I turned seven the year Star Wars celebrated its 20th anniversary. The space opera film trilogy’s re-release on VHS turned into a three-night movie event in my house, which in turn spawned my lifelong love affair with the franchise. I read the Star Wars Encyclopedia for fun, absorbing stories about Cindel Towani, Guri, and Nomi Sunrider, and I practiced using my Force powers, Silent Bob-style.
And so, when my father came home from the video store a year later with a new cassette, pointed to the foregrounded man in black, and said, “This boy is a prince, and he’s sort of like a Jedi,” well, you can imagine just how sold I was.
That was all it took for me to fall head-over-heels in love with David Lynch’s 1984 Dune adaptation. Screw being a Jedi, I wanted to be one of the Bene Gesserit. The litany against fear became my mantra, and—as soon as I laid hands on a copy of Frank Herbert’s source novel—I began trying to hone my powers of persuasion and physical mastery in order to be just like one of them.
It would be more than a decade before I realized that my deep and abiding love of David Lynch’s sci-fi epic had landed me in one of the most unpopular film fandoms, ever.
You see, people hate Dune almost as much as they love Dune. That is, sci-fi fans revile Lynch’s film almost as deeply as they revere Frank Herbert’s novel. Over the years, I’ve heard many theories on why Lynch’s Dune is so terrible, but I’ve never been convinced they’re right.
Look, I’m not saying the film is perfect, by any means, nor am I arguing that Alejandro Jodorowsky or Ridley Scott couldn’t have done a better job. Even Lynch himself hates Dune, after all. Valid criticisms about it exist, but, on the whole, I’ve just never understood what was so unspeakably godawful about the 1984 film that hardly anyone seems to be able to enjoy it, when I love it so fervently.
Writing for Tor.com in 2017, Emmett Asher-Perrin argues that “David Lynch’s Dune is what you get when you build a science fictional world with no interest in science fiction,” and they’re absolutely right. All his body of work’s weirdness aside, Lynch has shown very little interest in sci-fi over the course of his career.
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That doesn’t stop Dune from being a sci-fi film, however. The opening voiceover—one of the picture’s many, many voiceovers—explains that we’re dealing with a story set in the 11th millennium, and all of the strange technologies, from space travel and personal levitation to body-moisture recycling and voice-activated weapons, reinforce that we are not in 1984 anymore. None of these elements are executed in a spectacularly poor way, with the exception, perhaps, of the force shields Paul and Gurney Halleck wear while training, which are so stunningly Eighties that you practically need sunglasses—at night—to look at them.
So if Dune is, in fact, a sci-fi film, what’s the problem?
Most of the film’s critics seem to agree that Lynch’s cult classic simply isn’t a very good sci-fi flick, for a variety of reasons. Ask critics who aren’t familiar with the source material, and they’ll tell you Dune is nigh incomprehensible.
Take Janet Maslin, for example. In her 1984 review of the film in The New York Times, Maslin asserts that the “psychic” powers the heroes possess “[put] them in the unique position of being able to understand what goes on in the film.”
That’s one hell of a burn, but here’s the thing: I’ve never shown Dune to anyone—and trust me, it’s one of the first ten movies I’ll ask if you’ve seen—who seemed confused by the story.
At its heart, Dune is a simple tale, much as many fans will hate to hear it. There’s Leto Atreides, a weak duke who’s about to be overthrown; Jessica, his strong, gorgeous, and secretly pregnant witch of a concubine, whom he regrets never officially marrying; and Paul, their son, who was never supposed to be born. The guy who sells this royal family out happens to be secretly in love with Jessica, so he helps her escape with Paul. Mother and son wind up living as refugees on a remote desert planet, Arrakis, where there be monsters and a valuable resource: the spice, which just so happens to be the very thing that Leto’s enemies wanted to unseat him in order to obtain. By embedding themselves among the locals and winning them over, Jessica, Paul, and Alia—Paul’s younger sister, in-utero at the time of the coup—exact their revenge on the bloody Baron Harkonnen, who killed Leto.
