Star Wars vs Dune: Comparing Sci-Fi's Two Biggest Epics

Star Wars is good science fantasy Dune is great science [Music] fiction a beginning is a very delicate time that's not to say that Star Wars isn't compelling or entertaining or that the characters aren't great it's more that they approach the genre from different angles star wars's core goal throughout all of its films been series of games and books is to be a fun adventure there's meaning yes but it's an element not the core part being delivered dun's main purpose on the other hand is to address great issues such as colonization Humanity's relationship with religious fervor and the position of human society in the vastness of Eternity good and great in this sense isn't a metric of quality it's a distinction of separately achieved ambition ition Star Wars aims for entertainment Dune aims to relay Universal truths that's not State Star Wars is vaporat void of meaning far from it George Lucas has been very upfront about his intentions the good guys are the rebels they're using asymmetric Warfare against a highly organized Empire I think we call those guys terrorists when I did it they were vietcom however at the end of the day the Star Wars saga it exists for you to have f fun but Dune isn't about that but that's also not to say it doesn't have spectacle or amazing moments it surely does but there's a difference between seeing a death star this colossal force of power that can obliterate planets and encountering one of the sand worms the worm is far far smaller than the Death Star and yet Dune makes it feel even more colossal part of that is because we see the Death Star in its entirety we see all of it we understand it fairly quickly but when we see a sandworm the majority of its body is buried under the surface Star Wars shows you everything it can to Thrill Dune deliberately restrains itself to evoke awe in doing so paradoxically Dune tells a far larger story than Star Wars ever could by showing far less at this point in the video I'd like to remind you to like And subscribe if you want to see more get on with it yes get over there now I should probably admit my biases at the door I've always liked Star Wars but Dune is something I always saw as this intimidating massive thing Oni cinematic Saturdays he who controls the spice controls the universe now growing up my extended family would speak of it like some might reference the Odyssey with a level of weight and reverence I remember watching the David Lynch film on the Sci-Fi channel years ago I think it was the Extended Cut but I can't be certain in in memory doing a special 4our presentation Saturday at 700 p.m. Eastern and even with its flaws I could tell I was looking at something alien when it came time to read the books that alien quality became all the greater so much so that upon revisiting The Works time and time again I discovered new angles through which discuss Dune with Star Wars there are simply fewer levels to explore dune's World building incorporates political factions colonization industrial business complexes esoteric religions Eugenics anti-technological Warfare and the exploration of History not in decades as with Star Wars but in Millennia so boiling down Dune to what I'm hoping is a shorter video is going to be rough but I will oversimplify Concepts in this video I will but I hope that my point will be made clear how Star Wars for all the qualities I love about it is simply no Dune the Epic Masterpiece the sleeper has awakened from Visionary director David Lynch Dune tonight at 7 only on sci-fi a beginning is a very delicate time so before we get into the topic let's discuss what the story of both sagas are to establish some baseline information what's in there only what to take with you Star Wars saga is well you know this already Anakin Skywalker is the chosen one destined to bring balance to the force during a destructive Civil War Anakin becomes a hero but is not given the recognition among his peers that he feels he is owed when he has visions of his future with his secret lover Padme where he sees that Padme is doomed to die Anakin succumbs to the influence of the evil Palpatine becoming Darth Vader and enacting a genocide against the Jedi followed by a new Universal order fast forward a few years later and Luke Skywalker and secret Tri with Padme is trained under Anakin's old Master Obi-Wan to defeat Vader and overthrow the Empire after several Adventures where he meets several new friends he manages to beat Vader and the Empire things seem to be going great until decades later a new iteration of the Empire the first order emerges and exploits the weak government put in place after the Rebellion gained control look you know the story of Star Wars you've seen it Dune however is very different Dune is about a boy named Paul here to house at trades house trades has locked in Warfare with the vile house harinen a militaristic family who has apparently given up control of the spice milange milange is essential to just about everything in the Dune Universe this geriatric drug allows the space Navigators to fold space dune's equivalent of hyperspace travel where you can travel from one end the universe to the next without moving without spice no one would be able to travel anywhere in the Galaxy it also gives people special unique abilities such as the ability to see in the future and to expand Consciousness but unlike say the force the spice has a few major trade-offs for one it's