To those who liked "Dune" (2021) but haven't read the novel: an appreciation post that will let you pick up more details in one scene in particular: Salusa Secundus and the Sardaukar...

The "Salusa Secundus" scene is very striking to anyone watching it, but many things shown in the frame are "show, don't tell", to Villeneuve's great credit. No sponefeeding here.

I will go through some things in the scene so that some happy readers might want to revisit the scene again (I will link it in the very end), and get horrified by what they see, as they should.

Salusa Secundus itself is a brutal, inhospitable planet, with all-over extreme weather and dangerous animals. A bush on the planet contains Shigawire, a thin natural metal vine, which can both be used for communication or for garrotting. Every Sardaukar soldier can be expected to have one. So, what you see in the scene, unyielding rain even in apparent sunlight, that is a good day.

House Corrino, who has held the Emperor status for eons, used it as a prison planet for a millennia. When the House moved their palace planet to Kaitain, Salusa Secundus remained a prison and a training grounds, and all the most horrible criminals and psychopaths of the entire galaxy that were apprehended and sentenced were sent so SS.

For a long time no one knew where the Sardaukar shock troops came from, where they were trained or where they came from, it was a guarded secret. They are deployed everywhere where the Emperor wants a "cease of hostilities", to be brief. All anyone knew were that the Sardaukar were a pure, fanatical death cult and their soldiers could not be bargained with or bribed.

What you see in the Salusa Secundus scene of the movie is a battallion (~1000 men) that is getting adorned with a blood crest before being deployed again. The blood is carried by acolytes of the faith and pooled from a number of inverted prisoners who have had their throats cut. This was not in the novel but is purely ingenious portrayal of their surreal existence. Nothing could have rammed the point home better, to me.

In the very demanding and unforgiving regimen for the Sardaukar, 50% of recruits die during training. Since the influx of prisoners are more or less constant, this can be afforded. Those that didn't "make the cut" are the ones you see sacrificed like Mayan slaves. Again, to the soldiers that have made it in the clip, with cadavers around them, blood on their face, and a throat monster screaming nightmares at them: that is considered a good day.

The Sardaukar as mercenaries are among the most expensive services you can look for in the galaxy, and Baron Vladimir Harkonnen used a significant amount of his House's resources to finance the Arrakis conspiracy, with the implicit support of the Emperor (whom we will see in the next movie).

So far this is all book lore I've spoken of, with some flavor. What I haven't even mentioned yet is Denis Villeneuve's brilliant depiction of a fascist, cultist spiritual leader of the year 10191: The throat singer.

Take a look at his nose and his shoulders. Compare with how high your nose is from your own shoulders.

The man has an extended neck, likely deliberately and surgically augmented so that he can be a part of the priest caste that communicate blessings and orders to the troops before deployment.

Now, try to remember the beginning of the movie, the very first seconds after studio logos. What you get is this (lower your volume).

"Dreams are messages from the deep". This is very accurate when compared with the heightened meaning of dreams and visions to many entities in Dune, from the Bene Gesserit to the Fremen and others. What is so creepy is that this warrior death cult is also in on it. They don't need more motivation. :)

The "singer" preaches existential and philosophical messages to the troops. Every sound is a word and carries meaning. It's basically only vowel variations, with some glottal pauses and some hums. The shape of his neck suggests the singer has had his vocal cords drawn out and extended to have only one singular function, to sermonize. The object around his throat is either just ornamental or a big microphone (with the big floating box above him being the amp.

This whole aspect is an incredibly well-thought out idea by Villeneuve (and sung by the accomplished veteran Michael Geiger), because the reason Frank Herbert's novel stood out from the rest of the world when it won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award in 1966 is just this sort of thing, refinement over time.

You have to understand that during the early '60s most "sci-fi" novels mostly involved flying saucers, Martians, and robots with tube arms and fish-tank heads. The Clarkes and Bradburys and Huxleys had just started trotting.

Dune as a novel showed a world in the year 10191, and a humanity that had extended out into the Milky Way and then grown apart for eons, specializing themselves in a hundred crazy directions, either by choice or by environmental factors. Some humans (the Tleilaxu) are short, gray-skinned, bald little midgets. Others are living computers (the Mentats), and let's not even get started on the Guild Navigator (I won't).

What Denis Villeneuve accomplished in the "Salusa Secundus" scene was to show a small sliver of the terrifying future that is Dune, because the Sardaukar are pawns sculpted and molded from the ground up to be nothing but a Blade. Nothing more.

And here is the last stretch of appreciation: the Sardaukar language.

Another poster on the internet did the hard work and managed to decode what language the officer is speaking to the Harkonnen "twisted" Mentat Piter DeVries: it's english.

From his text on Reddit:

The Sardaukar speak English in the 2021 Dune film but they strip it down to the most basic syllables and sounds to make it as brutally efficient as they are.

The only word they do not shorten is Sardaukar.

To give you some examples, we start with the phrase uttered by the commander when Piter de Vries goes to Salusa Secundus.

“Those who stand against us fall!”

Strip the fat to get “se who st- gai-st u- fall!“

Then smash it together and say it fast!

“suh-oost-ageesta-fallah!”

Want another one?

“It is done” becomes “It s-d-” and then “Et’sa-duh.”

“No! We are the Sardaukar!” becomes “N- th- Sardaukar!” and then “Nah! Th/Sadaukar!

So after thousands of years these "jarheads" have manage to make efficient not just weaponry and uniforms, and not only pretentious military lingo ("helo") but the actual words they speak have been stripped of fricatives and spelling to be as short as possible.

Another poster also clarified an interesting thing: the voice of the Sardaukar Commander has been manipulated by the sound engineers and mixers of the movie, so that his speech is, to be simple, impossible. The commander is pronouncing words with parts of the tongue that by definition can't sound off at the same time, since the tongue can only be at one place at one time (close to the teeth, or close to the throat, or to the palate). This is why his voice sounds so thick and fuzzy.

So the Commander is speaking a language that is boiled down with a tongue that is unnaturally effective. A better definition of the book Sardaukar can not be made.

And here is the whole scene. Enjoy.

Submitted February 11, 2023 at 10:14PM by Dickpuncher_Dan https://ift.tt/L9lf65P