And how can this be? Because Paul is the Kwisatz Haderach—the super-powerful boychild that the Bene Gesserit have been waiting for. Really, folks, it’s all right there, in the movie.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that some parts of Lynch’s Dune really don’t make much sense. Like that grotesque pet cat/rat the Baron Harkonnen gives to House Atreides’ longsuffering servant, Thufir Hawat, to milk. Why does it have to be a cat with a rat taped to its side? Why does Thufir have to milk it in order to rid himself of Harkonnen poison? Why does he have to do this every day or risk death? Why does Sting have to be the one to carry the cat/rat? The easy answer to all of these questions is that Thufir’s pet is one of a generous handful of elements that aren’t fleshed out enough for us to understand them, at least not in any capacity that goes beyond the mental image of Lynch shrugging and saying, “Make it weird.”
But there’s another, less easy answer, and one that I think gets to the heart of why I love Lynch’s Dune so much. All of the elements of the film that grate on critics, from the near-constant voiceovers to the unexplained powers of the Mentats and Bene Gesserit, are near and dear to me, because they made sense to my 8-year-old, Star Wars-loving self. More than that, Dune gave me a world in which everything was not guaranteed to turn out all right—something to temper the almost relentless optimism of Star Wars.
Let’s get one thing clear: the problem isn’t that Lynch’s Dune doesn’t explain things. It does, sometimes to an excruciating degree. The bigger issue, however, is that the film, for all its info-dumping, never gives viewers a solid picture of what the world looks like outside of House Atreides, House Harkonnen, and Arrakis. Unlike Herbert’s novel, Lynch’s film doesn’t have the time to introduce you to the Padishah Emperor and his Sardaukar, or to the ongoing struggle between the Atreides and Harkonnen. Those elements are reduced, largely, to the spare summary I gave above—the barest minimum required to set in on the action.
Altering or erasing elements from the source text is a common in any page-to-screen adaptation, even more so with a doorstopper like Dune, but Lynch’s choices continue to rankle Herbert’s fans. In particular, his decision to prioritize interior scenes over exterior ones gives his version of Dune a deep and unabiding strangeness. Revisiting Dune for The Atlantic in 2014, Daniel D. Snyder writes, “If the movie’s goal was to create… a world that felt utterly alien, then Lynch and his surreal style were the right choice…. [Dune] seeks to put the viewer somewhere unfamiliar while hinting at a greater, hidden story.”
Where The Return of the Jedi wrapped up its space opera in a bow of happily ever after, Dune leaves viewers wondering what’s to become of Paul and his loved ones. Will his decision to enter into a loveless marriage with the Princess Irulan protect his people from another attack from the Sardaukar? Can Chani handle the burden of being his concubine, as Jessica did for Leto, given that her husband will have an official wife? Will the warchild Alia be forever scarred by her actions on the battlefield? What will the rain Paul has brought to Arrakis do to its native fauna, the giant sandworms known as Shai-Hulud, who are sacred to the Fremen?
Some of these questions have answers in Herbert’s books, and some don’t. Even as it opens these lines of inquiry, Dune doesn’t feel like a movie that’s gunning for a sequel. When the credits roll, you know it’s over, even though you want answers to all your burning questions about rain on Arrakis and Harkonnen heart plugs. If you’re an adult when you see Lynch’s Dune for the first time, you’re angry that the film doesn’t give you what you want.
But if you’re eight years old and watching the film for the first time, it’s a different matter. At that age, it’s OK if you don’t know how something works in a movie, because you don’t know how plenty of things work in real life. And no one will tell you how anything works in real life, just like movies and books gloss over things you don’t need to know.
That persistent ignorance lingers once you reach adulthood. The difference is that no adult wants to admit that we don’t know how the Internet, or newspaper printing, or fine dining works. Instead, we demand answers, even though most things become a lot more fun as soon as you stop banging out questions long enough to enjoy them.
That’s the problem detractors have with Dune. The movie possesses a cinematic claustrophobia, that, as Snyder points out, is “actually closer to Kubrick… than Lucas.” Dune takes place in a gigantic, unfamiliar galaxy, but only introduces you to a small corner of it. What you see is what you get. Everything outside is darkness.
Could Lynch have done a better job of giving us context for Dune’s weirdest elements? Of course. But Dune is much more enjoyable without the nitty gritty. The only thing required to enjoy the movie is to embrace the childlike sense of wonder that makes peace with not knowing everything—a trait all SF/F fans should try to cultivate.
