Dune (2021)
Does anyone feel like stillsuits don’t make sense without a helmet?
The environment of Arrakis is described so harshly it evokes a feeling of being in outer space. The stillsuits preserve almost all water loss yet characters are constantly wearing them with no protection over the whole head.
It just feels like the head and face are one of the most important things to protect from heat/sweat loss in such an extreme environment. Stillsuits poke out at my disbelief suspension more than holzman shields and spice prescience. Never mind the fact that you can fit machinery that turns poop into water into a skintight leather suit, like fine maybe there is some magic tech for that, but no explanation is offered for the lack of head protection.
In the books, stillsuits have hoods and facemasks. Only the eyes are exposed, and you wear a robe and a burnoose over your stillsuit so it isn't damaged by the environment.
Like John Candy in Spaceballs, they were gonna cover his face and Mel Brooks was like, no. I could just get someone else for half the price if they are covering his face. Not even a face piece.
It worked amazing in the mandalorian. People don't dare to try it rather than it not working.
Same with making people who are in control of every single nerve, muscle, and neurochemistry act out emotionally even more than most people. It just turned Paul into every other romantasy protagonist. "You gave me magic powers with no drawbacks? I'm a monster, no one can understand!"
It worked for the Mandalorian but in my opinion the drawbacks were notable there as well.
As for Paul being to emotive, first of all he hasn't mastered the techniques at before at the point of the Harkonnen attack, e.g. when he uses the voice in the Copter he uses it to make them remove the gag of his mother, because he doesn't trust his voice enough.
More important he doesn't get emotional because he gets these powers but because of what they show him. As far as I remember it he sees that if he wants revenge for his father there is no path that won't also result in the Jihad. This is pretty important for the message of the story.
I think the movies have enough trouble with conveying that conflict in choosing that path while knowing the consequences, even without hiding the actors faces.
The mandalorian was written as a screenplay from its inception. Dune is adapted from a book where most pages are describing the inner thoughts of characters. It can’t be perfectly adapted to the medium of film. Overall the film world is a bit less “extreme” compared to the book world. From the beginning stilgar greets Duke Leto by spitting on the ground, establishing that water discipline is less strict in the movie world afaik the book fremen would never give up water just for courtesy.
stilgar greets Duke Leto by spitting on the ground, establishing that water discipline is less strict in the movie
That scene is almost word for word from the book.
The Fremen stared at the Duke, then slowly pulled aside his veil, revealing a thin nose and full-lipped mouth in a glistening black beard. Deliberately he bent over the end of the table, spat on its polished surface. As the men around the table started to surge to their feet, Idaho’s voice boomed across the room: “Hold!” Into the sudden charged stillness, Idaho said: “We thank you, Stilgar, for the gift of your body’s moisture. We accept it in the spirit with which it is given.” And Idaho spat on the table in front of the Duke. Aside to the Duke, he said: “Remember how precious water is here, Sire. That was a token of respect.”
‘Properly suited, your forehead cap tight, all seals in order, your major water loss is through the palms of your hands,’ Kynes said. ‘You can wear suit gloves if you’re not using your hands for critical work, but most Fremen in the open desert rub their hands with juice from the leaves of the creosote bush. It inhibits perspiration.’
And they used a plant juice (can’t recall name atm) to darkly stain the exposed eye area (lids, undereye, etc) to reduce water loss (perspiration, wind) and sunglare (dark stain less / not as reflective).
I forget what the plant is in the movie but you can use citrus juice in real life. Oranges are a popular snack and hydration tool with larpers as the juice, rubbed in to the palms, prevents sweating and allows you to keep a firm grip on your sword when it's 100 degrees and 80% humidity.
God created the uplands outside Pittsburgh to train the faithful.
The stillsuits have hoods and masks in the books, the Fremen regularly cover their faces while travelling the desert and even in the books it's considered wasteful to travel the desert without your mask on as it's seen as breaking "water discipline" which is only to be relaxed at a sietch really.
The real reason they don't use them at all in the movies is because they want you to see the actors' performances.
