I watched Dune (2021) at the Midway drive in this weekend. Went with Jamie and Tiffany, though they drove separately. We grabbed a quick dinner from Sheetz beforehand. I had a chicken sub.
I feel I’ve been to a drive-in before, but can’t remember a specific instance. It felt weird driving into a dark parking lot with my head-lights off. Took me a while to notice Tiffany standing out to mark their location. Parking was kind of tight there. I thought the poles marked the sides of a spot but they were meant to have one car on each side, so I had to readjust. Luckily, it wasn’t that crowded and no one parked on the other side of me.
It was a chilly night for a drive-in, so we left our cars and heaters running the whole time. It made it a little harder to hear, but I was able to stay comfortable, even getting hot at times, with my window open so I could talk to Jamie sometimes. I can see how it would be pretty nice with nicer weather.
It was nice to be able to adjust the volume via my radio to whatever I wanted. If it weren’t for the car running and window open, I would’ve been able to hear quite well. There was the sound of all the other cars playing the soundtrack at the same time, making a weird stereo effect, and I could somewhat hear the track even when I accidentally changed the station instead of the volume once.
The screen was plenty big, but lacked some contrast. Dark scenes were particularly hard to see, most noticeably near the end of this particular movie. One scene had a giant worm at night that mostly looked like a big black shape. Every once in a while lights would turn on and reduce the contrast more. Or they’d shine in my eyes and temporarily blind me, like one car did that came in late with headlights blaring and parking backwards in the spot in front of me.
I will have to see another drive-in movie next year.
The movie was fairly good. I saw the 80s one and read the book, though both a while back. This movie was only one half (I’m guessing) of the story. It seemed to follow the book fairly well, closer than the 80s one, and I recognized many of the scenes as being pretty close to how I remembered them from the book. It had a less dark and sinister feel than the 80s one. It built the relationships between Paul and his parents a little more. I felt it didn’t strongly show the importance of water to the Freman that the book does. I don’t think it really mentioned much about or showed much of the Mentats. It obviously condensed, simplified, or skipped some things from the book to fit in a movie time-frame, but much less so than the 80s movie, which had to fit the whole book in a single movie. It spent a lot of time on Paul’s visions.
I will have to see the second one, whenever it comes out. I’ll also have to rewatch the 80s one.
There was a second movie on after, Venom, but I left after Dune. I had a dog waiting at home for me and it was already a little late. Plus, Jamie and Tiffany were leaving too.
I left the radio tuned to the station as I drove out. I didn’t notice until I got on the road. I could actually still hear it for several miles, though at times it cut out and got drowned out by another station.
I had to push my car pretty hard to make the left turn out of there onto the 45 MPH Route 59, as the traffic was annoyingly spaced. Between that and the idling for two and a half hours, my calculated gas mileage was pretty low. I had just filled up at the Sheetz before the show, and leaving the tank average was below 10 for a while. It got above 20 by the time I got home, but still hasn’t gotten above 25.