That, I think, is why I still love Lynch’s Dune, in spite of its faults, more than 20 years since we were first introduced. As soon as I see Princess Irulan’s face floating in space, I become the eight-year-old kid I once was, in love with Star Wars and all other things SFF. I’m not critical. I wait for answers instead of searching for them. I permit the film to pass over me and through me, and I remain. More than two decades after I first saw it, and approaching 40 years since its theatrical release, David Lynch’s Dune remains—unchanged by time, still waiting to welcome me back into the halls of the Houses Major and the sandy peaks of Arrakis.
Dune will have a new, theatrical successor soon. Denis Villeneuve is at the helm, with an all-star cast lined up on the other side of the camera. That film may not have the same flaws as Lynch’s adaptation, but it still won’t be the 1:1 analogue to the novel that some fans want. It will be its own monster, perhaps one full of bite and vigor, but faulty all the same.
I’m sure I’m going to love Villeneuve’s Dune, too. Because when the lights go down on opening night, I’ll be that eight-year-old kid learning about Paul Atreides’ world for the first time, all over again.
And right beside me in that theater, there will be other kids experiencing Dune for the first time. I hope they hold onto their wonder and joy whenever they re-watch Villeneuve’s film. I wish them the same sort of renewed beginnings I have in Lynch’s Dune. After all, a beginning is a delicate time.
Kristian Wilson Colyard writes fiction and poetry, reads, and does nerdy stuff at her home in the rural American South, where she lives with her husband and their clowder of cats. She’s on Twitter @kristianwriting, and you can find more of her work online at kristianwriting.com.
Lynch turned Dune into Gormenghast, and for all it’s faults, that’s a drug designed perfectly for my pleasure receptors.
DUNE was filmed at a studio in Wilmington, NC. Soon after it hit the theaters, a hurricane damaged the studio. Word among nerds was that Mother Nature was as unhappy as most fans of the books.
I guess I’ll take spot 2 in your line. I love the movie! I don’t need things explained to me. The movie is a wild ride from the first frame to the last.
Wasn’t this post published just last week?
I was 10 when this came out and I saw it in the theater.
I loved it, I think for many of the reasons you said: it was deeply weird and inexplicable and yet complete for all of that, and I didn’t need it to make sense.
I’ve always loved the look of Lynch’s Dune. Of course it’s a dark universe, literally. If I lived there I’d have one of those floating lights follow me everywhere.
To me, Lynch’s Dune falls into the same category as Attack of the Clones: films that are amazing as sensory experiences but fall down very, very hard in terms of telling a coherent story. I can definitely sympathize with the significance of the author’s eight-year-old perspective: I was 10 when the film was originally released and came out of the theater thinking the movie was cool but mildly confusing, yet I could not at that point in time quite understand why my parents were so critical about the narrative problems.
@7/princessroxana: Agree! If there had been some way to apply Lynch’s visual aesthetic to the more faithful narrative adaptation of the Sci-Fi miniseries, I think our long-awaited “definitive” screen adaptation may have occurred.
I also love this movie, for many of the same reasons as Kristian, but i made a conscious decision a long time ago to decouple it from the books. The basic narrative is the same, and has some of the same plot points, but they are done in such wildly different ways that its just easier for my brain, otherwise i’m constantly picking it apart for what it isn’t.
Dune is almost impossible to film because its protagonist goes through puberty in the time lapse connecting the first and second half of the novel. Finding child and late teen actors who look like each other and can both act compellingly is impossibly difficult, and the general solution of casting an adult playing an adolescent stretches plausibility to the breaking point.
Add in the fact that the novel has an omniscient narrator that rapidly switches between different character’s thoughts, and the fractal nature of the novel’s plot – in which certain patterns recur on different scales – and the result is a tale spectacularly poorly-suited for translation to film.
As much as I love David Lynch, he was a poor choice to make this film. He excels at taking normality and making it strange and unfamiliar, while the purpose of any science-fiction work is to take the strange and unfamiliar and present it in a way we can cope with. I agree that the movie has its valuable elements, and it’s not nearly the worst I’ve ever seen, but I can’t consider it artistically successful.
I also loved this movie! (I was 12, and my mom hated it. It was the first time I took an openly opposite stance to her. Then I went home, read the book by midnight and continued to love the movie.)
2 nitpicks:
1) Duke Leto wasn’t weak. He was assassinated because he was popular and it was threatening the Padishah Emperor. Also, Harkonnen did it because feud.
2) Yueh wasn’t in love with Jessica. He was still in love with the wife that he thought the Harkonnens had held hostage, who was another Bene Gesserit by the name of Wanna. (Pretty sure it was Wanna. I’m doing this by memory.) Letting Jessica and Paul go was a way of biting his thumb at the Harkonnens.
