Keyblade

She'd have been a bad choice too imo. Even as Princess Irulan, she seemed off. Maybe I'm biased towards American accents, but Chalemet seems to be the only one to pull it off and still feeling like Paul. From an appearance perspective I think Zendaya is probably the ideal choice to play Chani, and maybe Villaneuve was leaning to hard into that, to keep visual cohesiveness.

I wouldn't actually know, but I felt that the movie did a really good job of getting across the central themes to people who aren't familiar with the books. I also like that it had more of a "show, don't tell" approach but then again I would like that wouldn't I? It's one of my pet peeves of modern movies/blockbusters, where there's too much exposition and the viewer is taken to be some kind of fool. Also, I think Zendaya was the weak link of the movie as well. It's not even necessarily her acting per se, as I think she does a great job of conveying emotion with her face but it's when she starts speaking that everything falls apart. All the Fremen who can even speak English have an accent, except for her. For some reason she has a perfect American accent, and there's no real explanation for it. It's like they dropped MJ from Spiderman into this and put her into a stillsuit, with her sarcasm and everything. It's really jarring. It's one of my few complaints.

I mean Denis is already my favourite director and the movie is an absolute visual splendor as expected. And with IMAX, it was just an unforgettable experience. But from an adaptation perspective, he absolutely nailed the feel and pace of the story. You can tell the care and attention to detail that went into it came from a true fan of Dune who wanted to do it justice and not just some director who was hired to churn out another adaptation a famous story to get bums on seats. You know how when you watch an adaptation of a book or something else and it's just like a hollow facsimile of the source material? It doesn't really match up to what you imagined in your head while reading. I feel like this is the case for pretty much everything I've seen off the top of my head. For example I've recently finished rewatching Game of Thrones (with my brother who has never seen it or read the books). I love the ASoIaF books, and while the show was good, great even in parts...on the whole it just pales in comparison to the books. It's always in the back of your mind. And we're talking about eight, 1 hour long episodes per season here, and it still can't capture the spirit and depth of the source material. Villaneuve managed to do so with 5 hours to work with. Another recent example is the Netflix Avatar series. It's Avatar in name yes, and the characters visually resemble their animated counterparts, but I'm just watching them go through the motions of the story beats and not much else. It's an Avatar skeleton, with no meat on it. But with Dune 2, every scene has weight to it (it's not just there because this happened in the books so let's show it), and the way the various major plot points are portrayed very closely capture the tone and heft of the book. The climax especially, I never thought I'd see it done justice on the big screen. The other 2 adaptations certainly didn't. You know how when reading it you get the feeling that shit is really going down? That's exactly how it felt. And not in that Marvel-y final showdown kind of way. It really captured that essence of the power imbalance between the Imperium/Harkonnens and the Fremen/Muad'dib and the ramifications of the outcome were clear. But beyond that, there are some things that somehow were even more impressive than the book. For example, without going into details, the scene where Feyd Rautha is fighting in the pits. It's way more detailed and grandiose (and even strange looking) than I'd imagined while reading. Also some of the alterations to the story were mostly positive and ones that I welcome. How many times could I say that about other adaptations? Usually you're left scratching your head like "why did they change that? It's worse now". But yeah, I would say if you can catch it in IMAX, you gotta do it man. It's like I felt Hans Zimmer's score instead of just hearing it. The immersion was off the scale. It also made me wonder what's going to happen with the physical release of the movie. The majority of scenes seem very obviously framed for that IMAX ratio or at the very least something like 16:9 or 1.87:1. If it's presented with the same ratio as Part 1, we'll really lose a lot of information and framing. Just for that I might just go ahead and see it again in IMAX. Just as a pure audiovisual experience, it's absolutely top notch.

Saw it in IMAX. I'm not even exaggerating, that was the best film experience I've ever had. Best adaptation of anything I've ever seen. My favourite book, yet somehow Denis managed to make some aspects of it even better.

Yeah I'm not sad about him leaving Villa (at least not anymore) but for what football, particularly English football has lost. He was one of the most entertaining talents we've seen in decades and we've lost it in his pursuit of whatever (there's been plenty of argument in this thread about what that is). Probably was well worth it to him, but fans of football are the real losers here.

Kinda shows how bad we've been in the PL era. +20 is our best goal difference ever? In a season we finished 6th.

7 wins 7 draws 7 losses. Neutral goal difference. The definition of mediocrity. Can't believe he was the manager of Aston Villa Football Club in the Premier League.

Is he in our Conference League squad?

Let's say he gets like 20 goals and 15 assists and we get top 4. He'd have to be in the running for PFA POTY surely? Just off that alone you'd have to consider him our best ever striker in the PL era.

Mings was also Smith

???

Honestly his video before we signed him is still the best I have seen. Couldn't believe what I was watching. I thought we had a generational talent on our hands. And I remember his debut, came on against Palace and just completely destroyed their fullback (Souare was it?), thinking okay yeah he's going to be ridiculous.

Of course the Geordies turn into Mourinho's Inter against us at VP

It's crazy how he looks threatening every time he touches the ball. One thing that surprised my about him is his passing. He's been playing some exquisite through balls of late.

I don't know why anyone was ever worried about United. They literally have a neutral goal difference. If we let them finish above us, we don't deserve to be in the CL tbh.

Omobamidele looks like Murillo if he grew out his hair and beard for 1 more month

This is actually funny. Of course Divock Origi turns into Kevin De Bruyne against us

Still mad that we lost to these. Hope we score 10.

Ramsey is like 80% back. Going to be crucial for the run in.

He was just coming back from a lengthy injury so at least it was understandable. By the time Gerrard came in he'd been fit for a while so there really was no excuse anymore. He was at the very least a body in a position where we sorely needed them. When Nakamba got injured, that was supposed to be his chance, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Still sad we didn't get @Teale's 'tache AV diamond as our badge. That was brilliant.

Probably Lambert? When guys like Darren Bent say you're his worst manager (and he's had the likes of Bruce, Pardew etc), I can't imagine too many other people at the club liked him very much. But yeah, Gerrard's unlikeability is made more perplexing by the fact that he is very bad at his job. I imagine he struts around the place like he's Jose, with nothing to back it up. Was probably for the better for Morgan, he wouldn't have wanted to get back up to speed in the PL covering Lucas Digne for 90 minutes every game.

The bolded seemed to be an issue with a lot of JRPGs from that era, from like 2005-2015. I remember thinking exactly this about Kingdom Hearts 2 when it came out. I was just a teenager too, but it bugged the hell out of me. The whole thing was like "go from room A to room B, watch cutscene, do a battle", rinse repeat.

I was going to say that Ajax being in this isn't good for us but actually that's not true.