One video sounds the warning: is director Denis Villeneuve (the guy pronounces it as if it were bad Spanish: "Vila-nueve") going woke by turning Chani (Paul's lover) into more of a character than she was in the book(s)? Are we once again treading the path of the dark side?
Nerd Cookies is also concerned, but she has a more positive take:
I hope Nerd Cookies is right.
Taking a step back for a moment: Frank Herbert was ahead of his time in writing a story that, by today's standards, touts a form of "female empowerment." The order of the Bene Gesserit is composed entirely of highly trained women who have acquired so much self-discipline that they can alter biochemical processes inside their bodies, seemingly read minds, and fight with the prowess of any ten soldiers. This is why actress Rebecca Ferguson, who made that silly remark about how she saw Villeneuve as "modernizing" Herbert's work to make the story more woman-friendly, caught a lot of flak from faithful readers for not having read the story (Ferguson, to her credit, readily admitted she didn't understand the Dune universe): Herbert's work needed no such help. This time, however, with the second movie in what may turn out to be a trilogy, it seems as if Villeneuve himself has gone on record as saying he's explicitly made changes to some of the female characters to give them more depth and dimension. In the second video above, Nerd Cookies speculates that Villeneuve might be doing this to make Chani a foil for Paul—she loves her man but doubts his role as a messiah because she sees the Bene Gesserit manipulation (a part of the order called the Missionaria Protectiva seeded a messiah-narrative on Arrakis as a way to protect its own people should any of the Bene Gesserit end up marooned on the desert planet; the desert-dwelling Fremen have thus been primed to believe that a savior of some sort was headed their way; any Bene Gesserit could fit that messianic role). But in the books, Chani is not aware of this manipulation (at least at first), and that is a major difference between the book and movie versions of her.
No comments:
Post a Comment
READ THIS BEFORE COMMENTING!
All comments are subject to approval before they are published, so they will not appear immediately. Comments should be civil, relevant, and substantive. Anonymous comments are not allowed and will be unceremoniously deleted. For more on my comments policy, please see this entry on my other blog.
AND A NEW RULE (per this post): comments critical of Trump's lying must include criticism of Biden's or Kamala's or some prominent leftie's lying on a one-for-one basis! Failure to be balanced means your comment will not be published.