I fell asleep when I saw this as a child in the theatre, but I saw it again 4 years later and fell in love. It’s still a favourite of mine for many of the same reasons.
As an adult, I was surprised to realize how steampunk-ish the costume design was.
Also, I can’t wait for the Bene Gesserit TV show that is apparently in the works!
It was Wanna. Helping Jessica and Paul was also a bribe for Duke Leto. ‘Help me kill the Baron and I’ll save your family.’ Yueh tells him.
I was 17 when David Lynch’s Dune came out and had just read the book. Literally had just finished reading the book a week before the movie was released. I enjoyed the move, but felt that to much was left on the cutting room floor. I was able to follow the story only because the book was still fresh in my mind. My girlfriend at the time, had never read the book and really had no idea what was going on. The weird stuff Lynch added, the mentioned cat/rat thing, heart plugs, weirding weapons; I have come to expect when Hollywood does a book to movie, but the ending is still off setting for me. The sets and costumes really felt and looked right. I just feel Lynch was not the right director for this movie. You need someone who has read the book(s), likes/loves them and can keep the brass from trying to change things because of test audiences. Much like Peter Jackson and the LotRs
If you took the costumes, production design and cast (not Kyle, too old even then) of Lynch’s Dune and used the script that SciFi relied on, this would be nearly perfect. (Feyd-Ruatha should be a bit more gay in both). The voice overs were annoying and stupid. The “weirding machine” was a dumb crutch. Visually, though, this movie is stunning.
Fingers crossed for the upcoming production.
First impressions: hated the movie; thought the miniseries version was more faithful and fleshed out.
A couple of years ago, I re-read the book, then watched the movie. Surprisingly, I found that the movie had stuck with me far more than the ‘faithful’ adaptation. And had probably come closer to capturing the “spirit” of a political setting loosely based on the Dark Ages. The promised social contract: a place for every man, and every man in his place. The reality: well, apparently nasty enough to make a holy war in support of a committee-shopped prophecy about some generic messiah seem like a good idea.
Paul Atreides may be a prophet, but cannot control the storm he creates. This rather important point seems to get lost… so I can’t consider the film a good adaptation. But an interesting failure may be more valuable than something bland and forgettable. Hopefully the next version will be memorable.
I saw Dune before I read it. I like both very much. I don’t get why Lynch included the “weirding module”, but I still enjoyed the movie.
When I first heard about the Jordorowski Dune project, I wished it had been made. But after watching the documentary and reading more about it, he really wanted to take a huge shit all over the story, way worse than what Lynch did. I did really want to see Dali as the Emperor, though.
“Lynch has shown very little interest in sci-fi over the course of his career.”
Sounds like someone hasn’t seen Twin Peaks, especially The Return, which is chock full of sci-fi.
I love how the author is telling us how the plot isn’t that difficult to follow and that’s its all in the exposition, while he simultaneously is 180 degrees off base about essentially the only two plot points he mentions – Yueh doesn’t love Jessica, he loves his wife who he believes is a Harkonnen captive, and Leto is a major threat to the Baron/Emperor/whoever precisely because he’s very strong and very popular, both with his men and the wider community.
@17: At a guess, he didn’t want his actors to have to fake being skilled at a martial art.
My complaint about the Lynch Dune was that he kept on setting up sub-plots from the novel, and then dropping them on the floor.
I enjoy the movie. I agree, I put it in a separate universe descended from the book.
Nitpick to all the people complimenting Lynch on the production design – the look of the movie is taken right out of the original magazine illustrations (John Schoenherr, I think? I don’t have my magazines handy).
Count me in as someone who read the books first and still thought the movie was an honorable and partially successful effort, though the weirding module stuff was dumb.
Would have been better as a longer movie, or even split into two or three parts, as several other people have noted.
I don’t recall exactly how the Lynch film characterizes Leto. But I’d say the book presents him as morally strong, but practically weak in the sense that he over-extends himself on a big gamble that he can’t make pay off and loses everything as a result. He is not strong enough to rally the Landsraad against the Emperor and he over-estimates his ability to defend his House from the Harkonnen. He is enough of a threat to be crushed, but not strong enough to resist.
Does that make him weak overall? I guess that’s a matter of perspective. I’d probably consider him more tragically-doomed.
