There were many attempts to get Dune to the screen on the wave of its popularity. The version that finally came through was David Lynch’s 1984 film, made after both Alejandro Jodorowsky and Ridley Scott tried their hands at the project and ran short on funding and dedication respectively. Lynch was asked to direct and write the screenplay with no knowledge of the book and no particular interest in science fiction.
You can see where this was all destined to go wrong, can’t you?
Look, David Lynch has formally denounced this film and been forthcoming about all the mistakes he made in creating it, including his lack of say in the final cut. (Yes, there are other cuts, but Lynch was not involved in them and they do not make the experience better enough to justify their existence.) The film received largely negative reviews, went on to become an undisputed cult classic, and has received the “deep down it’s genius” treatment that gets offered to every film affording that staying power and status. The fact that David Lynch wrote and directed it helps. The fact that it contains genre film and television darlings like Kyle MacLachlan, Patrick Stewart, Dean Stockwell, Brad Dourif, and Sean Young also helps. There’s very little point in dragging David Lynch for making something that he has long been unhappy with, and even less point in arguing for its hidden genius. Dune is an awful film, and what few merits it has are eclipsed by its bloated excesses in every aspect of story, performance, and effects.
But the fact remains that this film is a perfect example of what happens to an excellent science fiction premise in the hands of someone who has no particular love for the genre.
While Lynch prefers not to discuss Dune in interviews, there was one telling quote in Extrovert Magazine back in 2012 that perhaps gives an indication as to why he took the job:
“I started selling out on Dune. Looking back, it’s no one’s fault but my own. I probably shouldn’t have done that picture, but I saw tons and tons of possibilities for things I loved, and this was the structure to do them in. There was so much room to create a world.”
So David Lynch was excited at the prospect of creating a world, and Dune offered him the ability to do that. The problem is that while the design of the film was incredibly meticulous, the overall creation of that universe is alarmingly homogeneous. The viewer is either in the desert or in any number of grim, muted palette locales that can only be differentiated from one another by noting who occupies the space. The outdoors barely exist; Caladan is black sky filled with lightning and the sound of rain, Giedi Prime is a great big warehouse district with practically no windows and darkness surrounding its mechanized exterior, Arrakis is carved from stone and sparsely accommodated, the people surrounding the Emperor are monochromatically dressed. Everything is in permanent twilight for no discernible reason, and what’s worse, the deliberate juxtapositions of all these locales is largely lost. And when you can see the immense work that went into detailing the costumes, the carvings, the mechanisms, the fact that it all serves more as background noise than focal material is a damned shame.
The Atlantic’s celebration of the film on its thirtieth anniversary dubbed it “the anti-Star Wars,” suggesting that Lynch was responding to George Lucas’s crowd-pleasing epic full of easily pronounceable words with something impenetrable and surreal and dangerous. That is… a generous summation at best. Given Lynch’s typical milieu, it is hard to believe that he has ever had the slightest interest in conversing with Lucas’s highly brand-able entertainment. It’s easier to say that Dune is a poor man’s 2001 (made by Stanley Kubrick, a filmmaker Lynch deeply admires) mashed together with a poorer man’s Blade Runner (which Ridley Scott left Dune to direct and found far more manageable). It takes the spectacle and the pacing of both, but does not ascend to the mindfulness of either, and therefore says nothing at all. The first hour is tedious explanation and repetition of the plot, and that last hour is a speedy push toward resolution that never pauses to communicate anything of relevance.
For a movie that clearly blew its sizable budget on effects and set pieces and dressing, complete thoughts fail to come through in the visuals that Lynch was so keen on creating. The Atreides uniforms are starched and a bit British-looking at first glance, which is all well and good until we reach the Harkonnen livery… which are essentially black hazmat suits with green vizors?
Any attempt at cohesion on a more granular level, which is where worldbuilding is most essential in science fiction, is shrugged off in favor of another inexplicable style choice that brings a bit of form and zero function. With the exceptions of military collars and crests, there is nothing that communicates how these things and people connect—some have tried to christen it “noir-baroque” which is a cute thought, but it’s hard to believe that any detailed reasons for the aesthetics were considered beyond “this looks cool.”
Dune wants to be phantasmagorical and it wants to be offensive to your senses, and those things can work in cinema, as Lynch’s career communicates incredibly well. But this film does not carry off that off-kilter creepiness as anything more than a parlor trick. It fails to be authentic because these cues are not entrenched in the universe projected on screen. They are there to shock the viewer, to disgust them, but they don’t mean anything. The Guild member floating in its chamber of gas is strange and otherworldly and grotesque, but communicates nothing besides that. It is not integrated into its setting, its surroundings. It exists to be gawked at, to unsettle us, and then it disappears from view and we go back to the part of the narrative that needs to hold our attention.
Everyone whispers all the time in Dune. Well, not everyone, as the Harkonnens prove, but anyone that the film dubs properly mysterious, which are most of the characters. It does not make them seem more mysterious, but it does make you wonder how armies can be expected to follow House Atreides when no one in the house can project or enunciate. I guess they spend a lot of time sending memos.
Attempts at distilling the story down to a manageable two-ish hour piece results in a deluge of bad voiceover exposition, and the added irritation of hearing the characters’ thoughts inside their heads to explain suspicions, actions, and motivations. Not only is this goofy device poorly used, it’s also terribly executed—because everyone whispers all the time. It’s impossible to tell whose thoughts we’re listening to for the majority because these segments were clearly added during post production as the film was being cut, precluding the chance of focusing shots on the characters doing the thinking.
In the distilling of the plot, every other branch of the story becomes superfluous—and many of the characters do too. This results in the Harkonnens doing nothing in the film besides being despicable to the grandest extremes Lynch can summon. Forget any semblance of intelligence and scheming, the Baron Harkonnen has been reduced to a rabid dog of a man who screams and spins and bounces to and fro like a punctured balloon. The movie also has the distinction of branding the character in an explicitly homophobic light by heightening the Baron’s actions and displaying them all at once: in a single scene we watch the man have his facial sores drained by a doctor (which gay writer Dennis Altman has pointed out appears to be part of the pervasive AIDS imagery that suffused pop culture in the 80s) before abruptly sexually assaulting and brutally murdering a young male servant, bleeding him out while his relatives observe. The choice to connect these moments visually in one savage blow cannot be overlooked or underestimated… particularly when the very next scene shows a flash of Lady Jessica and Duke Leto making love. It is a very literal Point-A-to-Point-B association of homosexuality with perversion, violence, and sickness, contrasted immediately with heterosexuality signifying loving, caring bonds and relationships.
I’m on the fence about how David Lynch presents female characters at the best of times, but in Dune, he treats all women as byproducts of the environment he has created. Gone is the strength of the Bene Gesserit, their plotting ways and millennia of manipulations. No one fears their influence. Instead, they are bald women concerned with breeding, and they live to serve at the beck and call of the men around them. The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim goes to test Paul on Caladan because she is told to do so. Jessica agrees to teach the Fremen her method of fighting only for Paul to teach them instead. Alia kills Baron Harkonnen because her brother wishes it. One of the original reviews of Dune highlights the problem quite well, though it is mistakenly framed as a positive; Time’s Richard Corliss stated “The actors seem hypnotized by the spell Lynch has woven around them—especially the lustrous Francesca Annis, as Paul’s mother, who whispers her lines with the urgency of erotic revelation.” The Lady Jessica is effective because she sounds erotic, a proverbial avalanche of male gaze projected by both the reviewer and by how the film frames her character, her power.
The worst offense of all are the “weirding modules” that Paul teaches the Fremen to fight with. Lynch claimed that he conceived the devices because he didn’t want to have to deal with “kung fu fighting on the sand.” This not only speaks to a remarkable lack of care for the philosophies that Herbert pulled into the story—the eastern concepts of prana and bindu, exacting focus and control over ones body—it also robs an all-female order of their own particular methods of fighting and surviving, and turns that into a piece of technology that anyone can use. The idea of the weirding modules on their own are quite clever, particularly their use of sounds and words as a manner of concentrating fatal force, but that does nothing to ameliorate the damage done to the singular position that the Bene Gesserit take up in the story of Dune, and how they are cast out of it with less than a thought.
Better yet, it causes hilarious plot holes that a ten year old could spot. The weirding modules owned by House Atreides are destroyed in the attack that leads to Duke Leto’s death. Somehow Paul finds one he can use to train the Fremen. He then, somehow, finds hundreds more to arm them with, and they’re all wielding them by the final battle. The entire endgame is predicated on use of a weapon that Paul’s forces shouldn’t even have access to anymore. (Commenter hammerlock has pointed out that he’s given the schematics for the modules from Yueh, which seems even sillier; where is he getting all the raw materials to create these things, and if they’re that easy to manufacture, why doesn’t everyone have them?) And that’s just one place where the simplest logic fails to bare up—such as the fact that “wormsign” is now communicated through lightning running across the sand, yet we’re somehow meant to believe that Fremen can ride something that creates horizontal lightning, and also clearly meant to ignore the effect that lightning can have on sand when it strikes, aka How Do You Like Your Desert Full of Glass?
