If you don't get it, I'm not sure discussing it will make for much of a worthwhile endeavor.
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See, I'm a sorta/kinda Bond fan after Sean was out. I get why they keep trying to milk the cow, but the sophisticated quasi-cool, quasi-douche Bond character just shouldn't be a thing anymore. The premise was shot after three actors, and trying to find another is just beating a dead, rotted, bones falling apart corpse.
We have the box sets of those Sci-fi channel (pre rebrand to SyFy) mini-series. Aside from the effects being what you would expect from a TV series at the time, they're really quite fun to watch and do an admirable job of capturing the story. Arguably, better than the new films. Granted, they spend more hours on them, so that's to be expected. They also don't saturate the entire color palate with monotones, though that's a personal nit that I tend to pick at more than it deserves.
Connery, Lazenby, and Moore were great. Pierce Brosnan did a decent job or attempting to balance Connery and Moore. I agree, though. The cash cow is pretty beat at this point, and Idris Elba could do a million other things than be Bond #7 (just counting Eon). Hell, you could make an argument that by the time Moore took the role, the idea was already done between the fifteen spoofs and loads of clones.
They do a much better job at world-building and character development than any of the movie adaptations do. Part of that is just the fact that they devote many more hours to it, but it's also a credit to the writers for sure. One of the better things Sci Fi channel ever gave us. The CGI is definitely janky but I found it pretty easy to look past. If anything I think that as CGI has gotten better, filmmakers tend to over-rely on it whereas when it was obviously kinda crap, they were more likely to only use it when there were no better options. In short, I highly recommend finding copies of the miniseries and devoting a weekend to them. The first two are widely available online, I had to go to the public library for Children.
One quibble I have with the Syfy Dune miniseries is that they focus too hard on the political machinations without really exploring the religious machinations that Paul and Jessica/The Bene Gesserit do to make Paul the Mahdi/Kwisatz Hadderach. They really gloss over that particular aspect. The Villeneuve films have the opposite problem where they do a fantastic job of covering the religious machinations but suck at the political machinations or even really explaining how important Spice is (which the miniseries does literally in the opening scene). I would agree that the miniseries does a better job of fleshing out Paul and Chani in particular. I'm also not as much of a fan of how Paul basically abandons Chani for Irulan in the Villeneuve version, rather than it being a deliberate political power play like it is in the books and the miniseries. The miniseries also handles Paul's sister better, and does a better job of showing that the war took years rather than months in Villeneuve's version. Also the dude who played the Baron in the miniseries (Ian McNeice) was chewing scenery like a motherfucker. I would argue his performance was only rivaled by the dude who played the baron in Lynch's version. Stellan Skarsgard's version was plenty menacing, but lacked the depravity/sadism that the others had.
You mean that a single sentence immediately after the opening credits with a booming, Mongolian-throat-singing-type voice saying "He who controls spice, controls the empire/galaxy/whatever" isn't enough to convey how valuable and important spice is?
We watched Atlas over the weekend too. In the continuum that Pacific Rim kicked off and Atlantic Rim quasi-parodied, it's no Atlantic Rim. Would have been about 20% better if Lopez would make exploding noises with her mouth when describing her fights to somebody right after they happened like they did in Atlantic Rim, or having a big "WE'RE CANCELING THE APOCALYPSE!" speech from somebody of Idris Alba's stature, but hey, I'll take my mecha fantasy any way I can get it at this point.
How so? Genuinely curious.
