Dune: Comparing The 2000 Miniseries To The 2021 Film
For audiences who remember the 2000 Sci Fi Channel miniseries adaptation of Frank Hebert’s Dune, the 2021 Dune movie will be as familiar as it is alien. The two adaptations contain many of the same scenes, built around the same dialogue — yet they are boldly differentiated by interpretation. While the miniseries is a vivid, epic tale of strange worlds, Villeneuve’s film is a slow, thoughtful meditation on humanity’s relationship with power. Both adaptations take on colonization and legacy, but they examine these themes through disparate lenses, finding different insights and, ultimately, telling different stories.
The first (and most obvious) difference in the two adaptations involves scene and setting: how the world of Dune is interpreted and rendered visually. The miniseries initially presents Dune as a story set In Space™. It conveys this at every possible opportunity, through various spaceships and star-strewn B-roll. Interior settings and on-planet exteriors are realized in lurid colors, mixing sleek, ultra-modernized design elements (the perennial code for technology-fueled futurism) with lavish costumes and elaborate sets (the perennial code for political intrigue among a ruling class). The Atreides wear white, and the Harkonnen wear red; the miniseries breaks no new ground in its coding of righteousness and scheming. Yet the result, while not subtle, is undeniably effective: the visuals reinforce that this is a somewhat-exaggerated melodrama, akin to the melodramas that comprise human history.
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The new movie, by contrast, is extremely grounded from the outset. It introduces House Atreides in a distinctly terrestrial setting, as when the
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