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    The Invention of a Desert Tongue for ‘Dune’

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    Language constructors for the movies started with words Frank Herbert made up for his 1965 novel but went much further, creating an extensive vocabulary and specific grammar rules.In Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi “Dune” movies, Indigenous people known as Fremen use a device to tunnel rapidly through their desert planet’s surface.The instrument is called a “compaction tool” in Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, “Dune,” on which the films are based. But the professional language constructors David J. Peterson and Jessie Peterson wanted a more sophisticated word for it as the husband and wife built out the Fremen language, Chakobsa, for “Dune: Part Two,” which premiered earlier this month.They started with a verb they had made up meaning “to press” — “kira” — and, applying rules David Peterson had devised for the language before the first movie, fashioned another verb that means “to compress” or “to free space by compression” — “kiraza.” From there, they used his established suffixes to come up with a noun. Thus was born the Chakobsa word for a sand compressor, “kirzib,” which can be heard in background dialogue in “Dune: Part Two.”For language constructors — conlangers, as they are known — such small touches enhance the verisimilitude of even gigantic edifices like the “Dune” series. If the demand for conlangers’ work is any indication, filmmakers and showrunners agree.“There’s a very big limit to what you can do with anything approaching gibberish,” said Jessie Peterson, who holds a doctorate in linguistics. “If you just shouted one word in gibberish, that would probably be fine. If you shouted a phrase of two words, OK. But if you tried to do a whole sentence structure in gibberish, it would fall apart very quickly. If somebody needed to respond or repeat information, it won’t cohere.”Other languages are a significant part of the “Dune” films as well. For “Part One,” David Peterson devised a chant for the emperor’s fearsome military forces, the Sardaukar, and the sign language of discreet hand gestures employed by the central Atreides family.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Dune: Part Two’ Gives Sci-Fi-Obsessed Silicon Valley a Reason to Party

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      In a top-floor atrium in downtown San Francisco on Thursday evening, tech workers from Google, Slack, X and Mozilla mingled next to a pair of cardboard cutouts of Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya.Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook founder, chatted as others sipped from cannily named cocktails like the Fremen Mirage (gin, coconut Campari, sweet vermouth) and the Arrakis Palms (vanilla pear purée, gin, Fever-Tree tonic). Tim O’Reilly, a tech industry veteran, dropped by. Alex Stamos, the former head of security at Facebook, was also spotted.“Do you think they’ll let me take home one of the freaky sandworm popcorn buckets?” someone in the crowd tittered. The suggestively designed buckets had become a sensation across social media.The techies were all there to celebrate Silicon Valley’s newest obsession: “Dune: Part 2,” the latest movie adapted from the Frank Herbert-authored science-fiction saga, which helped inspire many of them to become interested in technology. The film, which follows the 2021 installment “Dune,” sold an estimated $81.5 million in tickets in the United States and Canada over the weekend, the biggest opening for a Hollywood film since “Barbie.”The invitation-only private screening at the IMAX theater in downtown San Francisco was hosted by two tech executives turned podcasters of “Escape Hatch,” a weekly show focused on sci-fi and fantasy films. And it was not the only game in town.Across Silicon Valley — from venture capital firms to tech executive circles — people had booked their own private screenings of the movie, directed by Denis Villeneuve. On Thursday, the venture firm 50 Years invited founders, friends and investors to “come fuel your imagination with stellar science fiction” in a theater takeover.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Dune: Part Two’ Review: Bigger, Wormier and Way Far Out

