worship from the masses is 100% part of the book, and more or less the central part of the book. I think it's important not to confuse portrayal with endorsement, though I also recognize that other viewers/readers might be put off by it.

Honestly, we don't really see much of the Fremen in this chapter until the end. I think part two, which will start filming around the end of next year, is where we'll need to see how well the film navigates those treacherous waters. After all, you can read Dune (at least the first book) as alternatively a hero's journey in which a young man embraces his destiny to lead a people out of oppression and win ultimate power as a result, or of a privileged noble who, in order to best his rivals, exploits the spiritual needs of an indigenous people to win him that power - which was his goal all along. (I don't recall it happening that early in the story, but when things are looking desperate, Paul brings up the idea of his marrying the Emperor's daughter, which Liet-Kynes laughs off given the poor position Paul is in to negotiate such a deal. Ultimately, that's exactly what he does, but I think this plants the suggestion that Paul may, indeed, have some ambitions after all).

I've also seen mention of the fact that none of the prominent Fremen characters are portrayed by actors from traditionally Muslim ethnicities. The Fremen, and indeed the whole story, is inspired by the rise of Islam, with the Fremen having an Arabic/Bedouin basis for their characterization.

On one hand, I think that a distant future like that of Dune (the movie introduces the year as 10,191 - though it doesn't specify that that's "A.G." rather than "C.E.", meaning it's even farther in the future than that number would suggest) would probably see any recognizable ethnicities mixed together, and then new ones arising from the separation of populations on other planets. On the other hand, however, Arab actors don't get, you know, a ton of roles in big Hollywood blockbusters, and it would have been nice to see them get these.

Also of note is that I've seen people suggesting that putting Stellan Skarsgard in a fat suit denies a potentially meaty role to a fat actor. Personally, I have a ton of internalized fat phobia (I'm a heavy person myself) and so I find myself a bit more ambivalent about this critique.

The Harkonnens here are visually striking, if a bit of a departure from their portrayal in the books. First of all, it's weird to me that it's pronounced "HAR-ko-nin" instead of "har-KO-nin" in the movie, the latter being how I always thought it would be pronounced. But setting that aside - this movie portrays them as being industrial and lavishly gothic - all people on Giedi Prime are hairless and pale white, and everyone wears only black, with a kind of industrial minimalism. I think in Herbert's book, they're actually fancy - though kind of "playing at" being cultured, with a strong sense of kitsch. It's like they enjoy the trappings of wealth but have no taste (like a certain would-be dictator who was living in the White House last year).

I kind of get changing this. Villeneuve's futuristic vision is one of grand scale and minimalistic decor, and he basically makes the Harkonnens all look like Vader did after Luke takes off his helmet at the end of Return of the Jedi. Star Wars' evil empire was partially inspired by Dune, so it's a fitting cinematic connection.

I'm curious to see how Chani is dealt with in the second movie. Here, Zendaya only actually appears as a real person in the last few scenes. Prior to that, she is a metaphor - an embodiment of the Fremen people. There is something kind of dark and creepy about the way that Paul lusts for Chani in his dreams while lusting after the power the Fremen will provide for him.

I am very curious to know how this movie would play to someone who had not read the book. I've been hearing that people like it, which is reassuring - as I said earlier, the movie doesn't worry about holding peoples' hands, letting those of who know the story fill in all the details about the CHOAM corporation and sappho juice and why the Fremen all nick their wrists with their crysknives when Paul and Jessica negotiate a truce.

It's a little sad we'll have to wait two years for the second part of this. I imagine that we'll probably only see the first book adapted, but we'll see.

Foundation, Seven Episodes In

 There's a balance to be struck with adapting Foundation.

There are a lot of ways in which Foundation, particularly its first few "books" or "chapters" or "segments" or whatever you want to call them, is deeply unconventional in terms of story structure.

We get a protagonist who usually represents some change to the status quo within the Foundation, which is often doubted by the establishment, but their alteration of the Foundation's course turns out not only to be what's necessary to preserve it and its mission, but also precisely what Hari Seldon predicted.

Dramatically, it self-sabotages, but in the interest of pursuing a really interesting intellectual concept.

At the heart of the story is the notion that human society is shaped by immense forces, rather than great individuals. It's a refutation of the "Great Man of History" theory.

But there's a great irony to that - after all, what is the Foundation if not the product of a Great Man like Hari Seldon?

I don't know if Asmiov intended this irony or if he would suggest that the development of Psychohistory was going to happen regardless.

