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Brittany Snow
Frank Herbert
Rob Zacny

PEOPLE / 1 WORK

Brittany Snow

Movies · 2012

Pitch Perfect

Credit sources

www.themoviedb.org/movie/114150

PEOPLE / 2 WORKS

Frank Herbert

I enjoyed DUNC 1 a lot but felt pretty let down here. Some of my broad complaints: 1- The pacing of the whole thing is very hit or miss. There was too much content for a 2.5 hour movie, this really needed to be a trilogy. If the first third of this movie (Shai Hulud adopting Paul) had been a movie, then the rest had been a movie that would have helped a lot. 2- That first third was also pretty bad. The fights in it make no sense (even for Dune's weird tech/rules). Worse, the romance gave me intense flashbacks to Star Wars prequels. There was some extremely stilted dialog and the chemistry between the leads was no there, I like both of them but this just didn't work. 3- The racial and gender politics of this movie are just bad. I think Dune as a 60s SciFi novel was pretty progressive and interesting. But in 2024 there are a lot of glaring issues. Gendered roles in society have not aged well and there is a lot of implied gender essentialism. Beyond that having all the off-world characters be white is, well, it's the default, but it's a Choice. Beyond the white savior issues all of the leaders of humanity we see are white. And there are ways for that to work and add to the story, but they're not on display here. 4- The best part of these movies is without a doubt the visual design for a lot of things. But unfortunately that's a bit let down with Dune and its deserts being the primary setting. The Fremen and their settlements are not (and can not be) as visually interesting as other parts of the galaxy, and we already saw most of that in the first movie. The shots in the desert are gorgeous but can't compare to how interesting the scenes on the Harkonnen home planet are. 5- The holy war aspect and "fanatics" are poorly handled. We here they're in the south, and there are a lot of them. And I guess some of the people in the big cavern scene are them. But they're faceless and nameless. They're a very important part of the story that only function as a plot device. 5a- The movie has scrubbed a lot of Muslim influence from the Fremen. The language is the most obvious example but we are now given a clearly Muslim inspired people but now divorced from 20th and 21st Muslim revolutionary and well, jihadist politics. 6- I overall like how the film handled Paul's wrestling with destiny/power/etc., but it doesn't have a convincing turn from reluctance to acquiring power. I think this is another area where a third movie would help but we see his reluctance turned to certainty in the span of minutes. I'm glad these films were made, and they do some incredible things, but I think in the balance they can't quite pull it off. I think just increasing the films from 2 to 3 would have resolved a large number of the issues in this film (please more time w.th Lady Jessica!) but as it stands this was a let down. I'll be interested to see where they next movie goes, I do think that Chalamet "turns on" near the end of this film and I suspect the next could be much better. For one thing it will have to give a face and voice to the southern fanatics beyond the limp stand in of Stilgar.

Movies · 2024

Dune: Part Two

Movies · 2021

Dune

Credit sources

PEOPLE / 1 WORK

Rob Zacny

This book was fantastic. JA2 is a weird game for me, something of a white whale. It came out on PC in 1999. This is the era of games I remember most fondly, CDs had been fully embraced and games had gotten Big. Sprawling titles like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment came out around this time. And I was aware of JA2. But I never played it. It's funny, as a kid I was an avid consumer of PC Gamer and I now wonder, is the reason I skipped this game their review? The game, now regarded as a masterpiece received a negative review in PC Gamer. Is that what kept me away? And I'm really sorry I was kept away. I love this genre and I'm sure if I'd played it in 1999 it would have become one of my favorite games. But I'm glad this book exists, the book is a great, accessible read. It's liberally sprinkled with quotes from developers interviewed for it and is a fantastic look at why JA2 was special and why there has been nothing quite like it. There is no myth-building, just explanations of the circumstances that lead to the game's creation. One section I particularly liked talks about the game's code. The publishers released the source code, a very rare move. That means that people, including the author can take a look at what makes the game tick and what the developers wrote in the code. This section and really the entire book benefits greatly from the author's day job, video game development. He offers a lot of insight on how development in the late 90s differs from that of today. In the code for the strategic level of the game there is a 500-word essay on the philosophy for that part of the game. It is reproduced in the book and it's fantastic to get that insight and see that they included it as a comment in the code. The power of self-documenting code! I am also really happy this series of books exists. I've now read two, one for my favorite game ever and one for a game I've never played. And I loved them both. A deep-dive into one game is very interesting to me and the length of the books (pretty short) also works well. This book was a great read and my one and only new year's resolution is to play JA2 in 2016.

Books · 2014

Jagged Alliance 2

Credit sources

openlibrary.org/works/OL21552515W