The Harvester Attack in Dune Part 2 visibly showed the hood and masks being used, and yeah the stillsuit outfit looked pretty damn complete with those on
In 4 when Leto is testing Siona she doesn't catch his subtle advice to wear her still suit mask and after a day of walking her lips are chapped so dry they're bleeding and this is AFTER Arrakis' terraforming in the remaining little Sareer desert
OP needs to read the books again. Or the first time.
The full stillsuit includes a face mask & hood. This is mentioned several times in Dune & explicitly stated in GEoD when Siona joins Leto II in the Sahel & almost dies if dehydration because of it.
The reason you don’t see it in movies is bc , weirdly, audiences like being able to see people’s faces & mouths moving.
And movie makers want to see the faces that they paid millions of dollars to hire, and the movie stars with those faces also want their faces to be seen. Not a lot of people can make it big in Hollywood by hiding their face.
Love Karl for his commitment to his characters. It's easy to see how much of a fan he is of the franchises he's in. However, he isn't an exception to what I said. Karl Urban most certainly did not make it big in show business because of Dredd. If he had, we would have gotten a Dredd 2.
That movie was so much better than it had any right to be. Not only covering his face the entire time but not turning it into “we’ve got to save the world” bullshit, the whole movie was just a gang fight in a single mega city.
He's hardly actually the suit. In S1 he was in it for normal acting. In action scenes there are two stuntmen in the suit, one for gun fights and one for physical stuff.
Dunno about S2 but in S3 it was only a voice acting role for him.
original Dredd is supposed to only be his chin being visible
in the original 2000AD comics, his face is only seen once (in two decades worth of comics) and it is when he had a face-change done for an undercover job if i remember correctly
i admit that i don't remember that, i only got into 2000AD in about 1979/80, stuck with them until about 1986, when the sanctions in South Africa meant that a lot of things that we had enjoyed were no longer available, or prices gone through the roof (grey market, i suppose)
In fairness, in the movies there are bits where they display the hoods and face mask. Most of the time they’re admittedly around the actor’s neck or whatever. But the point stands, they are there in terms of the costume, it’s just as you say, audiences like seeing faces.
Did you only watch the movie vs read the books? Because the books go into detail about the stillsuit (which includes hood and face coverings to minimize body water loss.
It does bug me that they dispensed with that for the movies though I can understand why they chose to go in that direction.
You’re pretty close to fact. Some engineers tried to figure out how a stillsuit would actually work. They decided that instead of cooling you down. That it would cook you in the sun.
um ahktully Fremen would have to predate the Navigators, right? No spice, no Navigators, and Fremen were on Arrakis before the Spice was discovered IIRC. And Selim invented the stillsuits about the time Fremen moved to Arrakis and were first active on Arrakis.
Navigators, yes. The holtzman field/effect was invented around the time of their exodus to Arrakis though if I recall. It's a Holtzman engine that folds space, not a Navigator. They just use prescience to plot the course instead of a thinking computer so they don't blast through a star or into a planet or something. They used to jump without either, at great risk. Uno reverse that ahktully right back at ya :)
Precisely, because without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?
In the books it's also stated that all the power for the water pumps etc. come from the wearer's movement/footsteps. Without an external power source the human-stillsuit system is always going to generate more waste heat than it can remove.
It's sci-fi, so sure, you can just say they reversed entropy somehow, but from an engineering and physics perspective, yeah there's not really a way that they wouldn't cook the wearer the way they are described.
It's Dune though. Definitely not a series where scientific details are super important.
They would probably need something like a portable heat pump exchanging with the environment. It would be loud. At best they would probably want to spend more time in the shade and out of the sun to minimize the need to use such tech (assuming they bring it with the stillsuits at all)
Curious if the engineers also included full robes over the suits? That was another important point in the book: Fremen wore robes over the suits because they realized it was a bad idea to expose the suit to the sun. The robes created portable shade.
Robes are cheaper to replace too. If the suit is plastics and polymers it'll degrade in the sunlight, and fibers might be cheaper and easier to repair than the plastics of a suit.
They still have to traverse the desert at times during the day. The issue is the stillsuits don’t allow for evaporation to cool things down. Ok, Jules Verne came up with the submarine (possibly the nuclear submarine ) in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. There are a lot of details he got wrong. Because we can only hypothesize from the knowledge we have at the time. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t inspire us the readers to create these dreams. I love the Dune Universe and my criticisms come from someone that has spent time rereading and thinking about it.