Did I mention that the stillsuits don’t cover your head, and that they’re also black? You know, the absolute worst color you could possibly wear into a murderously hot desert, and even funnier when you consider that the Fremen are supposed to be a relatively covert group of people who would stand out spectacularly on the sand in their black leather fetish gear.
Here’s the funny thing, though—Frank Herbert had very little problem with the movie, at least publicly. His introduction to his own short story collection Eye had words on the subject, where he praised it as a “visual feast” that you could “hear my dialogue all through.” But he did have a few issues, mainly the most egregious alteration in the entire film, the true nail in the coffin of its awfulness:
Paul Atreides makes it rain on Arrakis at the end of the movie. Because he’s actually a god.
Not only does he make it rain, but there is another useless voiceover that tells us that Muad’Dib will bring peace where there’s war and love where there’s hate. So not only did David Lynch not really care much for science fiction, he completely passed over the entire point of Dune. Which is that Paul is going to help the Fremen remake Arrakis as they see fit using methods that they have perfected. Paul is made into a god in the minds of men, not that he truly was one. And the belief in this godhood, the worship of him and his cause will actually bring endless war to the cosmos, something that he fights to prevent and is eventually forced to succumb to; his terrible purpose. If David Lynch had truly intended to create the anti-Star Wars, he did so in the most Lucas-ean way possible—by having a reserved young man reveal his chosen status and save the universe with his special powers. It is a spectacular letdown of the highest order.
So while I understand the cult status of 1984’s Dune, it is impossible to grant it clemency due to passage of time. It can be entertaining to watch, to examine like an odd bit of ephemera, but it does not deserve laurels for failing creatively. There are better ways to manage that feat.
Come back next week for either the Sci-Fi miniseries version, or the Jodorowsky Dune documentary! I haven’t decided which one to tackle first….
Emmet Asher-Perrin cannot understand why anyone thought that Patrick Stewart made sense as Gurney Halleck either. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
Not to excuse the choice for the modules as a replacement, but he’s able to outfit the Fremen with them because Paul discovers “the blueprints for the weirding modules” along with the signet ring in his care package. So that part (at least) is not a plot hole.
This exactly matches all of my conclusions about the film, point for point. In many ways Dune feels like the quintessential ’80s movie, in how its production design is bloated and overproduced without any sort of coherence or depth, and its dramatic beats are obvious and shallow. It is aggressively bad: the ’80s in a nutshell.
I personally enjoy Lynch’s Dune. I prefer to watch it with the sound off purely for the visuals.
The weirding modules were a weird choice. You can sort of see how the Bene Geserit “voice” and “weirding way” got combined into one thing, but it’s still stupid.
And yes, it is dark. If I lived on any of those planets I’d have one of those float lamps following me around permanently.
I remember going to see this one in the theater back when it first opened, and coming out of it and trying desperately to convince myself that I had actually liked what I’d seen. (A skill which I later perfected and which would serve me well beginning in, oh, 1999 or so.) Yeah, the “weirding modules” bugged the heck out of me because they turned the final battle into more pew-pew lasers just like in every other big SF movie — Starcrash, for example. (Remember Starcrash?)
Having said that, the cast was stunning and I do like much of the production design, although I never thought about how dark everything was until now.
I remember Starcrash painfully well. I may need therapy.
Yeah this was an awful film when I saw it years ago when it first came out. I’ve never had the stomach to watch it again and I’m not going to do it now.The weirding module was the thing the Fremen used to speak the name Muad’Dib to destroy their enemies, right? I remember some stupid line of dialog like “His name is a killing word.” spoken in awed reverence. And I couldn’t believe it rained on Arrakis at the end. So clueless. Why even make the stupid movie if you’re going to change it so fundamentally.
I’ve heard some say that Jodorowsky’s version would have been cool. But it would have been so weird and it would definitely not have been Dune. Watching that documentary, he said he’d never read it. Again, why make it at all? Just make something completely different and don’t call it Dune.
“Jodorowsky’s Dune” is excellent. Here’s hoping Villeneuve captures some of that mad vision Jodorowsky wanted realized.
@@@@@ Roxanna in #3
A friend showed me the perfect way to watch this film.
Get the DVD and change the language to French (assuming you don’t speak it).
The navigator scene in the beginning is especially wonderful.
There’s a thought….
Thanks.
You’ve wonderfully explained pretty much every reason why this movie sucks, and suck it does. I really have no idea how this even made it to cult status. Never mind that it is an absolutely horrid interpretation of Dune, its just not a good movie. I’d like to repeat what others in this thread have said, if you’re not going to give two craps about the thing that you are adapting, why bother adapting it. If you want to build a world (something he didn’t need to do since Herbert already did it), write an original movie and do your own thing. Leave Dune alone.
When I watched the movie in the theaters, I hadn’t read the book in a while, and had three thoughts:
First, that the sets looked really nice as illustrations of the book. Second, that the ending was rushed, as if Lynch had filmed a bunch of the early book before realizing he needed to get the movie to end in a commercial amount of time. (He failed.) And third, that according to the book the rain would kill the sand worms, thus destroying civilization.
Having reread the book as part of the read along, I’ve changed my mind on one point. Yes, the ending was rushed, but so was the book. It wasn’t necessarily Lynch’s fault. (Although, given what else he did to the book, he could have changed the pacing.)
Also, for fans of esoteric musical instruments, the “baliset” in the movie was a Chapman Stick with gourds attached. For more information about the Chapman Stick (which is a decent musical instrument), go to stick.com
@6/hoopmanjh: I’ve never seen Starcrash, but it’s episode 6 of the new Mystery Science Theater 3000 that just premiered on Netflix, so I should be seeing it quite soon.
@12/Jason: I think what Lynch meant was that he wanted to build a world visually and stylistically, in terms of design and setting and atmosphere. That, ideally, would complement the conceptual and textual worldbuilding Herbert did, rather than replacing it.
@@@@@ Christopher, You may be correct in that. If that is indeed the case, I think he failed spectacularly. I may be in the minority on this though.
@12 Jason; ‘Dune’ made it to cult status because it looks really, really cool.
I liked it when it was first released in the long version because it was so wonderfully baroque and fetishy. (Oh the gags! Oh the gloves! Oh the braces, stays, and corsets!) But was so dark, visually, thematically, emotionally. Lynch didn’t like any of these people. (Does he like anyone?) He made damned sure that we knew he hated homosexuals. It was a steampunk vision of the far future, staffed with perverts and ideologues. His tech was deliberately clunky, as if HG Wells had taken over the design department at gun-point…a steam-powered blunderbuss, perhaps. I couldn’t hear the goddamned dialogue, but the music was crashing, booming, and altogether annoying. There were holes and gaps in the plot, the script, and the action, big enough for a Mack truck. I went back to the novel and re-read it thoroughly, trying to find those gaps. Nope, the book didn’t have them, but the movie sure as hell did.
I didn’t hate it, certainly not as much as Lynch obviously hated his actors and the project itself. I was disappointed and I had some odd dreams for a while after viewing it, probably because my mind tends to nibble subconsciously at conundrums, dreams that involved re-directing that mess: “No, no! We make the Baron sensuous, almost feminine, not grotesque! We swath him in robes and make his gestures graceful and hypnotic. Then we can show how he commands millions and conned the Emperor into giving him Arrakis and how Alia picks up his personality…because she’s his effin’ granddaughter!” I’d awaken, mumbling rewritten dialogue and my wife would sleepily inquire if I’d had a bad dream. “Nah. But not a good one, babe…”
I first discovered this at like 1 am on the Disney channel, of all places, when I was in high school. They were playing the longer cut, the one that starts with the male narrator speaking over the illustrations. I had never read the book, in fact I was just beginning to discover my love for sci-fi-fi and fantasy novels (it had previously been all Goosebumps/Fear Street/Stephen King, and some classics). I was totally enthralled, mainly by the visuals, the music, and the general out-thereness of it, plus it had Captain Picard, the guy who played Chucky, Sting, and that guy from Quantum Leap!
Going back today, I can never seem to get very far. I’m not sure if it’s the plot, or the over-reliance on the narrations, or the fact that I’m no longer 15 crouched in the basement at 3 am watching people ride giant worms to the score by Toto (let’s not forget that!). It’s a shame, really. Still, it holds a special place in my heart. I hope whatever film version they do finally get off the ground does it justice.
