Villeneuve Dune Films Database
Dune: Part One
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Transcripts of events of interest
[The Fremen fire their lasguns at the Harkonnen spice harvesters and carryalls, blowing chunks out of them. The explosions are accompanied by fireballs.]
Commentary
(The event can be found here.)
The lasguns plainly use actual laser beams to inflict damage.
The explosions are interesting. Lasers, contrary to what most movies would have you believe, typically do not cause explosions. More often, they simply go right through their target, creating a tiny hole. It is possible for a laser to make something explode, of course. I can think of four different explanations for the blasts:
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The lasers are just that powerful. They must then be in the terawatt range.
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The harvesters have very thin walls, with fuel or other combustibles just inside. Frankly, this seems unlikely given how bad an idea it is to design the harvesters to be so fragile. Of course, this may be an allowable design flaw to compensate for other advantages.
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The actual exterior of the harvesters is explosive. This seems ridiculous, so I won't go with it.
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The lasguns work like the Pulsed Energy Projectile system—they coat a tiny area in plasma, then create a blast effect with a quick pulse of energy. I don't think this is the best explanation either, as the blasts appear to contain a lot of pieces from the harvester's (presumably metal) walls. I doubt a plasma blast would do so much shockwave damage instead of melting.
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Overall, I think the first one is the best explanation for what we see on screen.
[Harkonnen troops land outside the Keep and charge toward the entrance. Roughly 40 Atreides soldiers march forward to meet them. About half of the Atreides troopers carry polearms similar to the Japanese naginata, while the rest wield the usual Atreides short swords. They form a formation similar to a Greek phalanx, but without traditional shields and with swordsmen standing between the spears. The two groups clash, with many Harkonnens falling quickly. Suddenly a Harkonnen ship passes overhead, dropping Sardaukar with suspensors. The Atreides troopers turn to face them, but are quickly cut down. The Sardaukar wipe their swords on their sleeves in unison, then lead the Harkonnen force toward the Keep.]
It has been stated that the Atreides display poor military tactics in this scene because they move so far away from the Keep doors, inviting an envelopment. This may not actually be a problem: they may have been afraid that the invaders might use lasguns to bring the ceiling and arch down on their heads, which could destroy their shields (see below) and kill them (though why they went so far is unknown). Of course the Sardaukar expertly drop down behind and slaughter them.
Also of note is how quickly the Sardaukar killed highly trained men with shields, some of them wearing armor. They appear to only take a few seconds.
[Paul chops at a practice dummy with a sword. Gurney enters the room with a bundle of weapons.]
GURNEY: Don't stand with your back to a door. How many times do we have to tell you?
PAUL: I can tell it's you by your footsteps, Gurney Halleck!
[Paul finishes hitting the dummy. Gurney places the bundle on a table and opens it.]
GURNEY: The sounds I make could be imitated.
PAUL: I'd know the difference.
[Paul picks up a glass of water, still facing away from Gurney.]
PAUL: Are you the new weapons master?
GURNEY: With Duncan Idaho gone, I must make do as best I can.
PAUL: It's been quite a day, Gurney. Give us a song instead.
[Gurney picks up a sword and hurls it across the room, imbedding it in the other table next to Paul's leg.]
PAUL: That's rude.
[Paul turns around only just in time to react to Gurney's first attack. Gurney lands a hit anyway. Paul turns on his shield and hits his arm with his sword several times fast, before hitting it slowly, showing how the shield allows slow objects to pass. Gurney twirls his sword and the two attack. Paul attacks with a thrust—Gurney avoids and strikes the back of Paul's shield. Paul turns back and gets back into his stance, suddenly relaxing and smiling.]
PAUL: Old man.
[Gurney makes a noise of playful surprise and attacks again. Paul blocks and counters. After several exchanges Paul gets to the side of Gurney and strikes his trainer's knee shield with the hilt of his own sword as Gurney lands a similar hit to his head shield. Paul jumps back up and attempts to throw Gurney off balance, but Gurney moves in too fast for that and passes his sword through the shield, pressing it to Paul's neck.]