highly addictive if you consume milange you cannot go without it for long otherwise you will die High exposure to the mange turns your eyes a full shade of blue blue within blue they describe it even higher and you might mutate into a grotesque entity like the CH Navigators who can fold space I forgot to tell you the spice exists on only one planet in the entire universe the planet is araus also known as June so how's Harin surrenders control over oracus to house trades which the head of the house trades Duo correctly recognizes as a trap but he recedes to accept oracus anyway hoping to subvert house Sook Conan's scheme by recognizing it's a trap uh this this does not work um Paul and his mother uh Leo's con concubine the lady Jessica wandered the desert after house at trates is destroyed there they meet the fine the native people of oracus who have been ostracized in their world by the pesha emperor from there Paul becomes muad the M Messianic leader of the freman as well as the quizat sadak a male member of the Benny jet we'll get to them later he overthrows House of Conan learns The Secret of spice production and uses power over spice to leverage the PESA Emperor the Benny JZ and the spacing Gil to his will and that covers basically the first book roughly where treachery is the spice of life they shall come all when describing Dune it is undeniably science fiction with an element of fantasy to it with the expanded Consciousness and Future Vision what have you Star Wars on the other hand is fantasy pretending to be sci-fi there is precious little science in Star Wars at least in its Mainline films the expanded Cannon tries to explain how lightsabers function or how all the Machinery operates but the reality is this is just window dressing it doesn't really affect the core storyline all that much hyperspace could be magic it wouldn't really matter how hyperspace Works Intergalactic travel within a star whale now I really have done it all Dune by contrast is maticulously developed in a lot of ways it's more like token's Lord of the Rings ironic considering tolken was not a fan of fank Herbert's work and the tolken comparisons only become deeper when we consider the legacy of both Herbert and tolken work but we'll get to that in a bit science fiction you got two branches one is science yeah and the other is social it isn't the science aliens and all that kind of stuff that I get focused on they are layers to dune's World building first there's the Empire a political structure that feeds into the noble houses the battle between house Harkin and in House of traes is ultimately one of political influence and power a blood Feud that's led to a war that ultimately feels quite trivial in the scheme of things it started 10,000 years before the first book to the point where the original origins of the feud barely matter but it leads to a cycle of violence the baron hekinan kills Paul's father so Paul sets out to kill him though ironically and this is a spoiler for the first book mind you ironically we later learned that Paul's mother the lady Jessica is the baron Harkin's bastard daughter this means that Paul's father was murdered by Paul's grandfather now this also leads to the second component of dune's World building the Benny jesser these witches have manipulated Society throughout history through political influence in selective breeding this is in order to maintain a continuity throughout history Eugenics have been employed through secret unions and marriages all to create a messiah the quizat hatak a male witch on the surface they resemble star wars's Jedi with both being an esoteric organization that maintain order throughout the Galaxy and possess strange abilities but the difference here is that while the Jedi maintain control with Force the Benny jeret maintain control with political manipulation the mind-altering voice and again Eugenics then there's industry upon which the earlier two branches feed spice isn't just a power source it's a resource it's like oil and araus is much like Iraq was during Frank Herbert's Lifetime well during our lifetimes too they even sound similar and certainly both sport significant deserts and both are subject to horrible colonization the spacing Guild buy spice in Mass but without the spacing Guild no one would be able to travel from planet to planet as such these three separate layers of society hold everything together political manipulation Science and Mathematics raw power compare that to Star Wars we have the Republic Empire and the Jedi two layers of influence in the prequels though these two layers essentially function as an interchangeable entity it's hard to distinguish where the Jedi Order ends and the Senators begin because they have such an influence on each other by the time the Empire takes over the Jedi Order is obliterated leaving scattered surviv s in its wake come the air of the new Republic in the first order the Jedi Order struggles to rebuild itself but again is just an esoteric separate religion with minimal actual influence on the plot Beyond a couple of Jedi who partake in government activity but all things in Star Wars are secondary to the force which exists Beyond any one individual the concept of balance of the force is emphasized a lot in Star Wars but it's rarely really expand expanded upon is balance just peace then well why isn't it why is there a light in the dark side how can you have balance if the light side has to beat the dark is balance in the