On a strange side note, when I did finally read the novel, it was right after Sting had released the song Desert Rose, which always seemed like the perfect song for reading about adventures on a desert planet (plus there was the previous Sting-Dune connection), and I now associate it with the story.
@9 – I thought it would be a cool movie as well, with Dali as the Emperor… however, after watching “Jororowski’s Dune”, I’m not so sure it would have been. He wanted to do some even more out there stuff than Lynch, and I think he cared less about following the story than Lynch.
As for the Navigators, they are detailed more in “Dune Messiah”, and Lynch’s version isn’t that far off. And the Harkonnens… they were basically as despicable and horrible as possible, with no redeeming qualities. In that regard, Lynch wasn’t too far off.
I saw the movie years before I read the book; I like the movie, but I definitely like the book much more.
Editing due to comment weirdness.
I watched this in high school in my Advanced Sci Fi class (we also read the book) and I remember very little about it – mainly Sting as Feyd-Rautha, the baron, and the soundtrack (which I loved at the time, ha).
But you are right, the end completely misses the point by making Paul into a literal god and wrapping things up all nicely. I doubt I really caught that in high school though.
This version of Dune is indeed a terrible movie, yet to me it has one redeeming feature – “Usul, we have wormsign the likes of which God has never seen!”. You can feel the cheese from here.
On the subject of lightning for the wormsign though, it is supposed to be a static buildup on the surface of the sand, literal electric charges created by friction from the movement of sand grains. This is a real process, called Saltation – by itself it isn’t enough to create lightning as such, but as part of a sandstorm it can, and presumably a large enough worm would have similar effects.
I loved the movie…. still one of my favorites.
This movie sucked so hard I had trouble breathing in the theater when the 20yo me went to see it. I remember being so disappointed at how badly they had screwed it up, when it could and should have been so outstanding.
Thank you, Emily. This movie is complete shit, completely disrespectful to the source material.
@18 – viewerb: Also, “Sihaya”, the pet name Paul gives to Chani, means “desert rose”, if I’m not mistaken. But the perfect song to go with Dune (the book) is Iron Maiden’s “To Tame A Land”, which is about Dune.
@19 – Eric: The Jodorowski documentary is fun, but yes, the actual movie would have been as awful as this one. Or worse.
The navigator in Lynch is basically one of the only things he got right. And the Harkkonens, is not that they’re not supposed to be despicable, is that Lynch plainly equates homosexuality with perversion, and heterosexuality with goodness.
@18/viewerb: The longer version was originally an edited-for-television cut, with deleted scenes added to stretch it out to 4 hours (with commercials) so it could air over 2 nights. (There was a long recap at the start of part 2, but that’s left off of the home-video edition.) David Lynch objected to the re-edit and took his name off it, so it’s actually credited to “Alan Smithee,” the standard credit used by directors wishing to protest a change to their work. I remember that when I first saw the TV edition, I didn’t know the significance of the Smithee credit, so I was confused by the name change.
@13 — And I never realized the baliset was a (cosmetically altered) Stick! Thanks!
I remember being excited to watch this after reading the first three books, and sort of going “huh” with my head tilted and my hand on my chin. “It sort of resembles Dune. Oh look! There’s Captain Picard! With hair! Sort of. Ok, Kyle Maclughlin’s Jaw should have its own credit. Sting!” That’s about as serious as i could take it. It was horrible.
The Sci-Fi miniseries (Both Dune and Children of Dune) was excellent, however, if you can ignore the small warehouse sound stage with painted desert scenes. It was my first experience with James Mcavoy, and I became a fan for life.
You pretty much cover all my issues with Lynch’s movie. I often refer to it as a pretty train-wreck of a film.
Also, as I remember, Jodorowsky didn’t have much use for the source material either. For him Dune was a vehicle for his own psycho religious musings.
I couldn’t wait to see it in 1984….and was so totally revolted then….and now. It’s laughable. Camp. And so so wrong.
Without knowledge of the book, the movie would be very hard to fathom. Bleh.
“I am the Shadout Mapes, the housekeeper. I must cleanse the way between us.”
Cheesy as the cleansing line was, it was the announcement that she was the housekeeper that got laugh-out-loud responses at the 1984 screening I saw.
Am I the only one here who, instead of seeing Dune for the first time and thinking “Hey, it’s Captain Picard,” instead saw the casting news for TNG and thought, “Oh yeah, I saw that guy in Dune?”
@ 31. Gerry O’Brien That line (and those that follow) are almost word for word from the book, exactly as Herbert wrote them, albeit with a some lines of interstitial dialogue removed. Not trying to defend a wholly mediocre (and sometimes bad) movie, but your post confuses me because I’m not sure what you’re implying.
@32 – I did something similar, but with Kyle MacLachlan and Blue Velvet. (I saw Dune at age 12, before having read the novel. It was rather confusing.)
This movie is awful in both the modern and medieval senses of the word. View it with any close attention, and it fails as both film and adaptation. But stepping back and just looking at it as a whole unified entity, it has a sort of grotesque grandeur, fascinating to watch (through side-eye) for all its WTFery.
As much as people complain about the voiceovers, I do feel that the additional narration and voiceovers in the Extended Edition at least made it possible to follow the plot more easily than in the original theatrical cut, even if those additions couldn’t do anything to fix the film’s more fundamental flaws.
Ten-year-old me came out of the theater during that original run transfixed by the high concept even if I found the story incomprehensible. I noted that here was another story involving a youngish man on a desert planet having a hero’s journey aided by quasi-magical powers, and although I didn’t yet realize that it was Herbert who influenced Lucas (not the other way around). I wanted more, so I eventually picked up Dune the novel a few years later, to my lasting satisfaction.
Beloved sci-fi novel with controversial, poorly received film adaptation…didn’t we just have this discussion? Hey, yes we did! I think I am willing to give Dune a bit more slack than Starship Troopers because Veerhoven seems to have knowingly ignored the novel and pushed a vision likely to resonate mostly with a niche audience, whereas Lynch just seems to have gotten in over his head. Cluelessness is a bit more forgivable than deliberate provocation.
The sheer arrogance of deciding you’re going to build a world when the author has already done that…
I remember sitting in line for opening night re-reading the book. I think I still have the free t-shirt they gave out somewhere. Reading the book right before seeing the movie was a big, big mistake.
The one visual thing I really wanted to see the movie do was the ornithopters, which they didn’t really do. I should try watching the Sci-Fi channel version sometime, I missed that when it came out.
Emily: thank you! I agree with just about everything you said!
@26 Christopher: better yet, along with the “Alan Smithee” director’s credit, the writing credit on the extended TV version was assigned to “Judas Booth.”
Someone was pretty unhappy with Lynch’s renunciation of the film.
I think you unnecessarily savaged a perfectly enjoyable movie.
Huh. I remember seeing the Lynch movie, and hating it. Then, later, seeing the SciFi miniseries, which was far more faithful to the book – and reappraising the movie. The setting in Dune is supposed to be feudal, and violent, and thoroughly horrible. That’s what makes Muad’Dib so fracking inevitable. I recall the miniseries as a bunch of pretty actors, wearing pretty costumes, on pretty sets, which… somehow drained a lot of impact from the story. Lynch’s movie could have been far better than it was, but all that visual darkness and stylistic ridiculousness may have captured something vital.
I remember being handed a sheet with a glossary of terms when I went to the theater, and even though I knew all the terms because I had read the books several times, I figured the movie would bomb because no one was going to read that glossary sheet to understand what was going on.
@32 ChristopherLBennett: I also remember thinking “Hey, Gurney Hallack’s going to be on the Enterprise” when they announced Patrick Stewart’s casting for TNG. I always wanted him to call Riker “You young pup!”
My understanding on the stillsuits was that they didn’t want to cover them with robes the way they were in the books because they looked so cool — they wanted them on display (and they did look cool).
I remember thinking that the movie was not good, but it did look cool and the casting was pretty well done. I loved seeing the case show up on Twin Peaks and other Lynch projects. I was just happy I could buy Muad’Dib and Stilgar action figures.
@38/eric: It was Lynch’s own choice to use both the “Judas Booth” and “Alan Smithee” credits. I don’t think it’s permissible to impose a pseudonym on someone without their consent, certainly not as a deliberate insult. “Smithee” was (from 1968-2000) the official Director’s Guild of America pseudonym to be used when a director removed their name to protest loss of creative control, but Lynch coined the Booth pseudonym himself to express his sense of betrayal at the studio recutting the film against his wishes.
While I agree with most of the criticisms the movie did have a rat strapped to a cat in a antidote milking machine so it can’t be all bad.
This is a movie I can enjoy for what they do well while being well aware of its failings. I’m not sure why.
