A new clip from Denis Villeneuve’s Dune shows Josh Brolin training Timothée Chalamet for battle. And according to Vanity Fair, you need to watch it twice, but “the second time with your eyes closed.“
With the film’s release less than two months away, new promo clips are expected to drop till it’s out in the theatres.
Now, Vanity Fair has released an exclusive clip ahead of the film’s debut this Friday at the Venice Film Festival.
In the clip, Chalamet’s Paul Atreides and Brolin’s Gurney Halleck are combat training while wearing futuristic, technologically advanced body shields.
These protective energy shields are similar to those in the Frank Herbert book, which block objects that are moving past a certain velocity.
So, if you need to penetrate your opponent’s shield to injure them lethally, you should be able to attack your opponent just slow enough, yet still too fast for the opponent to be able to block the attack.
The clip shows Paul Atreides as he says he “isn’t in the mood” to spar, to which Gurney Halleck replies that he is to “fight when the necessity arises” and not when it fits his mood. They begin the fight sequence, and Paul looks like he’s acing it.
He tackles Gurney to the ground and says, “I have you.” However, in the rush of trying to win the sparring session, Paul ignores the most crucial aspect of a fight, defending himself.
Gurney also has his knife to Paul’s stomach and says Paul would be “joining” him in death.
Gurney Halleck and Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa) are tasked by the Atreides family to train Paul in order to make him a warrior (I mean, who wouldn’t be a master of combat at 16 if they had Thanos and Khal Drogo as their training guides).
But that’s not all that makes their fight/training sequence interesting.
When both Chalamet and Brolin are moving around with knives, the sound design also captivates one’s attention, adding more impact and hammering the idea of this futuristic fight in the viewer’s mind.
Theo Green, the film’s supervising sound editor and sound designer, explained the effects during the fight sequence,
One of the great things that Denis allowed us to do was to start the ball rolling with sound and then have the VFX team look at what we have, listen to what we were doing, and start their first iterations of what we thought the shield should look like.
Theo Green
It began with the shield’s sound being that of automatic gunfire, the raw sound was then “filtered out so you can just hear the sub impacts, the throb, and then it was processed through a synthesizer and repeated multiple times. That’s the vibration you are hearing.”
After a few other tweaks, a mixing accident that made “clicking sounds and errors all over the place,” and a high guitar string added to make a ‘dit-dit-dit’ sound; the sequence got its final sound.
The VFX team then built upon that and added visible red flashes when you are in danger.
There are blue flashes that the shield gives off, but that shimmering red means it is about to be breached.
Go ahead! Close your eyes and listen to the sound effects to see if it makes you feel the way the sound designers intended to.
Villeneuve’s version only adapts the first half of the novel (unlike the David Lynch version), with Dune 2 primarily depending on how well the first part is received when it comes out this October.
Dune is set for a premiere in theaters and on HBO Max on October 22, 2021, after facing various pandemic-related delays.
Damn! No streaming services found :/
About Dune
Dune (also known as Dune: Part One) is an American sci-fi film based on Frank Herbert’s novel of the same name, directed by Denis Villeneuve.
Part One introduced the planet of Dune/Arrakis, the only place where the enhancer drug “Melange” is found and sought out by many. The Atreides House is sent to the planet as the ruling Duke, as part of their adversaries’ trap. However, the Atreides are aware of the same and aim to defend Dune and their house.
The ensemble cast is made up of Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya, David Dastmalchian, Chang Chen, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, and Javier Bardem.
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