I saw the movie before I read the book, so to me, the look of Lynch’s movie is how Dune looks. It’s costume and set designs are wonderfully bonkers. Plus, Francesca Annis is PERFECT as Jessica. That’s a woman I can believe Leto would love to the exclusion of a political marriage. Plus, how can one not love Patrick Stewart as Gurney Halleck?
The only way to do justice to Dune is a cable/streaming mini-series done by a network with money to spend on getting it right.
David Lynch’s Dune is a a fucking incredible film that just unfortunately was cut down too much by the studios and had bad pacing problems. I think the new Dune movie will be fantastic, and I wish Jodowrosky made his Dune movie. I mean, the production design alone of the David Lynch movie is incredibly (granted, it looks nothing like the novel but hey I dig it anyway and at least it doesn’t look *too* sci fi like a lot of sci fi movies lately
I knew the movie was in trouble when an usher at the door handed me a sheet with a cast of characters and what they did in the Dune universe. Likely the average viewer found it unintelligible. I found it much more cruel and dark than my first reading of the book. After seeing the movie, in my later readings of the book the memory of the movie made the Harkonnen house seem much darker and sadistic.
Sting was so popular with the teeny boppers, it must have been agony for them to see Sting be so mean to that nice Atreides boy.
One thing Lynch did will, as did Lucas, was make technology the side piece of the plot. For instance, the universal translator device carried in to the Harkonnen palace is undeniably old tech, so the only thing to do is gild it in gold.
What the movie got so badly wrong was the completely enveloping culture of a water conserving society. Sure, the main actor wears nose plugs to recapture moisture. But a desert culture was at the heart of Herbert’s world, an environment so foreign only Death Valley, or the Sahara can come close to being an exemplar here on our earth.
I think most people who see a David Lynch movie for the first time feel confused and/or disturbed. He rarely, if ever, tell you the whole story and leave you, as a viewer, to fill in the blanks on your own. But maybe the fans who loved the book were not used to this experimental style and expected a Star Wars type of adaption – only to get deeply disapointed. I think that if you love Dune and love the Lynch style of filmmaking you walk away satisfied. If you disklike any of these two components, then I am not surprised that you find the movie both incoherent (becase in many ways it is) and unsettling (because it is supposed to be). I loved it as a child, but haven’t seen it for years so I don’t know whether it has aged well or not…
#26 You are right that Lynch blew the desert culture completely but actually, regardless of his studies about actual dunes, so did Herbert. I read studies long ago that a stillsuit designed by Herbert would literally cook it’s wearer within hours.
People weren’t willing to give Herbert, or his readers any credit – if he didn’t explicitly explain how a function worked, they’d insist he’d gotten it wrong.
Stilsuits are clearly designed to radiate away heat under controlled conditions. There are also reasons why Fremen mostly operate at night.
I love the film and when I had my wife watch it she hated it, maybe for the exact reasons you called out. However, this write-up makes me want to show it to my 10 and 8 year old to see how it will impact them. I know I will love to be brought back to my 8 year old self and re-watch a film that has been a staple in my cinematic diet.
@23 – the book doesn’t show Leto as “over-extending”. It’s showing that Let is being betrayed by essentially everyone. He had no plans to overthrow the Emperor and therefore had no idea that the Sardaukar could possibly get involved.
He fails in only 3 places, which are all clearly called out in the text, and they’re all part and parcel of the same thing. He fails to realize that Imperial Conditioning can be compromised, which means he leaves a stone unturned in searching for a traitor. He thinks that it’s too expensive to transport massive military force to Arrakis (e.g. underestimates Harkonnen embezzlement). And he doesn’t believe that the Emperor will get involved personally. For the first and the last, these are not unreasonable assumptions – they are core tenets of the socio-political order of his time.
If any one of those three elements are not present, he wins his gamble and ends up (whether he utilizes it or not) with the most potent fighting force in the galaxy and control of the most important resource in the galaxy. That’s a good gamble on his part, not bad. Moreover, he had no choice but to accept it, so it’s technically not a gamble at all. He makes it clear his only other viable option is to go rogue and flee.
I watched David Lynch’s Dune over a decade before I was able to read the books. (Hard to explain; let’s say they weren’t widely available in the country I was living in.) And I loved it, warts and all.