GURNEY: Ah, the slow blade penetrates the shield.
[Paul pulls back and walks away.]
PAUL: I guess I'm not in the mood today.
GURNEY: Mood? What's mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises, no matter the mood. Now fight!
[Gurney charges forward and attacks with a thrust. Surprised, Paul moves offline and then parries another blow before Gurney disarms him with a wrapping sword movement. He retreats, jumping over the table before grabbing a pair of knives from it. He moves back around the table.]
GURNEY [glaring]: Come on!
[Gurney runs at Paul and the fight rejoins. After a few strikes, Paul forces Gurney back and trips him to the ground.]
PAUL: I have you.
GURNEY [smiling]: Aye. But look down, my Lord.
[Paul looks down to discover that Gurney shifted his sword to his left hand as he fell and is pointing it at Paul's ribs.]
GURNEY: You'd have joined me in death. I see you've found the mood.
[Paul helps Gurney to his feet.]
Note: The whole fight (with director's commentary) can be found here, and the second part without commentary here.
Paul and Gurney are clearly excellent swordsmen. This fight is a great example of good realistic choreography (based on the Filipino martial art of kali).
There is clearly a martial arts system at work here. In most films the fighters either use a series of unconnected techniques, or they fluidly follow up with one stupid move after another. Here they use actual technique with some real skill. There are a few exaggerated movements, but only a few. Some of the first exchanges have wonky distance and are a bit idealized, but those problems are minor.
The fight also really showcases shield-fighting. Not just the demonstration of how the shields work, but also how they use them. Gurney knows that the shields still transfer momentum, so he can knock Paul back with power strikes. Both fighters let the shields take the hits as they attack.
[Duncan is attacked by several Sardaukar. He quickly cuts three down. As he finishes the third soldier off, the fourth, who is standing about twenty feet away, fires a dart from a launcher on his forearm. The dart starts to burrow into Duncan's shield before he deflects it with his kindjal. He then throws his sword at the Sardaukar and it bounces off the latter's shield, knocking him back, before Duncan takes a flying leap to take the Sardaukar down. They struggle briefly before Duncan manages to slit his opponent's throat.]
(This fight, along with the following section, can be found here and here.)
Duncan's skill with a sword is firmly established. He easily kills four elite Imperial troops.
My cousin pointed out to me that Duncan appears to activate a suspensor before he jumps.
The dart (fired from a launcher resembling the WW2 Sedgley Mark Two "punch gun") appears to have some suspensor technology as well, or else it would not be able to hover as it penetrated the shield.
At least one individual has asked why soldiers don't all have those dart guns. One possible explanation is that perhaps the darts require very compact yet very powerful batteries, which had not yet come into common use, and the Sardaukar had just started being equipped with them (presumably they would have smuggled one to Yueh). Also, such weapons, while having superior range to swords, still probably only have a very small effectiveness window, where the darts cannot be dodged (their pre-shield-impact flight is about nerf-dart-speed for some reason) but before the enemy can close to melee range.
So, in conclusion, I don't know why the slow darts aren't more widespread, but it might be one of those reasons.
[Suddenly the control tower for the Arrakeen landing field is engulfed in a massive fireball. Harkonnen ships appear in the sky.
The Harkonnen ships fire missiles or bombs downward. They fall slowly before hitting the shielded Atreides frigates. They burrow through the shields in about a second or two, then explode inside the shields, which burst after a frame or two of the blast.
Spotlight turrets rotate up from towers on the ground. Then gun turrets appear likewise and start firing glow bolts at the Harkonnen starships. The bolts travel fast but are still distinctly subliminal in velocity. Upon impact the bolts create explosions, which in one case knock a ship out of the sky.]
(Photos of the first explosion can be found here. Much of the attack can be found here, or the whole thing here. A still of an anti-shield missile detonation can be see here.)
If the film follows the book in this respect (and there's no reason to think it doesn't) the initial bomb that destroyed the control tower cannot have been a nuke. Nukes are illegal to use against humans, and there would probably be at least some humans in the tower. Also, the radiation would be a huge problem for the survival of the Atreides forces. So the explosion was likely caused by a large chemical bomb (likely a laser-guided one). One might hypothesize that it could be an antimatter weapon, but given that nuclear weapons are still in use (or storage) antimatter is unlikely to be used in the Duniverse for weaponry.