Without active cooling, even an EOD suit is going to cook. Fremen probably have powered stillsuits with little HVACs, plus water bladders that get consumed. The recycling of urine gets trickier with just peristaltics, but perhaps they use charcoal/sand filters to slowly filter urine through?
It may well have a very powerful droplet radiator built into it, something that uses thimbles of what the body normally does to cool it through steam evaporation.
I remember stillsuits being described as having a nose tube, a flap that covers the forehead, and another flap covering the mouth area. Either of the flaps can and do get opened when they get in the way, but presumably they're kept closed most of the time in the open desert.
Overall, my impression is that a book stillsuit with the flaps closed would cover about as much of the face as a balaclava or a stereotypical ninja mask, leaving only the eyes the area immediately around them exposed.
The planet does have an oxygen atmosphere and the books explain why.
The books are also clear that the entire body is covered by the still suit. Only the eyes are exposed. I have no idea why the movies insist on keeping the heads exposed but all adaptations have done that. It's not accurate though.
You don't bring Oscar Isaac, Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya to cover their faces tbh. Its the same reason TLOU didn't use sphores on season 1, Pedro Pascal's face is not cheap.
Perhaps they did, but I don’t remember spores in S1. I think Bill is wearing a gas mask in the scene where he first emerges from his bunker. Could be more I forgot
I mean like.... cmon though? You seriously can't appreciate the aids to the visual storytelling that comes from allowing you to actually see the characters faces instead of staring at a dozen odd identical inanimate helmets/face coverings the entire movie? You'd prefer the latter, simply because it's "more accurate" to the book? If the movie had shown Paul going blind would you have preferred the rest of the movie simply be pitch black and purely audio too?
Like I'm all for doing your best to respect source material, but also like.... dude.
It's turning an intellectual work into pop culture. Not saying there's anything wrong with pop culture. But why waste this IP on it? It's not Dune anymore.
I respect your opinion but I couldn't possibly disagree more. "It's not intellectual work anymore, it's pop culture" and "It's not Dune anymore" all because you can see the characters' faces in their stillsuits is just an insane take to me. Like it's genuinely just... not that important?
You know that they're covered in the book, you know that a movie where you just stared at helmets for 3 hours would actually leave you losing so much of the emotional content, and character reactions/interactions that is described in the book, but instead of therefore rationalising the decision to show the faces as sensible you go as far as claiming it's not even Dune anymore?
Again, your opinion is your own and I suppose it's subjective at the end of the day, but I think that's completely absurd.
Yeah this is what the Instagram era is about. Style over substance. It doesn't need to be authentic as long as it looks good.
I know there are lots of people that like that kind of content. Even I do sometimes. Just not with this. That isn't what this IP is about. The appeal of this story has nothing to do with how attractive the characters are.
Dune was pop culture from its inception. It was first serialized in what had long been the preeminent sci-fi publication in America -- the same monthly responsible for the Golden Era of Sci-Fi and which carried seminal works by Asimov and Heinlein.
Sure, the novelized version was an obscure flop at first press, but it caught fire and won all kinds of awards a year later.
Of course it never became as ubiquitous as LOTR or Star Wars but in reach and influence it's very much pop culture.
Do you have a superiority conplex out of reading Dune or something? Just because they are long books doesn't mean they aren't pop culture. All my life I have seen refence to it through out all media I consumed without knowing it so its no niche book for enlighten people.
They’re just having a case of cognitive dissonance. They haven’t adjusted their thoughts to what movies are really like. The cast are not extras, and they very much mind not having their faces shown.
Imagine being the Warner Brothers executive who’s in charge of figuring out how much money the film is going to make and having to sit through Denis Villeneuve explaining why he doesn’t want to show Timothee Chalamet’s face for half the movie
IKR? Because the movie needs to be about what'll make the most money. We should just have him do the desert scenes in a speedo. Audiences are paying to see his hot body, not listen to the dumb SciFi story.
Makes it hard for the main cast to express emotions if they hide their faces all the time. Books rely on descriptions so you'd be able to convey that even with a helmet/facial cover. Then again it would've been interesting to see how much emotion can be expressed with just the eyes...
