Is black/white for censorship to get PG-13? It reminds me of Kill Bill 1, both movies had awkward transitions made you "WTF?"
Kill Bill 1 used "blinks eyes" to change color. I thought it was weird and awkward, but Dune 2 was worse, some elements like the lines in telescope were color, but the rest of the elements were black/white, like human and the set.
Will they release color version like Kill Bill?
My understanding is that this effect is supposed to be something about the Harkonnen homeworld. I'm not sure what the lore justification is, nor am I certain if it was exclusive to the film or was part of the book (it's been too long since I read the book). But I think it's something to do with the light on Giedi Prime. That's why the telescope lines are in colour: that readout is projecting its own light that the telescope user can see (because their eye is isolated) but why the image is still black-and-white.
With all that said, because it's a worldbuilding thing, I doubt they'll do it in colour. I also feel like it has nothing to do with getting a PG-13.
The problem with your theory is: Giedi Prime in Dune 1 wasn't black and white.
shareEither they decided on it between films or maybe they didn't have the budget to do it on the first one (I know it was a HUGE budget, but they might have eaten up the costs elsewhere).
Here's a quote from Villenueve:
"I love this idea and I tried, for Giedi Prime, the home world of Harkonnen, there's less information in the book and it's a world that is disconnected from nature. It's a plastic world. So, I thought that it could be interesting if the light, the sunlight could give us some insight on their psyche. What if instead of revealing colors, the sunlight was killing them and creating a very eerie black and white world, that will give us information about how these people perceive reality, about their political system, about how that primitive brutalist culture and it was in the screenplay."
The interview is here: https://www.moviefone.com/news/dune-part-two-exclusive-interview-denis-villeneuve/
I believe the only shots of Giedi Prime were taken at night in part one, which would explain the broadened color spectrum, but I could be wrong about the first part of my statement.
shareI'll first preface this by saying it was an artistic and story-making decision to use this scene just to show how nasty Geidi Prime is to live, as well as showing how much of a brutal sociopath Feyd Ruatha was. Using infrared cameras was also an artistic decision, because nobody's used them before in film-making, and Villeneuve wanted to give the scene a unique look.
It's normal in many films for directors to use color palettes to tell stories. Oppenheimer is a great example, because all the black and white scenes are stuff that was historically documented about him, whereas all the color scenes are pure speculation. Movies like "Wizard of Oz," "Underworld," "Sin City," and a few others used interesting color palettes too, most notably black and white and color.
The arena scene on Geidi Prime, astrophysically and biologically speaking, makes no sense whatsoever. Never in the entire history of astronomy, has a "black sun" ever been documented. Also, there is no such thing as a star that gives off visible light that would bleach everything black and white. The human eye does not register visible light in black and white. Because of our cone cells, we can detect all 7 colors of the rainbow, even if we were to be under a blue sun, a white sun, a red sun, a yellow sun (like the one we currently have) a white dwarf sun, or even a neutron star sun (though why anyone would want to get near one of those, I can't imagine). Even if a "black sun" did exist, the human eye would still not detect only black and white when looking at visible light such a fictional ball of gas would shine down on a planet. You would still register color, even if there wasn't much of it in the Harkonnen court (they sure do love black and white coloring on that world, despite the Harkonnen crest being described as orange and blue in the lore).
I even talked with a friend on here on a "black star" being a black hole. Hollywood actually covered that idea in "Interstellar," where it would be possible for a black hole such as Gargantua to have a stable solar system if it rotated, and its accretion disk gave off light similar to our sun. But even then, human eyes on any planets orbiting such a phenomenon would still detect color of some kind.
Using infrared cameras was also an artistic decision, because nobody's used them before in film-making
Oppenheimer is a great example, because all the black and white scenes are stuff that was historically documented about him, whereas all the color scenes are pure speculation.
Actually, if you look more closely at the arena scenes in the Dune 2 film, the infrared cameras react to fabric differently than a normal camera using visible light, which is why the Bene Gesserits visiting in the same box as Lady Fenring are first seen with their usual black robes and weird, boxy, veiled headdresses, and then in the "light of the black sun," their outfits look like they are white. (I've seen this same effect with red infrared cameras, where some fabrics, no matter what color they are, looks "white" in the infrared image). Another weird thing the infrared cameras did was make the Baron and Feyd's faces look smoother and more gel-like than in normal light. Human skin apparently looks different in infrared light compared to visible light.
Villeneuve did an interview about it, and said they had to do it right, because they weren't going to shoot the scene again with normal cameras.
I never said Oppenheimer was great. I'm just pointing out the artistic choices regarding the color scenes vs. the black and white ones. And yeah, movies with multiple POV's can be done entirely in color, whether it be a historical biopic or a fictional story. In fact, some of the best action and disaster films of the past 30 years would show multiple characters' perspectives, versus just one person.
if you look more closely at the arena scenes in the Dune 2 film, the infrared cameras react to fabric differently than a normal camera using visible light, which is why the Bene Gesserits visiting in the same box as Lady Fenring are first seen with their usual black robes and weird, boxy, veiled headdresses, and then in the "light of the black sun," their outfits look like they are white. (I've seen this same effect with red infrared cameras, where some fabrics, no matter what color they are, looks "white" in the infrared image). Another weird thing the infrared cameras did was make the Baron and Feyd's faces look smoother and more gel-like than in normal light. Human skin apparently looks different in infrared light compared to visible light.
I know, and frankly, it was a waste of film on Villeneuve's part.
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