When the shields are destroyed by missiles detonating inside them, this is almost certainly the result of the generators being destroyed. The missiles obviously use some kind of suspensor technology.
Those missiles took a while because they were going through massive, thick starship shields. The darts fired at Duncan later were light, so they took a while to get through even personal shields.
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I don't know what the bolt-firing cannons are. The bolts glow, make things explode in big fireballs, and travel at subliminal speeds. They could be:
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Normal shells coated in plasma somehow. Perhaps the projectiles are electromagnet-equipped to contain the plasma (with ceramic exteriors to prevent melting). However, why wouldn't people just put electromagnets on their ships to stop them?
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They could be plasma pulses. While this idea sounds attractive, I still don't like it. While it is possible to get one to work, there are only two ways that I know of to do so: The Star Wars-type blob of plasma contained in a "magnetic bottle" and kept hot during flight by a powerful infrared laser (this wouldn't work very well anyway, because to squeeze enough plasma of sufficient energy inside and keep it in would be nigh-impossible); or a relativistic beam of only a few ions (which doesn't match what we see on screen, and might not work well anyway due to the repelling effect of the atoms).
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The bolts consist of massless subluminal particles (though no such particle is known to exist in our universe). However, why is there so much recoil, then?
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Tracer shells of some sort.
Note that the Harkonnen vessels did not exhibit shield flare, likely because they were afraid that the Atreides might use lasguns, or perhaps because shields are vulnerable to detection by sensors at long range. Note also that the bolt-weapons would probably cause much the same effect as lasguns upon contact with a shield (the energy's there, after all).
Another hypothesis, put forward by a Redditor, is that the Harkonnen ships were in fact shielded, but the bolt-weapons are able to transfer enough momentum to knock them out of the sky. This also makes a lot of sense, except that no shield glow is visible.
[Duncan Idaho takes off in an ornithopter, firing several missiles at the Harkonnen ships before getting hit by another missile. The Harkonnen mothership fires a lasgun beam at his ornithopter, chasing him through Arrakeen, smashing buildings as it hits them. Duncan finally escapes.]
The missile that hit Duncan's ship appears to have disabled its shields, or else the Harkonnens would never have fired a lasgun at it unless the lasgun-shield interaction is different from the book version—and anyway, right after the hit, the 'thopter's wing hits a building with no shield flare. This shows that shields can indeed be disabled by brute force. This is almost certainly the result of the shield generator(s) being crushed by the forces transferred to it by the impact, through the shield. Here's a breakdown of how this would work. Note that it was either the momentum of the missile (about 5000 kg*m/s, give or take) or the explosion that broke the shield, but not both, as the two occur at two different times separated by microseconds (unless the physical impact partially smashed the generator, and then the explosion finished the job).
It is pointed out in this discussion that there is a flashing red light on the 'thopter's control panel right afterwards, and that the wings touch a building nearby without any shield flare.
Also, more evidence that lasguns are terawatt-level lasers. The buildings, which appear to be made of steel and concrete, are being cut to bits wherever the beam touches them. It is odd, though, that we don't see the same fireballs that the Fremen lasguns created; this is most likely due to the difference in the materials.
The Harkonnen targeting systems don't seem too good, undoubtedly due to the lack of computers in the Dune universe. They have Mentats, but Mentats appear to be rare, and anyway, even though their computing power is superior to that of any computer, their reflexes are not.
[A specialized Harkonnen ship fires a hail of fiery missiles onto the buildings of Arrakeen, ingulfing that section of the city in flame.]
The Harkonnens sure like the "rain of rockets" tactic. Obviously the aim of the gunship's bombardment was to destroy Atreides vehicles or kill their troops, not to damage the main city itself. The missiles appear to have limited range, but are guided and powerful. They are a bit slow, but this might be to avoid bouncing off any shielded targets, instead hitting and slowing down naturally to get through.