Thank you for this! I read the Dune trilogy (it was a trilogy at the time) in high school. When the Dune movie came out 6 years later, I went to see it on opening night. I was so terribly disappointed that I honestly can’t remember if I ever watched it again, but I remember all the flaws you point out. I really don’t understand the love for this movie.
I find it very funny that we have all these people hating on the movie for not being faithful to the book yet reading the article, nearly all the things the article mentions as wrong with the movie CAME FROM THE BOOK! I’m not saying the movie doesn’t deserve criticism, it certainly does but I just find that funny. I think I will rewatch it tonight.
CLB @32- Watching the NG premiere, my thought was “is that King Leodegrance?”
This was the first film I saw that introduced me to the great disappointment one can feel with film adaptations of novels. It was terrible. A facade.
The SciFi channel’s version does better in terms of using more of the novel’s material but, though I hate to say it as it’s so subjective, I found it exteremely boring. It also manages to miss the point as early as the Gom Jabbar test.
I have absolutely no faith in the upcoming film version.
I’d much prefer a well done anime version of Dune.
I love the bit in the Jodorowsky documentary where he’s dragging his heels to go see the Lynch version, watches it with his head down, slumped. Then he starts sitting up, his eyes widen, and a big grin is coming over his face, because it’s terrible.
Hot Take: For all of its faults, this movie is significantly better than the SyFy Dune miniseries, which was boring and lifeless.
I love Julie Cox as Irulan in the SyFy version.
I like Dune. I think the cast is amazing, particularly Lady Jessica, Duke Leto, Paul, Stilgar, Chani, and Yueh. I like the voice-over, the stillsuit design (even though I just realized it’s a really bad idea having black attire in a desert landscape), the Navigators. I realize the movie missed the whole point of the story but it’s beautiful to watch. And I can hardly wait for the Villeneuve remake, anything Dune is always welcome.
However, I had a lot of problems with the 2000 mini-series. It was boring, the casting was awful (apart from Alec Newman, I always loved him), the Baron was made a caricature and I’m not even gonna start on the clothes. Just plain awful.
EDIT: Julie Cox was an amazing Irulan!
Ok – wearing Black clothing in a hot desert is NOT inherently a bad idea. The desert dwellers of North Africa have been doing it for centuries. The key is that their clothing needs to be loose to allow air circulation to work. Nature tested it in an experiment in 1980 and found that wearing white or black loose fitting clothing had no effect on body temperature, and actually white often allowed the heat to get closer to the skin. The traditional black clothing is also sourced from their native goats, who have black wool. Wool acts as an insulator from heat as well as from cold.
The stillsuit is a skin tight suit which accepts all moisture via a high efficiency filter and heat exchanger. So we need a temperature differential between inside and outside, and I suspect you could do that with an air permeable layer inside that draws air up and out through a mid layer of the suit. Black would actually boost that, since the outside would be even hotter – I’m thinking of the chimney effect acting to cool the inside.
Yay headcanons.
@52, It still sucks as camouflage though :)
@28- Anthony: Yeah, the SciFi minis were a bit cheaper all in all, but at least they were respectful of the source material. Not great, but better than this movie.
Is there a cut where it doesn’t rain at the end? Because I’m sure I’ve seen this movie, but I don’t remember that.
Thank you for this article! As a huge lynch fan i must say i found Dune unwatchable and a total disservice to the source material. You worded it perfectly-David Lynch simply is not a fan of scifi (nor does he take it seriously) and it really shows here.
And while people say Jodorowsky would’ve ruined it too i actually disagree, Jodorowsky respected Dune as a spritual story and respected the dynamics created by Frank Herbert. It wouldnt of been an exact copy of the book but it wouldve UNDERSTOOD Dune and give it the complexity and spiritual meditations it deserves. Jodorowsky also has an all around deep respect for scifi and even makes allusions to Star Wars in his teachings as an allegory. His oddness has a deeper spiritual and symbolic meaning unlike Lynch who seems to function more on spur of the moment ideas that dont necessarily have any depth to the.
*the
The adaptation had severe flaws, but there are moments… like, I will say that the scene of Paul calling the worm for the first time, it bursting out of the sand… yes, there was cheesy 80s effects (especially when they had to composite the model and real people), but it was still incredibly moving even just recently watching it on YouTube, it totally brought me into the world and felt real. The miniseries version? It looked like a bad video game creature pasted into something filmed on a stage.
If I could reorder time, I’d like the cast and production team & overall aesthetic of the 80s movie with the script and runtime of the 2000 miniseries and be happier than with either.
**THEM hahaha man my keyboard isnt working
Jodorowski is a disgusting person that advocates rape therapy. I’m sick of hearing him hailed as a genius, and he even admitted he didn’t read Dune and still planned to make a movie about it.
@45 wingracer: I don’t remember the book having wooden acting, a lot of set design that was underutilized and shot way too dark to fully appreciate, a slipshod plot involving a secret weapon that appears and disappears when it’s convenient to the story, sandworms that look like giant sausages being pushed around a sandbox, and costume design that manages to be simultaneously cool-looking and yet completely and totally absurd (clarification: Sting’s silver drawers are only the latter and not at all the former).
The thing about Lynch’s Dune is that even if we stipulate that Frank Herbert’s novel is nearly unfilmable as written and massive changes have to be made (not sure any of that’s really true, but let’s stipulate to it anyway), Lynch’s Dune pretty much fails as a movie. And not in the still-interesting way that Mulholland Drive kind of fails as a movie.
Lynch is one of my favorite directors, but the best thing you can say about Dune is that it led to Blue Velvet being produced. And it’s not because it’s a faithless adaptation, though it fails on that track, too. It’s because it’s a laughably bad movie. In fact, as I write this, I find myself wondering if there’s any conceivable way Joel Hodgson could get the rights to use it on Netflix. (I know, the answer is no. But one can dream.)
I put David Lynch’s Dune just a step ahead of Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings. With both, fans of the book who watched the movie were left with a “WTF???” feeling, while those who weren’t fans who watched the movie were left with a ‘What the heck did I just watch???” feeling.
The difference with Dune is that it is visually striking, and there are those geek icons acting onscreen for us.
If I had the choice, I’d go with the SciFi (before their spellcheck failed and they changed to SyFy) mini-series before watching the Lynch version again – unless I just wanted mindless entertainment.
For a fine example of how an “unfilmable” novel can be turned into a truly outstanding movie, check out L.A. Confidential. (Although I admit that the reason it’s such a good movie is because of the many radical changes they made, including dumping probably 75% of the original story.)
If you want an example of casting “whuuh?” reactions, imagine seeing Muad’Dib as a seedy Vegas showrunner years later.
Just a reminder to keep your responses civil in tone–rude, dismissive, and insulting comments will be unpublished. You can find the full Moderation Policy here.
I like to think that Lynch’s version looks close to what it may have looked like if some studio spent an obscene amount of money, close to the time of the book’s original release in the mid 60’s.
60. MaGnUs I have to respectfully say you’re mistaken about Jodorowsky, he does not advocate “rape therapy.” He told that actress in El Topo beforehand he was going to “rape” her on camera and she gave her consent:
“In regard to the making of El Topo, Jodorowsky stated that, “When I wanted to do the rape scene, I explained to [Mara Lorenzio] that I was going to hit her and rape her. There was no emotional relationship between us, because I had put a clause in all the women’s contracts stating that they would not make love with the director. We had never talked to each other. I knew nothing about her. We went to the desert with two other people: the photographer and a technician. No one else. I said, ‘I’m not going to rehearse. There will be only one take because it will be impossible to repeat. Roll the cameras only when I signal you to.’ Then I told her, ‘Pain does not hurt. Hit me.’ And she hit me. I said, ‘Harder.’ And she started to hit me very hard, hard enough to break a rib…I ached for a week. After she had hit me long enough and hard enough to tire her, I said, ‘Now it’s my turn. Roll the cameras.’ And I really…I really…I really raped her. And she screamed.”[21] He went on to state, “Then she told me that she had been raped before. You see, for me the character is frigid until El Topo rapes her. And she has an orgasm. That’s why I show a stone phallus in that scene . . . which spouts water. She has an orgasm. She accepts the male sex. And that’s what happened to Mara in reality. She really had that problem. Fantastic scene. A very, very strong scene.”‘
It was a spiritual symbolic “rape” that was consensual and understood by all parties not making it rape at all. Please be aware of the real story before spreading harmful rumors! No offense meant, just wanted to clarify that fact.