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      Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya make an appealing pair in Denis Villeneuve’s follow-up film, and the actors fit together with tangible ease.Having gone big in “Dune,” his 2021 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s futuristic opus, the director Denis Villeneuve has gone bigger and more far out in the follow up. Set in the aftermath of the first movie, the sequel resumes the story boldly and quickly, delivering visions both phantasmagoric and familiar. Like Timothée Chalamet’s dashingly coifed hero — who steers monstrous sandworms over the desert like a charioteer — Villeneuve has tamed a Leviathan. The art of cinematic spectacle is alive and rocking in “Dune: Part Two,” and it’s a blast.The new movie is a surprisingly nimble moonshot, even with all its gloom and doom and brutality. Big-screen enterprises, particularly those adapted from books with a huge, fiercely loyal readership, often have a ponderousness built in to every image. In some, you can feel the enormous effort it takes as filmmakers try to turn reams of pages into moving images that have commensurate life, artistry and pop on the screen. Adaptations can be especially deadly when moviemakers are too precious with the source material; they’re torpedoed by fealty.“Dune” made it clear that Villeneuve isn’t that kind of textualist. As he did in the original, he has again taken plentiful liberties with Herbert’s behemoth (one hardcover edition runs 528 pages) to make “Part Two,” which he wrote with the returning Jon Spaihts. Characters, subplots and volumes of dialogue (interior and otherwise) have again been reduced or excised altogether. (I was sorry that the great character actor Stephen McKinley Henderson, who played an eerie adviser in the first movie, didn’t make the cut here.) The story — its trajectory, protagonist and concerns — remains recognizable yet also different.“Dune” turns on Paul Atreides (Chalamet), an aristocrat who becomes a guerrilla and crusader, and whose destiny weighs as heavily on him as any crown. In adapting “Dune,” Villeneuve effectively cleaved Herbert’s novel in half. (Herbert wrote six “Dune” books, a series that has morphed into a multimedia franchise since his death in 1986.) The first part makes introductions and sketches in Paul’s back story as the beloved only son of a duke, Leto (Oscar Isaac), and his concubine, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson). When it opens, the royals, on orders from the universe’s emperor, are preparing to vacate their home planet, a watery world called Caladan, to the parched planet of Arrakis, a.k.a. Dune.The move to Arrakis goes catastrophically wrong; Paul’s father and most members of House Atreides are murdered by their enemies, most notably the pallid, villainous House Harkonnen. Paul and the Lady Jessica escape into the desert where — after much side-eyeing and muttering along with one of those climactic mano-a-mano duels that turn fictional boys into men — they find uneasy allies in a group of Fremen, the planet’s Indigenous population. A tribal people who have adapted to Dune’s harsh conditions with clever survival tactics, like form-fitting suits that conserve bodily moisture, the Fremen are scattered across the planet under the emperor’s rule. Some fight to be free; many pray for a messiah.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Interview: Timothée Chalamet and Denis Villeneuve on the ‘Dune’ Films

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      The director Denis Villeneuve and the actor Timothée Chalamet bound into the room talking at, and over, each other in rapid French. Villeneuve is from Quebec; Chalamet was born in New York City but has dual American and French citizenship. Together, they’re a dynamic tag team dressed near-identically in head-to-toe black, although Chalamet’s shiny leather layers have more swagger. The topic of the day is galactic genocide and dubious messiahs, central themes in “Dune: Part Two,” the second installment of their cerebral space epic based on the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert. Yet, the pair are prone to giggle fits.“We didn’t see each other since a while, so it’s like a holiday,” Villeneuve, 56, said apologetically, switching to English. When coffee arrives at the room at the Four Seasons hotel in Los Angeles, the two clink mugs. “That’s our spice,” he chuckled, referring to the psychedelic substance found only on the movie’s planet Arrakis.In “Dune,” spice is the most valuable resource in the universe. Herbert conceived of it as a glittering dust with the power to expand minds, fuel interstellar travel and incite bloody battles over its distribution. Combine the brain-melting effects of peyote, the geopolitical strife over oil and the violence of Prohibition-era bootlegging. Multiply that by the number of stars in the sky and you get the idea.The previous “Dune,” released in 2021, won six Academy Awards. It climaxed with Chalamet’s sheltered scion, Paul Atreides, abducted from his family’s spice-mining compound and left to die in the scorching Arrakis desert, patrolled by fanged sandworms the size of the Empire State Building. To survive “Part Two,” Paul’s mother, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), encourages the Fremen, a tribe of desert-dwellers, to believe that her son is their long-awaited savior. The danger is that Paul might be swayed to believe it, too, even as the hallucinogenic spice peppers him with visions of a jihad waged in his name.Heavy stuff. Not that it’s weighing down their mood. As Chalamet, 28, grinned, he said, “The great irony of working with a master like Denis is it’s not some pompous experience.” The two spoke further about the next potential sequel, the impossible quest for onscreen perfection and those infamous “Dune” popcorn buckets. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Scenes may look simple, the director said, but he took pains “to make sure that we have the right rock at the right color at the right time of the day.”Warner Bros.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More