When I finally had access to the books, they basically could not live up to my expectations. Too many things don’t stand to close scrutiny. (For one thing: how could Alia possibly be “possessed” by her Harkonnen ancestor, if she, not being a Kwisatz Haderach, had no access to the Other Memory on the male side? And don’t get me started about the Duncan Idaho gholas…)
Yet the movie is always there for me, and it is somehow much more attractive than the decent, more or less faithful, yet hobbled Syfy Channel adaptation. While one can only dream of the even weirder and more far-fetched movie Jodorowsky would have made, Lynch’s is, thankfully, there for me to revisit, in all its deranged glory.
@31: He also falls for fairly transparent psychological tactics, e.g. by allowing circumstantial evidence to shake his confidence in Jessica, which has the knock-on effect of also undermining Idaho’s effectiveness. This puts him on the defensive and divides his senior ranks at precisely the time when he knows he needs to be most vigilant. That is probably the biggest personal mistake he makes after arriving on Arrakis, because it neutralizes what could otherwise have been his biggest advantage: strong personal loyalty of very competent people.
Otherwise, I agree with you that, from his perspective, his choices seem reasonable in context. The plot requires that he fall, so he does. As I said, I don’t think “weak” is the right adjective. But his threat analysis is wrong, and all of his tactical decisions are wrong as a result.
Except the Duke states very clearly that he has no doubt of Jessica, and only pretends to in order to give the Harkonnen agents he knows must be watching disinformation. Paul is told the truth, and is instructed to convey it to Jessica if anything happens to the Duke.
But that disinformation affects his own forces as much, if not more than, the enemy. Paul is able to reconcile Jessica and Duncan, but only after it is too late to change anything. It’s a mistake.
never read the book – loved the movie. it probably took a few watches to figure out who all the characters were and how they related to each other.
one of my favorite quotes – almost an overarching philosophy for life – “without change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens. the sleeper must awaken!”
“Walk without rhythm, and we won’t attract the worm.”
Which of course gave rise to the Christopher Walken video of Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice“. Without the movie, we’d not have the video.
I was 35 when it came out, not 8, so I have less of an excuse than you do for loving it. But love it I do. I remember seeing it on US opening day (which I did for any SF movie back in those days). A nervous studio had printed glossaries to hand out to audience members, and I saw it in a suburban theater, not a downtown urban theater, so I assume they did that across the country. I’m also a big fan of David Lynch, but I play my DVD of Dune more often than all of Lynch’s other movies put together. I particularly love Princess Irulan’s opening intro, and sometimes I’ll pop the disc in and play just that. Replacement of the Princess is just one of many fatal flaws in the Alan Smithee cut.
It had been 20 years since I read the book, but I had no trouble following the movie. I liked the book, but I didn’t love it. It certainly isn’t in my top 50 all-time SF novels list. I never read any later ones in the series. Maybe that’s because I read it serialized in Analog as 2 shorter novels (Dune World, 3 parts, 1963/1964 & Prophet of Dune, 5 parts, 1965). I liked the John Schoenherr art (used in Analog, as well as for the Chilton & Ace editions) more than I liked the text. I didn’t have enough interest in the material to watch the SyFy (or was it SciFi back then?) miniseries, but I will watch the Denis Villedeuve movie because (despite my hugely pessimistic expectations) I really liked Blade Runner 2049.
I don’t do this deliberately, honestly. I come by my heterodox opinions naturally. I also think Zardoz is one of the greatest SF movies of all time (Arthur Frayn’s opening monologue is even better than Irulan’s) and far prefer John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic to the William Friedkin original.
I also grew up in roughly same time period and very much enjoyed the film as a kid, which introduced me to the books. I also enjoyed the film very much. The plot isn’t that hard to follow, like said, minus the Lynch weirdness (in my opinion). I think that it failed for one of the same reasons Blade Runner did. The ‘hero’ isn’t necessarily a hero. In the book, it plays out this way with the deaths of millions as a result of Paul’s jihad. I think the movie hints at this in a visual way as it looks very ominous at the end and is confusing to Star Wars happy ending movie goers, just as Harrison Ford wasn’t an action hero in Blade Runner. Plot wise, Dune is so much easier to follow than Blade Runner which has lots of things that don’t make sense plot wise, but is a visual/sensory experience in the same way as Dune.
The version I saw as a kid was expurgated– no long introduction explaining the rise of the machines and the Butlerian Jihad, very, very few voiceovers. It’s still one of my favourite movies, because like the author, it hit me right -there- when I was in grade five and reading the novel for the first time.