Lynch’s Dune is a big sprawling mess of a movie but you have to give him credit for avoiding the obvious trap of turning it into a Star Wars knockoff. I actually loved the steampunk vision of space travel — mahogany-paneled space cruiser interiors and all. But I agree with most of this critic’s comments as to why it sucks, although the feminist critique avoids the obvious point that ALL of the characters were lame, lifeless, over-the-top and/or lacking in motivation, not just the females. The Baron’s scenes were nearly unwatchable but very Lynchian — remember the only two movies he’d made before this were Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, both filled with grotesqueries (and he’d won the freaking Academy Award for the latter, which couldn’t help but have gone to his head). He must have gotten deeply into this film thinking he could do no wrong before realizing he didn’t have a clue how to pull it all together. His biggest failure in my view is in his inability to make Arrakis convincing as a hot, inhospitable desert world where water is as precious as gold. It just seems like a dreary Hollywood backlot with fake rocks and some beige dirt, no more convincing than a Star Trek TOS planet surface. No one even sweats very much. And the big battle at the end is completely without drama or any interesting action.
@53
I knew I should have left in the line about Herbert in the books putting them in robes for insulation and camouflage purposes.
@juliette
Jodorowsky’s Dune was going to be an astonishing movie if it was ever made, but it wouldn’t have been Dune either … it would have been whatever was going through his mind as he made it, with the trappings of Dune put on top.
test
“You see, for me the character is frigid until El Topo rapes her. And she has an orgasm. That’s why I show a stone phallus in that scene . . . which spouts water. She has an orgasm. She accepts the male sex. And that’s what happened to Mara in reality. She really had that problem.”
Dude, what the what?
I mean – I can grant that (maybe) the actual actress did consent to some kind of primal roleplay type thing for the purposes of method acting (or as some way to process her own trauma and own it) but if anything his explanation makes it sound even worse if he’s trying to imply that in real life rape (of women who aren’t actually actresses consenting to method acting) helps cure people of frigidity and get them to accept sex.
@68 – Juliette: I am not talking about that, I’m talking about statements he has made regarding his “psychomagic” methods (which seem to be based on this El Topo thing). And there are other things he has said or done that are disgusting.
And Alia’s voice was WRONG! I’ve only been griping about that for how many decades?
Plus (and somebody may have mentioned this already), didn’t Herbert die before he saw the finished product?
70. Mayhem I definitelty agree with that! :) I just think Jodorowsky would’ve been more respectful of Dune and turned it into something more meaningful than an aesthetically pleasing space opera. He has a love of the genre and even wrote comic books with the material he gathered for Dune, so I think for him it would’ve been much more of a passion project (even if inaccurate at least made with care and love), unlike Lynch who saw Dune as his “selling out” point.
72. Lisamarie 73. MaGnUs Jodorowsky had been practicing “Psychomagic” long before El Topo. It is an equally complex and simple spiritual practice that uses metaphor and symbolism to help people heal themselves. He does not advocate the harm and abuse of others. I would recommend reading his book on psychomagic before passing further judgement. I guarantee it is not at all what you think. Again, I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but perhaps you are judging Jodorowsky without truly understanding his work and ideas.
@75: In a world in which so-called “corrective rape” is a real thing and a real threat, there’s no arcane system of symbolism than can justify a comment like the one you quoted, or the movie scene as described.
Oh, sure, he’s a misunderstood genius. Sorry, don’t buy it at all.
76. Amaryllis What you’re talking about and what I’m talking about are two totally different things.
77. MaGnUs I didn’t say he was a “misunderstood genius” all I said was to educate yourself on his ideas before attacking them without any intellectual depth beyond “he’s disgusting and wrong”
i worked for Dino DeLaurentiis around this time and my apartment manager was actor Jack Nance (who is in the film and a main character in Twin Peaks as well as the star of Erasherhead). The problem was that Lynch saw it as a means to express his film style but, like Eraserhead, is ALL about being stylized. I find it ironic that Dune used the same voice over technique as Blade Runner and, like that film, botched it.
>69, the puzzle for Lynch, which I suppose he failed to overcome, was not to echo Tatooine from Star Wars while at the same time deal with the fact that the novel Dune predated 1977. You could argue (and I think many do) that Tatooine was inspired by Arrakis, so we have a circle in debating who’s riffing off of what. Lynch’s movie completed the dog-chasing-its-tail. I think his escape (which he didn’t use) would have been what you noted, to have more greatly emphasized the deadly nature of Arrakis and the challenge of survival. We’ll see if the next rendition does that.
The 1984 movie did accomplish one good thing: It got me to read the book. I hated the movie when i saw it and my parents convinced me to read the book. I thought most of the performances were dreadful (notable exceptions being Sir Patrick Stewart and Dean Stockwell), and I particularly remember the massive disappointment many felt when realizing that Sting only had about five minutes of screen time when the ads were promoting him as a major star of the film.
And like Christopher in comment #32, I also saw the casting list for TNG in 1987 and thought, “Oh, cool, it’s Gurney!” I had no idea who Stewart was beyond the fact that he was one of the few bright spots of that dismal Dune movie (I wouldn’t see I, Claudius for the first time for several more years), but even though, as Emily said in her bio, he was all wrong for the role, he was also one of the few standout performers in the film. Because, y’know, he’s Patrick fucking Stewart. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Thank god someone else sees that the God-Emperor of Dune has no clothes.
Lynch is simply not a good director, full stop. In Dune, that’s all so very evident. This movie should be a cross between Gosford Park and Lawrence of Arabia, but instead it’s a big budget version of the type of silly flicks skewered by MST3K.
Excellent review overall, and useful for any sci fi writer hoping to avoid certain traps.
But also much overdone. If you apply this level of criticism, any story will fail, even more so any two hour film.
I read Dune in high school, and was still in high school when the film came out. Saw it in a packed theater, and yeah, everyone was disappointed. But the challenge was insurmountable. Dune had a huge and loyal following, as indicated by the packed theater. There is simply no way to adapt Dune into a two hour movie without first transforming it…adapting it…and such was the loyalty of its fans that any transformation would be seen as sacrilege. Lynch was in a situation that could not be won.
Compare this to, for example, Harry Potter. That first book was written in a way that was perfect for film. Little adaptation was needed. Part of that may be due to the fact it was written for a younger audience. And the author is just a great storyteller too.
Dune is an awful novel to adapt to film. Even the book has too much exposition, and exposition is death to film. In fact, most sci fi and fantasy is too heavily burdened with exposition and world building. Its readers accept and expect that, but in film it doesn’t work. Modern writers generally do a much better job than writers from Herbert’s time trying to focus more on the story and less on the minutiae. But again, hard to fudge with something like Dune with its audience being so loyal.
And then there are the minefields now laid out by agenda-driven progressives. Modern feminists are offended by a woman like Jessica, for whom seduction is just one of her many powers. But every world constructed in the universe cannot look like the campus of Berkeley. No, I am not suggesting that the progressive changes to our world are bad, they’re not. But we should not apply these same standards to every world created in sci fi, or it will get tedious and ruin sci fi…it will ruin fiction, frankly. Jessica was matched to the Duke in the story for political reasons. She’s his concubine, though he treats her as his wife and they both love each other, while remaining mindful of other and higher duties. It makes sense that Jessica, in her world, will employ erotic powers in order to pursue her duty and to protect those she loves, because they are some of the most useful tools in her situation.
Star Wars set the bar too high, ironically, because Star Wars is really nowhere as good as we remember it. The story borders on silly. What Star Wars did…it sucked us right out of our own world and into a space opera…can not be duplicated. It’s like losing your virginity the second time, it can’t happen. There was no way Lynch could recreate that feeling.
Which is not to forgive the flaws of the film, flaws mostly rooted in the book itself. Paul is a cerebral character raised to master his emotions. It works well enough in the book, but in film that’s not effective. The actor that plays Paul is not one we bond to like Hammel’s greenhorn and pure Luke Skywalker. The actor portrays an arrogant character, fitting for the son of a duke, but not one that earns our love.
I think to adapt this story, you have to focus on the strength of the larger plot: the duke’s family is betrayed and destroyed, but his son miraculously survives and leads the oppressed native population to enact revenge and return to power. Build a new story around that, taking what you need from the Dune universe, and there’s much great stuff to draw from. But the meat of the story has to be in the re-ascent to power. There must be tremendous set backs and an all is lost moment. Paul should be less cerebral, more someone people can relate to. Learning to master his emotions should be a great battle which he only succeeds at by the end of the film.
@81- krad: Good thing it got you to read the book. Oh, Shaitan. I had forgotten that Dean Stockwell in almost-yellowface played Yueh…
Excellent critique, IMO. “DUNE” is one of only three movies where I actually walked out of the theater mid-showing. I had loved the book and was just disgusted at what I was seeing.
“I started selling out on Dune. Looking back, it’s no one’s fault but my own. I probably shouldn’t have done that picture” We all make mistakes and I’m not gonna hate.
What bothers me is that it’s my favorite book and when I mentioned that to someone recently they said they had seen the movie.
