My biggest gripe with Cameron’s Avatar is that it downgrades spice from the equivalent of crude oil and fentanyl to a nominally valuable MacGuffin colloquially referred to as “unobtainium” with no real name or purpose given (although the visuals imply that it’s a sort of room-temperature superconductor). Spice addiction provides the only alternative. No big deal, just let the navicomputer have a think and away you go.īut in Dune, navicomputers have been hard banned throughout the empire because interstellar route calculation at faster-than-light speed requires both sentience and prescience, the sort of thinking machines from which humanity had escaped total enslavement only a few millennia prior. “Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy! 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?”

But you have to give it to Lucas for conveying the importance of spice better than any version of Dune ever has by giving Han Solo a line explaining navicomputers in his own charming way: And there are many other parallels.Īs ripoffs go, James Cameron’s plagiarism of Frank Herbert was more faithful than George Lucas’s attempt: Star Wars. Jake Sully fulfills the same messianic role for the Na'vi as Paul Atreides for the Fremen. Cameron’s Pandora is Herbert’s Arrakis with trees in place of sandworms. But without giving away any spoilers, let me just say that you’ll find Dune (part 1 of ?) a lot less boring if you think of it as the spiritual prequel to Avatar-which it is.

Truthfully, Dennis Villeneuve’s film rendition of Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel Dune, exciting as it is for fans like me to see it so beautifully rendered on the big screen, has the same pacing issues as the novel it adapts and that does make it pretty boring for the uninitiated.

Xkcd tiny piano