I absolutely adore Lynch’s Dune. So you are not alone. I find the voice-overs to be soothing and weirdly relaxing, mysteriously beautiful. I particularly love the parts of the film that feel like a dream. I never even knew people hated this film so much until a few years ago, thanks to very loud opinions on the internet. I think most people (in the real world) have never even seen it and if they have, they just find it ok.
Thanks for voicing your apparently unpopular opinion. I’m with you!
One of the best parts of Lynch’s movie is the soundtrack by Toto. I bought the CD years ago and still listen to it. Very moving music.
I saw it in the theatre while in college. Of all my friends in the theatre with me, I was the only one who came out loving this film, and I never understood the hate for it, either. Yes, I’d read the books, but Lynch’s vision for it was original and compelling. Just watched it again for the umpteenth time on Blu-ray a few weeks ago. My love for it has never waned.
I will quibble with one of your points, however: the shield practice scene with Gurney and Paul is one of the standout visual sequences in the film, and again so when Duncan is killed. It doesn’t look dated at all to me and is still a very unique effect.
I finally got to see this in the cinema last. And people laughed. The swine.
it´s a flawed classic.
When the film came out, everyone I knew who’d read the book marvelled at the excellent cast (well, except for the Baron, but you can’t fault the actor for Jodorowsky’s choice of Orson Welles lingering in people’s minds.) However, my friends and I spotted trouble as soon as the credits rolled past the title “DUNE”: associate producer (okay), mechanical SFX (really?), creature created by (huh?), SPX photographic (WTF?!) We came to see a story, and the special effects get first billing? And sure enough, a crucial story element, the supreme toughness the Fremen acquired rising to the challenge of their environment, went out the window. Instead, we got a 3rd-world equivalent House Atreides outfitted with a new sound weapon. For all its glaring faults, the later Dune mini-series at least respected the Fremen. So I hope Villeneuve’s version will finally settle my mind, which keeps trying to fit the storyline of the horrible-looking mini-series to the magnificently-produced Lynch movie.
Well, I read the original in Analog in the 60s, and I liked the film. Everything was rather dark, but that’s a common trick to make special effects work. Not everything has to be explained!
Basically I think Lynch bit off more than he could chew. The film is too short.
Of course the basic logic of the story doesn’t hold up. Without water, Arrakis couldn’t have any kind of ecosystem at all – let alone one that could sustain enormous sandworms crashing about. And where did the rain at the end come from, anyway? Out of nowhere. There is obviously very little hydrogen to enter into water on Arrakis!
I didn’t find it perfect, but it was awesome in many ways. Big, massive, solid in its conceptions. The parts that were less memorable, I have probably forgotten. For me, the key problem it has is that it got about half the story told, and then the “fifteen minutes left” light came on, so they just threw everything in: armies went from left to right, and then right to left. Explosions occurred. “He IS the Kwisatz Haderach!” Curtain. Really, it’s too bad Lynch couldn’t have been interested in going back and making it long enough to break into two movies. On balance, I liked it more than not.
I was 17 when Lynch’s Dune was released. I had been an avid fan of the books for years, plus most of Herbert’s other works. The litany against fear was also my mantra for years, and I sometimes still say it to myself. I went to the movies by myself to see the movie. I was excited but nervous, because how could a book like Dune, which so much internalized dialogue, translate to a movie? A cheat sheet of Dune terminology was handed to all movie-goers, not that I needed it. I’m not sure if I still have it, but for years it was folded up inside my copy of Dune. I had mixed reactions to the experience. It was the first time I had seen an adaptation of a book where so many of the actors/actresses looked like my mental image of the characters. Not exact, no perfect, but very close in some cases. In other cases, not so much, Alicia Witt’s Alia drove me crazy, that odd voice they gave her. There was other stuff I disliked, stuff I liked. I’ve watched the director’s cut every once in a while when it’s playing on cable. I still think it was better than SyFy’s 2000 Dune miniseries, which may be damning with faint praise.
This version of Dune simply sucks. The book makes clear that the real subject is the planet itself and its ecology which the movie fails to capture. I went into the theater expecting to see a science-fictional version of Lawrence of Arabia and got trash instead. The book is a classic, the movie, not.
My basic issue with the film (I mean, I had lesser ones, but they’re lesser, and I never understood the “can’t follow what’s going on” part) is this:
Movie: Emperor backs Harkonnen because Atreides has a technological advantage.