fors referring to when there's an equal amount of light in dark in the universe then why does defeating the Sith lead to it being balanced because there's no Dark Side users after the Sith are defeated until we get to kylo ran and all that in in the sequels these ambiguous questions don't have satisfying answers because balance the force is an abstract goal it's not tangible what how it's defined changes from film to film in the original trilogy it's beating the Sith but in the sequel Trilogy we see that balancing the force results in the diad between Ray and kylo Ren so does balance did balancing the force change from sequel Trilogy to the original trilogy or did the original trilogy characters not understand what balancing the force really meant the problem with this is that it's so ambiguous and so open to to interpretation that any number of writers can come in and reinterpret what balancing the force means but Dune is very grounded there is no ambiguity if you control the spice you control the universe you control the spice by managing spice production or threatening to destroy it it's that simple he who controls the spice controls the universe Paul manages to win in the first book because he figures out how we can exploit every system's weakness by threatening to destroy the spice in doing so he uses the threat of its destruction to gain political influence but no one can destroy the force the Jedi are romanticized deified if you strip away the myth and look at their deeds the legacy of the Jedi is failure Star Wars and dune are both stories about chosen ones who bring about ruination to their world through destructive genocidal Wars and whose children carry on on their Legacy by becoming Mythic figures themselves that's an oversimplification of the story but it's a core tenant to focus on the Temptation a casual viewer might have when watching Dune or Star Wars is to compare Luke Skywalker the central protagonist of the original trilogy to paulat trates because at first both seemed to follow the typical hero's journey especially when comparing the original trilogy to the first dune book in both our heroes are heirs to Greatness who haven't realized their skills sure Paul is born knowing he is the heir to House of Trades while Luke's Heritage as son of Anakin Skywalker has to be revealed to him we see both pursue the adversary that destroyed their father from a certain point of view they become aware of a greater Destiny bestowed upon them and eventually they bring order to the Galaxy by overthrowing an Empire if Dune ended with the first book that comparison would be fine sure Paul feels dread that his name mu Adib has become a killing word but Luke has darker moments of contemplation too the Force battle in the cave and The Empire Strikes Back the dark robes he wears and Return of the Jedi the moment where he loses control and almost slays his father at the end of a Return of the Jedi that's a Darkness but Luke overcomes it Paul well he he dreads that his Destiny is darker he has a dark Destiny ahead of him but we don't really see that in the first book but then you read dun Messiah and realize you had it backwards Luke is a hero he's a savior but Paul while presented at first as a christ-like messiah Doom Messiah reveals that no Paul is not Christ in defeating house hekinan and the pesha emperor Paul sends the various systems of the Galaxy into a tail spin he has dismantled the very systems used to maintain order and a new order a new jih pod is spreading from planet to planet and in the process Untold billions of people are dying entire planets are wiped out and it's a casual occurrence for him here was the race Consciousness that he had known once as his own terrible purpose here was the reason enough for quizat sarak or L Al or even the halting schemes of the Benny Jaret the race of humans had felt its own dormy sensed itself grown stale and knew not only the need to experience turmoil in which the genes would mingle and the strong new mixtures survive all humans were alive as an unconscious single organism in this moment experiencing a kind of sexual heat that could override any barrier and Paul saw how feudal were any efforts of his to change any smallest bit of this he thought to oppose the Jihad within himself but the Jihad would be paulit Tres is not Christ paulit trades is the Antichrist Paul isn't Luke he's Anakin if you want to understand Paul's rise and fall look no further than Darth Vader a boy who from the time he was a child was groomed to be the chosen one only to lead a destructive Civil War that culminates in him becoming the Galaxy's greatest villain in his Pursuit for peace he loses everything he once loved only to watch his son fulfill a destiny far beyond that which he could ever dream in this sense Paul's story is a tragedy like the kings of Shakespeare who experience a great rise to power only to catastrophically fall it's completely understandable why everyone would want to destroy Paul the same reason Paul wanted to conquer them power influence money all There Is No Escape of course there are so many more things to discuss about Dune the rich cast of characters the love affair between shaie and Paul the Brilliance of Lady Jessica's character gie HCK UI and of course the baron Harkin and himself but to engage in that discussion will distract us from the core argument of this video essay what makes Doom good at being great and Star Wars great at being good the ultimate distinction