I couldn’t even think of anything to say besides a trite “they’re pretty different from each other”. I mean, how can you convince someone to read it after that? I felt pretty sad.
If the only version of Lynch’s Dune you ever got to saw was the gutted mess that was the 2 hour presentation, you could not be blamed for viewing this as the level of travesty that was done to Harlan Ellison’s “City On The Edge of Forever”. I had the fortune to see it as a WPIX marathon showing over a period of 3 days of watching the 6 hour version which is an epic presentation. The material that those extra four hours allow puts a hell of a lot of flesh back on to a worried skeleton, and I’ve heard tales of a version longer than that.
Some of the things pointed out are needed changes for the sake of visual presentation. Full cover stillsuits while more accurate, would give you a field of unrecognizable monochromatic figures instead of recognizable actors. And while the choice of black would be problematic during the day, they’d be perfect for night oriented stealth in which those bright uniforms that Asher-Perrin would insist on would be disasters at night. Presumably the riding choice of dark uniforms is meant to emphasize the ferocity of the Fremen, and the fact that they’re not generally nice people when it comes to strangers. Also remember that they ambush Paul and Jessica at night, something that would not have been feasible if they were dressed in white. It should be remembered that movies and books engage their audiences very differently, even when they’re drawn from the same material and the transition of a book to movie form is going to involve changes to make the latter succeed, even if they would not fit well in the original venue.
A love of the genre would be a nice bonus but it’s not required as been proven by such folks as Brent Spiner who delivers excellent performers as Data while admitting that he never even watched Trek, and has no interest in doing so. Wrath of Khan, the only Star Trek movie of the pre-Abrams era that would stand alone on it’s merits as a film, was directed by Nicholas Meyer, and it’s considerably better than the first film which Roddenberry had full command and towers well above the films that followed it up to and including Nemesis which were directed by Star Trek luminaries.
Dune is far from being a perfect film, and there were other versions which did a better job in SOME areas of the original material. It also must be admitted that Dune the book would be a daunting effort to bring to any screen, small, or large… something that would really require a Games of Thrones level of effort, and I don’t think the Dune books in this late date have that level of popularity to justify the risk of committing major money to it.
I disagree wholeheartedly with the author. It was, and is a great movie.
Many of the people replying read the book(s) before seeing the movie. For me it was the other way around. And that, I think is a part of why it was a good movie. Herbert’s world building is, in a word, epic. For anyone to capture all that is the “Dune universe” on film is all but impossible at this time. Lynch didn’t, and Syfy didn’t.
While I understand that hard-core fans would prefer the Syfy version, I believe that the Lynch version was a better told story on film. Everything was explained, as far as I am concerned, there was no stumbling to figure out what a mentat was or how they did what they did. To make the story work in the medium of film, Lynch had to leave the plot and alter things in such a way that a viewer who is willing to suspend disbelief can follow, in the time constraints he had to work with.
As we can see from the comments some of the issues that are raised in the article, are just molehills made out to be insurmountable peaks. The wormsign being lightning created by the sand as the worms pass under, the weirding modules being made by the Fremen, the stillsuits being black? All of these are minor points easily explained and not truly worthy of sharing space with issues like the deviation from the plot, as far as I’m concerned.
In fact the only reason I can think of for including them, is to do a hatchet job on something you want to do a hatchet job on, instead of actually being open to the good and bad and producing as fair a critique as possible comparing apples to oranges.
And that, my fellow sci-fi lovers, just ain’t right.
Your mileage may vary.
LazarX: Actually, Nemesis was not directed by a “Trek luminary,” it was directed by Stuart Baird, who had never worked on Trek before, and had never even directed a feature film before, and the primary scriptwriter was Trek newbie John Logan.
It was also an unmitigated piece of crap. The best of the TNG movies was First Contact, which was entirely created by “Trek luminaries,” scripted by TV show veterans Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, directed by co-star and Trek veteran Jonathan Frakes.
All of which goes to show that being immersed in the genre isn’t a requirement, but not being so immersed isn’t a negative, either. Having said that, there are differences among unfamiliarity, indifference, and contempt, and Lynch was dancing all over that line…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@@@@@ Roxana
This article is spot on. And while it reached cult status because it looked cool, it can also be attributed to those that liked the movie because it looked cool also never read the book. If they had read the book they would realize why looking good does not save this move from the utter indifference Lynch showed the source material. I love Lynch, but he justifiably refuses to discuss this movie; it embarasses him.
Another weak point of the movie for me, not mentioned here:
As a musician (a failed one, but still), I am occasionally asked by my friends what I regard as the best and worst movie soundtrack musical scores ever. For best, of course, it’s that by Erich Wolfgang Korngold for “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), followed closely by just about any of Bernard Herrmann’s for Hitchcock, particularly “Vertigo.” For worst score, I have to subdivide into Moroder and non-Moroder divisions, as the egregious awfulness of Georgio Moroder’s attempts at musical expression are a thing unto themselves. For worst, the offender is the one for Lynch’s “Dune.” Just as the movie was made by someone who doesn’t get science fiction, it has a score by someone with no knowledge of the function of film music.
The music is credited to “Toto,” which is said to be a band, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find it had actually been written by Toto, Dorothy Gale’s dog. It is inept, stupid and meandering. The “big tune” is a few notes repeated and varied a little in boxed-in song form, and the only other attempt at music I remember is a twangy-boingy electric guitar riff that completely takes you out of the worm-riding scene it accompanies. I could swear that the advance posters I saw on display at the 1984 Worldcon in Anaheim listed John Williams as the intended composer; if he had composed it, even if it had not one of his hundred best scores, it would still be far better, and more science-fictiony, than this monstrosity.
c.f. all four 90s Batman movies…
Perfect summation of what was wrong with that movie, which I fondly refer to as “a Foul Reek In The Nostrils of God.” It backs away from one of the central threads that runs through the entire series, to wit: When you play the Game of Messiahs, you set free terrible forces you can’t control. In the end, Paul FAILS, because even though he overcomes the Harkonnens and the Evil emperor, he unleashes bloody Jihad on the galaxy. But that’s too much of a downer ending even for David Lynch.
I do enjoy Lynch’s Dune, in a way…but yeah, it is not a good movie.
Good title , it’s true Lynch , a very talented director , seems to not have read much good prose SF , if any at all. On the other the first choice for director Ridley Scott and he got fired from the film for a strange screenplay.(I believer Cinefantastique’s account of this and not Scott’s story in later years.)
The cast was a 1000 times better than the Sci Fi version and costume design was about a million times better than the TV series, lord the women’s costumes were just god awful.
I don’t think there was a director , at the time, who could have tackled Dune.
One notes the remarkable show The Expanse for a science fiction visual narrative that is executed in the spirit of modern SF prose. So maybe there are those around now who could make a good SF film out of Dune.
>>>”the Harkonnen livery… which are essentially black hazmat suits with green vizors?”
I think that the figures that you have in mind are actually the Sardaukar. And not the Harkonnen soldiers. Who appear briefly in the Geidi Prime scenes. And have their faces fully concealed.
The Sardaukar come from a jungle “hell planet” of gases. Plus the black and the green mask gives them a look of implacability.
The Atreides uniforms are the colour of the desert – whilst Paul and Duke Leto are wearing green uniforms when still on Caladan. The Atreides soldiers look unarmoured and softer than the Sarduakar “terror troops”.
In contrast to the Atreides, the Fremen also wear black which make them stand out against the sandy desert background.
I disagree that Lynch’s film is not SF. He chose a different science to determine science to determine the look and culture of each of the peoples and factions throughout the film.
The Harkonnen are bio-chemical. The Baron cultivate skin diseases to protect him from poison. Their are animals being butchered in the hallways and acid baths as disposal units around their rooms. The Guild are space-travellers. The Atreides are physics- with their new fighting technique which Lynch invented for the film.
The “blue in blue” eyes of the Fremen and the eerie voice of the Bene Geserit are two highlights for me.
Frank Herbert was pleased with the film. Lynch is an enigmatic man. It’s entirely possible to read too much into Lynch’s reticence about the film.
I came to Lynch’s Dune from Eraserhead (having loved the book since I read it at 14) I was crushed and distraught; upset does not describe it. The Harkonens! Oh God! the Harkonens! A comic side act? Maybe. A revenge plot to get Sting into a pointy metal diaper? Likely. Baron Harkonen as a homage to Mary Poppins’ creepy unfunny laughing Uncle Albert? Almost certainly. It took a long time for me to trust him again …
Also Jodorowsky’s Dune remains far more interesting and entertaining in concept and unmade, leading to films like Alien, than the shambling underfunded godawful mess it would have made of the book if he’d ever finished it.
