Originally Posted by
Common Soldier
Actually, I think the lightsaber is a cool device, it was a way to bring sword fighting in a believable way into a futuristic world with blasters. The Jedi, with their ability to sense the future, could move their light saber into position where the blast bolt would be and block it. Ans thr light sabers were powerful, able to cut through blaster doors, as you saw in the Phantom Menance.
The point is, that you want to do things in a least somewhat believable way, not just because the author says so. Dune is a lot like The Last Jedi, where things happen just because the director wants to do things that way, however much it makes no sense. Science Fiction requires a "suspension of disbelief", but you won't get that suspension by the reader or audience if keep doing things without laying the foundation for the rrader and audience to suspend their disbelief. Dune, like The Last Jedi, does not lay that groundwork, thr author/director does stuff simply because that is the way the author/director wants it that way. The original Flash Gordon had people fighting with swords, that made no sense when people had ray guns.- just pick up a ray gun and blast the person with the sword. Star Wars made using the light saber believable, because the Jedi could stop blaster bolts with it, and it cut through doors that were blaster proof. The light saber made sense for the Jedi, who were more into defense than offense - "Not as random as a blastrr. A more elegent weapon for a more.civilized age", you could see the Jedi prdferring to using an elegant lightsaber over a crude blaster.
In the books, Dune brought back knives in fighting in a hamfisted way - the shields were just an obvious and crude plot device to bring back knife fighting into a futuristic world, but having shields explode when hit by lasers made no sense, and was like TLJ ships suddenly running out of fuel for hyper jumping with no good reason or justification, because a lazy director wanted his movie that way and could be bothered to come up with a plausible justification. The movies actually do a much better job in making the use of knives believable than the book - personal shields block energy weapons and high speed projectiles like bullets, but would allow slow movie objects like knives tomgo through. If nothing penetrated a shield, you could not pick up anything, or turn a door knob. The excuse "its just fiction, so the author can do whatever they want" is not really true, not if you want to make good fiction. You can't just decide to make Superman evil, without laying the proper believable work. You can't assert that people could give up all computers but still maintain an interstellar technological society with space flight. Advance AI, yes, but all computers? No. Lazy story writing.
Re: Dune 2020 by Villeneuve has finished filming
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