here is subtlety versus overt messaging Star Wars has never been subtle about what it's trying to communicate sure some people might watch and miss the over references to Vietnam individal Trilogy or the direct parallels between George Bush's war on terror and the prequels so this is how Liberty dies with thunderous Applause but no one can argue that Lucas or his successors tried to hide their messaging Frank Herbert at times is very unsettle again Iraqis sounds just like Iraq but at other times he is very subtle uh don't trust leaders to always be right um I I work to create a leader in this book who would be really an attractive charismatic person for all the good reasons not for any bad reasons uh then power comes to him he makes decisions some of his decisions made for millions of people Millions upon millions of people don't work out too well there are several messages woven throughout the series right down to an event that occurs prior to the story's start the butlerian Jihad in Dune they are no Ai and no computers rather menax individuals who have trained themselves to function as computers have replaced these machines and the reason for this is very simple Humanity depended too much on computers to think for them so Humanity found a substitute the valarian Jihad is a rebellion against machine learning in machine dependency that has ramifications for thousands of years in Universe this is a very sub subtle warning against the overreliance and Technology true which is ironic given that the pesha Empire is entirely functionally dependent on milange but Frank Herbert isn't just finding a way to avoid using Androids and computers in his future he's also including a message about the subtle cycles of history where Humanity's entire dependency on a singular form of Technology requires extreme upheaval in order to reverse course on it but he's also talking about Humanity coming to conclusions on their own not relying on other and other mechanisms to answer Life's greatest questions Humanity's independence from Reliance but Herbert doesn't really give any answers to these complex questions rather much like Humanity following the butlerian Jihad Herbert asks his readers to think for themselves and to not wait for an easy answer to his questions in this sense there are two Star Wars films that come closest to matching the style of Dune one is Revenge of the Sith for reasons we've aved outlined the rise and fall of a masonic hero but the other one and a lot of Star Wars fans are not going to like this the other one's The Last Jedi I need someone to show me my place in all this The Last Jedi is an attempt in the Star Wars saga to be self-reflective to review what has come before in order to assemble messaging that runs throughout the series it's not simply let the past die it's what has the past done and how can we grow Beyond it it's a means to break up stagnant storytelling rather than erase the past the cycles of mentors and students how the failures of past Heroes have led to disasters that follow them the Divide between Legends and their deeds I think one reason I enjoyed the Last Jedi as much as I did is because I'm a dune fan first and a Star Wars fan second and the Last Jedi does feel like it's taken a page out of dune's book Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi serves the same role that Paul plays in children Children of Dune both have gone into Exile following great personal failures that have brought about disaster and conflict both in their own lives into the universe around them however while Luke aims to end the Jedi Order and goes into exile to die Paul becomes the preacher a Wandering figure in the desert who gradually starts to Rally a religious order around him also Children of Dune has the somehow Palpatine's returned element in it as well by having the baron Harkin's Essence possess sister Aaliyah to explain the concept of being pre-born and the expended Consciousness that would take a lot of time but essentially it's a way that Harkin and can turn to unleash one final Act of vengeance upon House of trates by destroying all the spice from within Dune it's complicated it's weird that's Dune Foya oh and both stories end with these noteworthy characters dying so the next generation of characters can help Salvage their world to stop destruction to stop forces of Darkness of course of course in Star Wars this takes the form of Rey who's a pretty divisive character whereas in Children of Dune it takes the it well Leo II is a god emperor of Dune is trippy guys I I don't know what to tell you while Dune Messiah and later God emperor of Dune are more over deconstructions of dune's Legacy The Last Jedi does serve a similar role in that it grounds and expands the legacy of the original trilogy by showing both the vast indifferent Scale of the Universe cosmology and the human tragedy of Heroes caught up in great difficulty ultimately both Last Jedi and dune serve a singular similar purpose uh don't trust leaders to always be right you have a great line which is so this is how Liberty dies to we're in the middle of it right now to thunderous Applause but Star Wars and dune do have something else in common that I think is very important to discuss one person Kevin J Anderson the whims of Doom by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson Kevin J Anderson Rose to fame or maybe infamy when writing the Star Wars Jedi Academy novels at the time fans did not like these novels they didn't