Still, taken as a whole, those first few chapters serve less as a chance for drama itself (though there are space-battles and such) as it is to set up an expectation. With each chapter ending with one of Seldon's prerecorded messages showing that, yes, while things looked dicey there, he knew it was going to happen and it's all going according to plan.

And then the Mule shows up. A nobody who happens to have a genetic mutation that allows him to instantly alter the emotional reaction people have to him through some sort of psionic ability, the Mule rapidly gains power as he simply turns the powerful military leaders he encounters into loyal subjects who are fiercely devoted to him without losing any cognitive ability. And, as someone who suffered before he developed this ability, he has a vindictive grudge to go along with his imperial ambitions.

Probably the best scene in the "Foundation Trilogy" (the stories continued past them, and the stories were not originally published this way, but Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation are the books I've read) is when, in the midst of what the Foundation assumes is the latest Seldon Crisis, they go to the vault where his holographic recordings are viewed, expecting the message to describe their current situation and how it will be resolved - only for Seldon's premise to be utterly wrong, with his expecting them to be on the tail end of some civil war (one that was averted in the name of standing united against the Mule) and how this will bring about some crucial reforms and changes to the working of the Foundation that will guide them forward.

Suddenly, Seldon, who has been dead for centuries at this point, is no longer the omniscient, paternal reassurance, but just a video tape. And panic erupts.

The Mule takes up two of the "chapters" of the Foundation series, (if I recall correctly, the back half of Foundation and Empire and the first half of Second Foundation) but that reversal almost makes the somewhat stuffy narrative of the first book and a half worth it.

So, the needs of a TV show are different.

But I do wonder if Apple TV's Foundation is taking too many liberties - not just with plot, but through its plot, theme.

Supposedly, one of Frank Herbert's inspirations for Dune was a rejection of Asimov's core premise for Foundation - in Foundation, the Mule is an aberration meant to be corrected for, and by the end of the first half of Second Foundation, the eponymous organization basically succeeds. Herbert, however, thought that it was far more interesting to have a protagonist who upsets the status quo.

In fact, you could argue that it's Jessica, not Paul, who is the real protagonist of Dune. She is the one who chooses to have a son rather than a daughter, and thus upset millennia of careful planning by the Bene Gesserit.

In a lot of ways, the Bene Gesserit share a lot with the Foundation - they guide humanity, and likely think they are safeguarding humanity in doing so. Jessica's decision might not have been intended to upset that balance, but it does awaken a certain ability in Paul that he was not supposed to have. And then, it's her decision to have Paul play the part of the Fremen messianic figure.

Paul is an aberration as well - not only in his special abilities (which were intended for the son he was supposed to mother - though given Leto II's role in the narrative, I sort of feel like it might have actually worked out that way anyway?) but also because he upends the plans of the major factions.

Anyway, Dune has, I'd say, a more compelling narrative (I think Herbert was also just a better writer of characters and prose). And so I'm given to understand that by sticking more or less with the plot as shown in the book with the new movie, said movie has been a big success (I'm probably going to see it tomorrow).

Anyway, the point is:

The Apple TV show has vastly expanded the plot of the first "chapter" of the story. Honestly, the stuff with the invading Anacreons and the stuff with the Emperor has been pretty decent. Where I find myself growing frustrated is the stuff with Gaal.

It's pretty clear to me that this is meant to set up the backstory for the Second Foundation - especially with the reveal that Gaal has some kind of psychic ability. But there are a few things that feel like they're really flying in the face of the story:

For one, we have Hari Seldon masterminding not just broad movements of history, but micromanaging individuals - claiming that Raych had to be the one to found the Second Foundation and Gaal had to be running the first one. But Psychohistory as a sci-fi concept only seems believable because of the modesty of its claims - it only works when the anomalies of individuals are smoothed down by the enormous sample size. I could even imagine Seldon suggesting that it wouldn't work for a single planet (like our modern Earth) because the sample size is too small and individuals have too much of an outsized influence. The Galactic Empire imagined by Asmiov is one in which entire worlds are just a tiny fraction of the population.

I also think that it's important that the Second Foundation isn't born out of people who have spontaneously developed psionic abilities - instead, it's that while the first Foundation is preserving and developing physical sciences and technology, the Second Foundation is dedicated to developing, effectively, psychological technology.

What the show is doing, effectively, is making Gaal into a Mule way before the story is ready for a Mule.