Is no one going to bring up the fact that there was a scene in which Sting was in a, as @97 puts it, ‘pointy metal diaper’?
I had not read the books when I saw this movie when it came out. I remember thinking it was darker than normal in the movie theater. I enjoyed the movie but thought it was a mixture of interesting / odd / gross. It is the only movie that I was able to get out of school to go watch – my history teacher let the entire class go to it as a ‘field trip’.
I made the mistake of re-reading the book before I saw the movie. Especially given what Lynch did with the movie, that was a bad idea. I also made the mistake of ignoring the advice of a friend who said “I went to see The Terminator instead.” But still, every once in a while I’m watching a movie with a bad voiceover that motivates me to say “The worms…. The Spice….”
I am amazed. So much hate directed at this (admittedly terrible) movie, and not one mention of how much more awful the cash-in ‘novels’ by Herbert’s son and his conspiratorial partner were.
Yes, this movie was bad. It is not the worst thing in the Dune universe. That special hell belongs to the series of post-Frank novels that the authors claim are based upon Frank Herbert’s notes but are so unlike anything that came before that they were obvious cash-ins with nothing but the name in common. Filled with gratuitous violence because that was all the co-authors could imagine; throwing away the watercolour character portraits and replacing them with crayon stick figures; confusing their own plots from one page to the next! Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson have tried to make money from Dune, and in doing so have almost destroyed it!
I have a different take on the movie version of Dune. I remember hearing at the time that Herbert was very involved with the production and liked it very much. He wasn’t bothered by the tone, aesthetics or feel, certainly.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5458417/new-evidence-that-frank-herbert-loved-david-lynchs-version-of-dune
The author or this article makes many good points about mistakes Lynch made, but I’m not convinced that the main problem was his lack of appreciation for the SF genre.
I’m a bit of an outlier, though, because I’ve always questioned the assertion that Dune represents an ironclad SF premise to begin with. Many of the elements in the story were quite fantastical, and there were certainly major holes in the science too. A desert planet like that couldn’t have a breathable atmosphere or tolerable temperature extremes. The planet Arrakis was an allegorical stand in for the Middle East.
None of this really matters to the story, but hard SF it isn’t. The setting had more of an epic fantasy feel than SF, imo, what with the monarchistic government and emphasis on how important arranged marriages were in politics. I envisioned it as very lush and Gothic when I read the books (before seeing the movie).
Another issue is that there were a lot of challenges related to translating some of the stylistic elements of Herbert’s writing into a visual media. For example, those much mocked long thought passages were lifted right out of the novel. Herbert relied heavily on internal monologues, set off by italics if I remember correctly, to move the story along and explain various premises. Omitting those would have been better for the film, but it wouldn’t have been true to the tone of the novel.
Hallelujah! Finally a proper critique of this shitshow of a movie (ok there have been others, but none quite so justifiably ruthless.)
It’s probably a testament to its awfulness that out of so many late century classics, the film industry has balked at the prospect of repeating the mistakes of Dune.
@101, What books are you referring to? I wasn’t aware there was a money grabbing attempt that bastardized the “Dune” name by people who should know better :) I read the House books, they were crappy fan fiction that couldn’t be bothered to be consistent with the original novels. I read the Jihad books, they were at best mildly interesting. I didn’t read their attempt to finish the original series cause I didn’t think they could do it justice. I flat out refuse to read anything else of theirs after they called “Paul of Dune” a “direct sequel to Dune”. Dune has a direct sequel, its called Dune Messiah. BH and KJA just saw an 11 year gap that they could squeeze one of their crappy books into, proving that it was never about Dune, but about exploiting it to make money. BH should know better.
@83/kevin lenihan: “If you apply this level of criticism, any story will fail, even more so any two hour film.” I think you’ve just added another useful corollary to Sturgeon’s Law! :-)
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The comments on this thread over the last couple of days got me to thinking about what aspect of a book prevents it from translating well into the feature-film format; while length, plot complexity, and number of characters certainly play roles, I’ve concluded that perhaps the most significant characteristic is having a plot that relies heavily on any elements apart from activities directly involving the POV characters during the primary timeframe of the story. For Dune the pervasive internal monologues obviously qualify, but so too the critical information we obtain from Baron Harkonnen through his various conversations (with Feyd, Count Fenring, etc.) since Paul, Jessica, and others are not privy to them (even indirectly). As a few others have pointed out, quite a number of SF works (e.g. Asimov’s Foundation) will likely run into this same class of adaptation issues: too much talking/thinking and not enough doing. (Stories in which significant infodump conversations involving the POV characters can be naturally worked into the plot seem to be the best way for an epic tale to have a good chance of translating to the screen well; The Lord of the Rings and The Hunger Games are two examples that come to mind.)
As much as people claim comparisons with Star Wars: A New Hope are unfair, that movie does illustrate a good benchmark for a two-hour film. The key characteristic is that the elements that make it an epic space opera (primarily the rebellion against a tyrannical empire and the existence of paranormal Force with a possibly Manichean nature) only affect the main plot in broad strokes: everything you really need to know about the main characters and their storyline is directly shown, and any discussions of the space-operatic bits are only there to provide a bit of extra texture. Of course, as @83 points out, that also means that the story itself ends up being vastly more simplistic than many care to admit. (@83 also offers the early Harry Potter movies as an example of stories that can be adapted to work well as films in this manner, but I find it interesting to note the that the movie adaptations of the later HP books—whose storylines do involve relatively more narrative-action-at-a-distance plot elements—have more problems in their execution despite having a broadly consistent creative group across all eight films. This seems to support the notion that such book-to-screen adaptation issues are somewhat inherent in the source material rather than necessarily being failures of the director or screenwriter.)
Dune, however, I think is probably just impossible to adapt cleanly into a standard feature-length film. The original novel is long and has at least a dozen significant characters, so just getting all of the major story elements and people introduced in even a minimal way might suck up most of the running time. And not only are the internal monologues a major driver of the plot, but also the context provided by Irulan’s commentaries; hence, a straight adaptation requires voiceovers to cover not only an omniscient narrator but also windows into key characters’ minds, yet audiences and critics often find either type of voiceover to be an awkward narrative device!
However, there is a live-action format where the presence of a narrator to guide the audience and the use of soliloquies and asides to get into characters’ heads is quite conventional. I wonder if Dune might work better as a stage play (maybe with some sort of VR/augmented-reality assistance?) than it does on film or TV…
@105 Part of the problem is that sitting around and talking can count as “action” in a book. Especially when your inside a character’s head and can have all sort of emotional reactions. On film, it’s just a bunch of talking heads.
How did Game of Thrones deal with this? I seem to recall a fair amount of sitting around a table and talking in the books but I haven’t seen much of the show.
@106 – by setting it in brothels, usually ;)
I saw Dune, if not opening day, opening weekend, with the handout of the terms from the book. I liked a lot of the visuals, but the plot drove me crazy. It was as if the director had been told about the main plot events, but none of the underlying motivations and it was awful. For example, in the book, it’s clear that the Baron is evil because of the ways he uses people, but in the movie, it’s because he deliberately has himself infected by hideous skin diseases. And Beast Rabban and Feyd are cut from the same cloth. At the time, I missed the combining of the Bene Gesserit voice and weirding way into a silly sonic weapon, I just saw it as taking the name of the fighting technique and using it as the name of the weapon. But the worst of it was the ending, which didn’t know what to do with the Kwisatz Harderach, so they gave him the god-power to transform the desert planet and cause it to rain, which anyone who had read at least through God Emperor of Dune, knew would have killed off the worms and source of spice.
I’m constantly amazed by the fact the fact that folks tout Jodorowsky version as the more respectful one. Lynch at least tried to adapt the book, even though his adaptation is deeply flawed and misguided. Jodorowsky’s version would be this over-expensive presentation of his own arcane philosophy with only the thinest of parallels with Dune’s plot and setting. There’s a ton of info on it online y’all, feel free to inform yourself. It might have turned out to to be interesting and idiosyncratic movie – depending on how one feels about Jodorowsky, I cannot blame those commenters here who are less than enamored with him – but Dune it would not be.
Why WOULD pugs ever change? Aren’t they perfect in their pugness?
Seriously, I find it hard to believe that Lynch could have improved the film by retaining control of the final cut. When every scene that remains is weird and out of control, are we to believe that the rest was any better?
Lynch has created a few amazing pieces of visual fiction, but this was simply a bad idea, poorly executed. I think that Frank Herbert had been waiting so long for SOMEONE to make a Dune movie that he was glad one came out before he died.
I think that Jodorowksy’s adaptation would’ve probably been just as disastrous as Lynch’s (if not moreso); but the documentary made a strong case that without his failed attempt to make a film, cinematic science fiction of the late 70s would’ve been a very different, and possibly lesser, place.