like them at all and while some have grown nostalgic for these books they're still at best seen as average entries in the uh Legends Cannon whenever Star Wars fans celebrate the old continuity over the Disney era I always wanted to say that nothing Disney is currently doing is as disappointing as some of these old novels Anderson would continue to write for Star Wars until 2005 working on various novels and Comics however his work really ended in Star Wars because he was occupied bringing his writing talents to another Universe dune Frank Herbert died before he could finish his second Dune Trilogy now there six books in the Dune series under Herbert the initial Trilogy of Dune dun Messiah and Children of Dune the then there God emperor of Dune which is kind of a bridge between these two trilogies and a second unfinished Trilogy Chapter House Dune ends on a cliffhanger so fans for years wanted to know how the story ended but Herbert had passed on enter Frank's son and new Orbiter of his estate Brian Herbert who claimed he found his father's notes in a safety deposit box from this he wrote several spin-off novels as well as completed the trilogy that his father aimed to to write he collaborated with Kevin J Anderson to draft the last book in his father's final Trilogy only they decided to divide the book into two books and then write several prequels and books that take place between the other books Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson have written 20 other Dune novels with more coming when Star Wars puts out an underwhelming piece of content fans complain non-stop but they they watch it they read it but you can tell how profoundly disappointing the Dune books are because Dune fans desperately try to forget they exist this is the real divide between Dune and Star Wars Kevin J Anderson came to Star Wars wrote A Few subpar novels and the world kept turning but for Dune fans the drop off is severe what in the Box pain with science fiction that intends to be good anything subpar is forgivable the question becomes did this entertain me enough failings are easier to forgive there might be a reason the Last Jedi upset so many people because by seeking to raise some genuinely interesting questions it forced people to look at the facade behind their Escapist media the Jedi are romanticized deified but if you strip away the myth and look at their deeds the legacy of the Jedi is failure however when a great science fiction story produces something that aims to be good and falls short of that being just bad bad the level of disappointment hits all the harder especially when the quantity of bad media becomes overwhelming there are so many subpar Dune books that it suffocates the legacy of the original it might be easier to compare Brian Herbert to Christopher tolken and that both are Arbiters of their father's literary estate but the reverence Christopher tolken showed to Lord of the Rings is just incomparable to the way Brian Herbert exploited his father's Legacy it's not even comparable what Disney did with Star Wars because Disney actually lowered the output of media there are far less books coming out than they were at the Heyday of Lucas Films and that whole thing they put more money behind the content they produced and in many cases did create some occasionally excellent pieces of media The Last Jedi remains a divisive movie but people are still talking about it years later Andor is a genuinely brilliant piece of Science Fiction some of the best Sci-Fi TV we've seen in a decade and the Mandalorian became a sensation for a very good reason but the only lasting Legacy Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson have left on the Dune franchise is confusion because newcomers might look at this huge body of work and not know where to start yes is the original book but what's next arguably even six books might be too much for some fans but 26 where where do you even start with that without a guide Dune is great science fiction followed by a great series of books and smothered by subpar trash but Star Wars the reason is merely good and not great is also the reason why it continues to be relevant why it continues to entertain people decades later when Star Wars is bad sure it's bad but you're you're still going to watch the next thing when it comes out you're still going to hold out for some glimmer of hope that what comes next will be good because that's attainable for Star Wars but June when it fails it fails hard it's genuinely hard to to muster up any optimism about the future because the books are just that bad and this is why the new series of films is so miraculous it's in many ways revitalized one of science Fiction's greatest sagas in a way that say Apple TV's Foundation series hasn't old sci-fi is a Trevor Trove of fantastic stories that modern audiences might simply not know about there are so many sagas that could be reinterpreted for modern audiences now personally still holding out hope for a Peter Jackson adapted version of arthon and doy's lost world but I won't hold my breath Dune is having a revitalization and I'm hoping that the greatness of The Saga will outshine the Dre has accumulated over its once pristine reputation also just a final note that David Lynch film it's aesthetically fantastic the sleeper has awakened

Channel: Anthony Gramuglia

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Length: 29min 57sec (1797 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024