Indeed, I think that the show has done a decent enough job of selling the stakes of the invading Anacreons that it could pull off the "yep, everything's going according to plan" thing without feeling too dramatically undercut. But I think that the showrunners have mistaken the central figures of each chapter as being "chosen ones" rather than simply "the person who happens to fill the role that history was going to give someone". While yes, I get that that's more conventional storytelling, I think you're totally missing the point of Foundation.

And if you wanted to subvert the point (or maybe interpreted Asimov's stories as being a refutation of their own initial premise, which is an argument I'd be willing to hear,) you could do it in a less hackneyed way.

As great as Jared Harris is, I don't want to have a sentient hologram of his Hari Seldon effectively keeping his character alive indefinitely.

Am I going to keep watching? Yes, probably. I've really liked the stuff with the three emperors (basically one huge invention of the show, but a successful one) and the ways in which seemingly benign things (like the current Dawn's attempts to hide his deficiencies and live his life) will, presumably, play a major role in the downfall of the Empire.

But I don't really have any faith that the show is going to commit to the heady concepts that are at the core of Asimov's works.

(The early introduction of Demerzel is interesting. I've been watching her with an understanding of what she really represents - I'd love to see the show actually go into the three laws of robotics (and the zeroth law) though I also understand that, given her position, she can't really talk about anything but the 2nd when interacting with the Emperor. In the books, of course, it's eventually revealed that she - or rather he, in the books - has actually been playing the Bene Gesserit role since the very beginning of the empire and before, and that he's actually R. Daneel Olivaw, the very first sentient robot and one who figured out that it was robots' responsibility to preserve humanity. Among the things he does is subtly nudge Hari Seldon into developing psychohistory. Not sure what to make of the idea in the show that she at least claims to follow Luminism.)

Foundation

 Interesting that this year marks adaptations of two of the great space epics of the mid-20th century. Later this month, Denis Villeneuve's Dune comes out (something I've been very excited for) while Apple TV has released four of the ten episodes in its adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories.

Both of these stories are enormously epic in scale, both set in distant futures in which the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, even after we've spread to countless worlds. And both concern the fate of empires.

Asmiov's Foundation stories jump from time period to time period, following new protagonists and new eras, which is one of the reasons that an adaptation would be very difficult to pull off. The other is that the first few chapters of the stories are, well, hardly even stories. They're intellectually very interesting, and there are some space battles and a lot of thoughts about how an organization whose initial purpose is basically to build a high-stakes Wikipedia transforms into the dominant power within the galaxy.

Let's rewind:

In the distant future, the Galactic Empire, whose capitol is on the massive ecumenopolis of Trantor, is shaken by the conclusions of the mathematician Hari Seldon. Seldon has devised a radical new branch of mathematics that essentially combines sociology with statistics and probability theory (and is far more advanced than anything our modern scientists would devise, of course,) which purports to predict the course of the future on a galactic scale. And, most troublingly, he discovers that the Empire, which has kept trillions of people in relative safety and stability for over ten thousand years, is going to collapse in a matter of centuries.

Seldon claims that the aftermath of this collapse will be a horrifying 30,000-year dark age - over twice the lifespan of the empire - filled with death and barbarism. However, he believes that if steps are taken, that dark age could be reduced to a mere thousand years. To do so, he wishes to create a Foundation, which will preserve the knowledge of humanity and accelerate the rebuilding of civilization.

Rather than having him killed, the Emperor sends Seldon and his followers to a remote world known as Terminus, and it's there that the Foundation is established.

Over the course of the books, the Foundation encounters a number of crises, which often forces them to transform their mission - becoming a trading empire, and then a religious church that has control over technology. With each crisis, however, Hari Seldon's holographic records kept in a vault are unlocked and basically show that he predicted these events, and that this is all part of the plan.

Which, again, lets some of the air out of the dramatic tires, as it were, until the narrative is forced to change.

Apple's adaptation of Foundation naturally takes some creative license, which was probably necessary to make the thing work.

In its first four episodes, we begin with Gaal, a mathematician from a remote world that is dominated by an anti-intellectual religious order, who leaves home to work for Hari Seldon after winning a galaxy-wide mathematics competition. Through her, we're introduced to Trantor and the precarious situation that Seldon is in.

In the books, the Emperor is a fairly uninteresting character. The show invents a convention that I was initially skeptical about, but winds up being very interesting - every emperor is a clone of Cleon I, who ruled 400 years ago (not at the beginning of the empire, but the beginning of the current era.) At any given time, there are three clones of Cleon - one young, one middle-aged, and one old, referred to as Brothers Dawn, Day, and Dusk. This allows the show, as it jumps generations, to have the same actors portray the Emperor, but different version of him. Lee Pace, who plays Day, transitions from the Emperor who banishes Seldon to the boy who stood and watched as he did, and it's a cool acting challenge that Pace does a great job with (as does Terrence Mann, who plays Brother Dusk).