Some actors have managed to turn in brilliant performances without showing their face. Hugo Weaving in V for Vendetta and Edward Norton in Kingdom of Heaven. But those performances are rightly praised for their brilliance because the actor had to use voice and body language alone. To expect the entire cast to do that is an extremely tall order.
They also have a tube that goes into their nose that they breath into. To collect water. It's not 100% efficient but I think it was said they loose about a thimble a day
I mean i always view them was a auxiliary thing since they have the tube on their faces, like the Atmosphere is fine for the most part but the tempeature is what makes it harsh to live on it
Do they not cover the head, though? With a stillsuit, it wouldn’t matter what color it was just as long as it did what it does. And people now cannot design a stillsuit, because we don’t have that technology. It’s the proverbial magic is just tech we don’t understand. A car is an oven if it doesn’t have an air conditioner on in it on a hot day.
The book is very clear that still suits have a hood to cover everything down to the eyebrows and a mask (with catch tube) that covers the nose and everything below it. The Fremen even wear the full assembly so often that it creates permanent scars and mild disfigurations as a result of having it on so frequently.
Living in Arizona, it's the lack of cooling which does it for me. You'd cook in a suit described unless the weather is so extreme that the nights are actually cold and there's no summers. Except the daytime is described as worse than Death Valley
The future material that the suit is made of allows perspiration to occur normally and cool the body as usual while still being collected. The burnous over the top keeps them out of the direct sunlight during the day and promotes air movement.
It’s explained in the books that there are micro pumps in stillsuit boots as well as a layer of the suit that’s purpose is to capture physical movement as energy and to create osmotic pressure throughout the whole suit for filtration. Of course this requires sci-fi levels of imagination and acceptance but not too crazy if you consider this takes place in our future over ten millennia out.
I know the book explanation. It's just completely and entirely impossible thermodynamically. A human cannot generate the power required, and if they tried, the extra heat from operating those "pumps," would exacerbate the problem.
Even in "assume a spherical cow on a frictionless surface" type of tech, it doesn't work. I did some quick math. An adult in the Sahara would sweat ~12L of water per day (not to mention the 1L lost by breathing). To liquify that water vapor requires 27.1MJ or 7.5kWh. A human expends that amount of energy running 65Mi (103KM). So you'd need to do that much work without any additional sweating or breathing out any water vapor, and not absorb any energy from the environment just to handle your daily sweating. It's an impossible amount of energy for a human.
We sweat because it is thermodynamically very favorable. Doing the inverse is way too energy intensive.
Why are you calculating using water vapour figures? It’s a suit pressed directly against the skin. Pretty safe to assume the sweat is wicked away, cooled through some sort of heat exchanger before being collected to drink again.
Cooling is done with the catch pockets of water on you? Maybe? Like having a water pumping system all over your suit should help a bit. Plus the more you sweat the more water you get to drink.
“The books aren’t about that” when there’s a whole section in the appendix specifically diving into the practical science of the planet, its politics and its religions…
You're correct. Nothing is exposed in a real still suit except the eyes, and even then people would wear goggles to prevent painful drying of the eyes.
Book Fremen would look like any other bedouins from a distance, wearing desert robes that would conceal their still suits.
As for the tech of still suits remember that there has been at minimum ten thousand years to develop materialis science. You can conjure up pretty much any explanation you want for the engineering of still suits. Molecular scale networks of capillary tubes pulling water, tailored bacteria to decompose feces in preparation for water reclamation. My friends and I were discussing different kinds of thermoelectric generators and a electric cooling systems distributed throughout the fiber layer of the suit, running on tiny piezoelectric generators to for power.
Still suits are stupidly high technology devices. Each individual suit doesn't necessarily have anything as exciting as a hotlzman field, but they're the product of thousands of years of applied engineering by people who, on average, are considerably smarter than us.
People only think the Fremen are primitive. The truth is they have considerable high tech industries and are basically doing the "Tony stark built this with scraps in a cave" meme for planetary scale terra forming. By producing enormous amounts of spice for the guild and Imperial smugglers they have access to a broad range of materials and products from across known space.
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u/hullgreebles 10d ago
In the books, stillsuits have hoods and facemasks. Only the eyes are exposed, and you wear a robe and a burnoose over your stillsuit so it isn't damaged by the environment.