@104 Those are the books. Herbert Jr and his ‘ghost writer’ claim that they’re all based upon notes left by Frank Herbert about his plans for the series. BS! They are so far away from everything Frank Herbert wrote that it is difficult to even see them as part of the same genre.
As you say, crappy fan fiction; I’m not sure where Anderson gets his claim to being a sci-fi writer ‘in his own right’, but I know from having read his Dune work that he cannot tell a half-decent story.
I posted a review of one of their ‘creations’ on Amazon, and it somehow got deleted – so they’re not big on criticism.
@110 – Smithnik: Is it… pugfection? :)
@111 – hoopmanjh: I really don’t buy into the hyperbolic interpretation that 70s/80s scifi wouldn’t have been the same without Jodorowsky’s attempt.
I will admit that Dune has a special place in my heart but I also saw the movie when I was probably 7 or 8 on VHS and was struck by its visual wonder. (Plus anything with captain Picard is a win) it’s been years since I’ve seen it and all the context you mentioned went totally past me back when I was a kid. I never understood why I rained but attributed it to some sign that the planet would be the water world the firemen wanted I guess.
Anyway, I read the book when I was 14 and found that I preferred the mini series because it was much more faithful to the book. When I did read the book I was struck by how different it was from this film. No baby; No drama between Gurney and Jessica; no issue between th fremen way and Paul’s internal wrestling with fighting Stilgar.
Yet despite all that this movie did play a small but crucial role in my childhood so for that I still in some small way love it.
I saw the film when I first bought a laserdisc player. Seeing the article and the comments I wonder if we were watching the same movie.I had never heard of Dune but Princess Irulan’s prologue clued me in and with every scene I was able to extrapolate what was going on and the likely consequences. Perhaps my grounding in politics made it easy for me.I found it not overblown or a flawed masterpiece. It’s not a masterpiece – if Kubrick had done it and the cutting and re-cutting was not messed up – it could so easily have been. I found it very enjoyable and instructive in the knowledge that all empires collapse as they get too big to control. The only serious mistake was the wierding modules- being used to support the rebellion whereas the Fremen fierceness and self-sacrifice, with their hidden underworld/unknown lifestyle, would be enough to cause any multi-country/planetary empire to underestimate them. Think of Rome and the vandals, Huns, and other invaders.
I can never understand, no matter how detailed, evolved, or insightful the comments, why anyone could ever hate this movie. I remember when it came out how they had to give some audiences guides so that they could understand what was going on. I never got a guide, I had never read the books (at that point), but I was in love with this movie from the day I saw it. I still love it. There are few movies I will watch more than once, and this one keeps coming back to me. It is not just Dune, it’s something else, in addition to. It’s not just sci-fi. I think of the musician Prince when I think of artists who hate their own work; he was so much better when he was controlled than when he was left to do what he wanted. Sometimes the taint is the catalyst that makes the artists work beloved.
A note about Ridley Scott’s input into the Dune world – according to Harlan Ellison’s essays on Lynch’s Dune, Scott employed Rudolph Wurlitzer to scriptwrite. His movie credits prior to this were ‘Two Lane Blacktop’, ‘Glen and Randa’ and ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’. His take on Dune featured Paul and Jessica in an incestuous relationship. Wurlitzer has suggested that his contribution was not well received.
I was a bit too young when this came out. Hindset tho this was a great movie. Its campy like lynch is but also amazingly epic. Its cheesy goodness. Great to watch ripped.
Of course, the Lynch version of Dune has been criticized for decades. Most of it is well earned. In the novel Baron Harkonnen was insane but not hysterically out of control all the time. The oozing pustules on his face are no more than an annoying distraction in his scenes. An outstanding classical actor like Patrick Stewart is given grunts instead of lines portraying Gurney Halleck, but, he does the best that he can with it. Most of the acting is abominable. It is as if the actors were performing in a parody. Since some are outstanding, they must have been directed to recite the lines this way as if it was a 1930s Flash Gordon serial. (“Ming you fiend. You’ll never get away with it!) The characters are mostly wasted. Other than getting killed the Duncan Idaho character does nothing. Likewise, we learn nothing about Chani or Stilgar who have important roles in the novel but are reduced to stick figures in the film. There are some good things. The pre-steam punk design is interesting and innovative and some desert scenes are impressive. The penultimate scene in the throne room with Alia and the Baron is very good. It is as though Lynch had some good ideas but did not know how to effectuate them. I do not agree with the comment that certain scenes are “too dark.” A dark scene can work very well as it did for the entire film in Dark City, which is a classic of its kind. If you have not read Dune, the film makes no sense because so much background is absent. To be fair, Dune as a novel cannot be presented successfully in one film and Lynch should get credit for trying. There is just too much material to tell a comprehensible story in 90 minutes. The multi-film presentation was not available until Jackson did it right in The Lord of the Rings, since investors could not be found for such huge money commitments. A two or three film version of Dune that brings out the characters and includes some of the fascinating detail that makes Dune great would be wonderful. Who knows? Maybe it will happen!
The 80’s was and still is an absolutely awesome movie! It is one of my all-time favorite movies. I know a lot of people who agree with me on this as well. It was a masterpiece of story telling. I hated the Frank Herbert’s Dune series. It was awful. I hope this remake lives up to the greatness of the 80’s Dune.
Little pet peeve of mine: it won’t be a remake of the Lynch film, it’ll be a new adaptation of the novel.
Emily,
Best review ever. You must have read the novel!
Addenda: Paul, at the beginning of the novel, was a 15 year old boy who “spoke and acted like a man”. In the movie he is portrayed by a 22 year old who, in an attempt to seem 15, spoke and acted like a child – the exact opposite of who Paul Atreides was.
I did like the look of the Guild Navigator. And once I let go of the idea that the movie had anything to do with the novel, I rather enjoyed the over-the-top portrayal of Piter Devries by Brad Dourif.
If only David Lynch had thought of making Dune a musical! It could have lived forever, just like the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
@70
> Jodorowsky’s Dune was going to be an astonishing movie if it was ever made
Yeah, I kind of doubt that it would have been, to be honest. The effects wouldn’t have been up to snuff, for one thing. (I mean, they were actually planning to have Dan O’Bannon supervise the effects. I love O’Bannon as a creative force, but he’s hardly John Dykstra.) It’s probably a great piece of fortune for everybody that the project petered out. For one thing, “Alien” would almost certainly not have happened had it proceeded. And it might have set the cause of mainstream science fiction movies back by five years through its likely failure, critical and commercial.
Personally I love Lynch’s “Dune”. Flawed? Sure. Not entirely faithful? Agreed. Slightly batshit? Absolutely. But it looks magnificent, I like the score (both the Eno and the Toto stuff), and the feel and atmosphere are great. It’s a companion piece to the book rather than any kind of perfect adaptation of it. Stylized, weird, occasionally goofy, but always fun and interesting. Even with – *especially with* – the predominance of po-faced, histrionic internal monologue VO.
Frank Herbert actually disliked the final cut, but he had signed an agreement that he wouldn’t criticize the film publicly. (He WAS enthused over earlier, longer edits and hoped that a extended version would be released). Also, he was enough of a professional to know that if the film was a hit, his prospects for selling the movie rights to his other books would improve. That’s probably why he gave it his official approval despite being unhappy.
Many years after watching the movie, I find myself agreeing with this article. It is a fun, yet VERY flawed sci-fi romp, with a few visually appealing moments, a very messy and unbalanced script and lots of wasted talent as far as actors were concerned. Although the fact that it wasn’t very faithful to the novels didn’t annoy me back then, it does now, especially after you read the original Dune books. The diminshed female roles, the “weirding modules”, the rushed, gap-ridden story… bloody hell, not only did Lynch missed the mark on this one, it also has killed any chance for a proper adaptation for the past three decades. I would love to see at least the first trilogy plus “God Emperor of Dune” adapted to the big screen, or at least a Game-of-Thrones style adaptation (the mini series from the early 2000’s was also a failed attempt, IMHO).
Why is Dune a mess? Dino De Laurentiis!
Please evaluate the mini series. I liked that one better. And well done on your critique of the Lynch version. I had similar issues with it.
HAHAH this is amazingly written, thank you for expressing my thoughts and emotions on this hilariously awful film. I just finished reading Dune Messiah (after reading Dune of course), so I thought I’d have a bit of fun with Dune the movie knowing that it is supposed to be terrible. It was ok at first, boring and kind of humorous at how bad it is. But the last 30 mins or so were absolutely ridiculous. And the RAIN?????? I threw my hands in the air just giving up on life. Can’t wait for the next adaptation though (it comes out next year). I have a feeling this movie will be way better with modern visual effects, much better actors, and a director who actually cares about the source material.