My ultimate opinion on the show is certainly still forming. The jury is out on some of the characters, especially given that the ones that the first couple episodes really focus on seem to have been phased out by around episode 3 - though that is of course the nature of the story (it does look like some shenanigans will allow us to see figures return, though.)

The show approaches this challenge in part with conventions like the Emperor's rotating clones (though I imagine that we're eventually going to see that cycle break down, unless the show is going to seriously deviate from the books even more by keeping the Emperor an element throughout.)

Actually, the Emperor is probably the most noteworthy element of the show at this point. We know that his arrogance and dismissal of Seldon's predictions marks him as a doomed villain, but there's also something a little tragic about him - each emperor is forced to walk the same path has his predecessor, his only family is reflections of himself, and frankly, his closest companion, the ageless majordomo Demerzel (whose nature is not revealed until far later in the books) seems to be the one who actually wields true power.

Naturally, the show looks very different than how I imagined the series it when I read it, though that's to its benefit. For whatever reason, Asimov's prose conjured a future that was strangely mundane, and so I mostly pictured a fairly ordinary-looking mid-century aesthetic with a bit of 70s used-future. Apple has a shit ton of money, and it sure looks like they spared no expense - the series has a big-budget movie feel to it. A catastrophic terror attack that occurs in the first episode and marks the beginning of the Empire's visible downfall is rendered in breathtaking detail (and is also deeply disturbing in its focus on the innocent people realizing their doom as the massive structure they are on collapses.)

Representation here is also significantly better. While its later entries develop some compelling characters who are also women, the first few stories in Asmiov's opus have practically no women (there's like one who is a misogynistic caricature without a real name). The series reimagines both Gaal and Salvor Hardin as women of color, and also makes Demerzel a woman, which does serve to make the story a little less cringeworthy.

Jared Harris, who plays Seldon, is appropriate casting, though as with the books, his role is to be the catalyst for the story, and not its protagonist. Harris is a versatile performer and one that I'm generally happy to see - I wish we could get more of his character on The Expanse, but I think it likely that his plot is basically done and has been for a few seasons now.

I think that purists will probably balk at all the invention the show does, though I think that a totally faithful adaptation would be unwatchable. The AV Club's reviews have pointed out that Salvor Hardin is being set up as a kind of chosen-one figure, and there are certainly elements to her character that are a bit off the themes of the original stories. I suspect that this is an attempt to keep the story easier to follow - ideally, we'd get a dynamic ensemble cast that collectively work together to fulfill their stage of Seldon's plan, but I think the producers and writers might have worried that getting to know an entire cast of characters only to move on from them in the next era might be too much to handle. By keeping things focused on the individual, we can see a baton passed from generation to generation.

I do wonder if this show would be getting more attention if it weren't on Apple TV. While Apple has been throwing a ton of money into their streaming service, I think that the momentum that brands like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime have are a bit tough to compete with. Obviously, Ted Lasso has been doing a lot for Apple's entertainment brand, but while I think Apple has been hoping for this to be their Game of Thrones (albeit one that doesn't end so catastrophically) I don't think we're seeing the same level of buzz for it. Admittedly, it wasn't until the end of the first season that Game of Thrones really took off as a cultural phenomenon, but I think the reaction to Foundation has been somewhat less enthusiastic.

Indeed, it might just be a victim of the fact that epic television is no longer the novelty it was when GoT came out. The notion of a massive genre epic coming to the small screen was fairly unthinkable at the time. Now, though, there's precedence, and everyone is trying to capture the zeitgeist the way that GoT did.

Foundation also has the age-old problem: some might view it as cliche, when in fact, it's the story that established many of the tropes now seen as cliches. The city-planet was a novel idea when Asimov wrote about Trantor. A galactic empire was novel as well. Even the notion of specialized faster-than-light ships was, if not original to Asmiov, at least a pretty recent idea (I know that the Alcubierre drive, which is more or less the warp engine from Star Trek, appeared in Ursula K. LeGuin's books, along with the Ansible).

Still, I'm compelled to watch more, and I'm eager to see how the story evolves. There are changes, of course, but I'm going to try to take the show on its own terms. Yes, the Asimov books don't get really awesome until the Mule shows up, but I think the showrunners are trying hard to make the build-up to his appearance equally compelling.