Er… Emperor could command or even ask the Duke for one of those Weirding Module thingies.
But no, these must all be destroyed!
Er, no. You don’t destroy a rival’s technological advantage. You steal it.
Book: Emperor backs Harkonnen because Duke Leto has the one thing that cannot be stolen and cannot be tolerated: A fighting force personally loyal to him, not the emperor, which is as good as, and perhaps slightly better than, the emperor’s.
Without that problem — no, I wouldn’t have liked the movie, yes, I would have thought some of the grossness was above and beyond, whatever — I’d find it meh, and then mostly for what was cut, which, honestly, I’m not sure how much more could have been fit in at that time. But with it, for me, the movie fails on its own terms.
Well said! I first saw the movie when I was 12, and have always loved it. It was this love that drew me to the written series.
I read the books first, probably 8 years before the movie came out, which never bodes well for a movie adaptation of anything. But I hated it, not immediately mind you, I think it wasn’t until the heartplug (wtf???) thing and then I knew I could never get behind that version. I have seen it more than once but I will always like the mini-series more than that piece of tripe. Looking forward to what the next rendition will hold for us but I have learned not to expect too much.
Maybe I missed it–there are quite a few comments– but I’m surprised to not see anyone in the comments mentioning that Lynch wanted to make a much different movie, but creative control was wrested from him and the movie ended up incoherent and oddly cut. Lynch cites this as the reason he doesn’t want his name associated with the end product, and the reason he insists on full creative control on his projects to this day.
Wonder what he’d have ended up with otherwise. Probably still not something most Dune fans would like, but I’d be interested!
Thank you for writing this. I agree 100%
LONG LIVE THE FIGHTERS!!!!
People don’t know or forget, Frank Herbert was on set during the filming. He approved this version. The weirding way was going to be to difficult to capture and portray in a movie. Syfy did their version but it was also lacking. It was more then martial arts and deceptive movements. It was total body control through mental training. How do you get that across to a movie goer? Especially one who isn’t cerebral enough to “get it”. BTW, I still watch the movie every couple of years or so
What’s wrong with Lynch’s “Dune” is what’s happened to other SF&F movies like “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, “John Carter”, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” and others that are waaaaaaayyy off from their source material.
The script writers and directors have little respect for the story and want to *put their mark on it* instead of showing how well and creatively that can put the author’s story onto the screen.
So they start adding things that aren’t in the original. They leave things out that *are very important* or they minimize or cut them short. They’ll mash separate characters into “composities” “Because they’re so similar. Having too many characters confuses the audience.” NO IT DOES NOT! We fans *love* tales made deeper with more characters.
Nevermind that by mashing these guys together you’ve already #%@@@@@#ed up the sequel (wherein the guy you eliminated *is important*), which you haven’t bothered to read, because for you this is mostly about the paycheck and your ego.
“I would have included ‘X’ but the run time was just getting to be too long…” It wouldn’t be too long if you’d left out the hyper extended dragon fight / Magrathea / whatever scene that’s not in the book!
For Dune, remove the heart plugs, the weirding modules, the Sardaukar’s spacesuits filled with green gas (they’re just highly trained humans, not aliens), remove all the pieces NOT in the book at all, and what is left *IS* pretty darn close to the book. The scene where Paul is nearly assassinated is practically spot on. So is the scene where Paul is given the Gom Jabbar test.
Then fix things like the ornithopters. Like it would have been so hard to hit up a library (or just read the Dune book) to find out that’s a flying machine with flapping wings. The capability existed to combine practical effects and animation to make convincing ornithopters. The shield wall for the city – more evidence of either not reading/understanding the story or making a change because assuming the audience wouldn’t understand the Shield Wall is a high mountain/cliff range protecting the city from the near constant winds and blowing sand, nothing whatsoever to do with the defense shield technology, which I thought was done very well.
IIRC the shield tech in Dune was developed as a defense against atomic weapons, unfortunately the shields are a double edge sword because shooting one with a “lasgun” makes the shield explode in with an atomic bomb force equivalent to the power used to create the shield. The reaction also (never explained how) causes the “lasgun” to explode, making such an attack suicidal. Apparently Herbert never thought of robots or just a really long pair of wires to a trigger switch.
So when the Emperor uses atomic weapons to breach the Shield Wall, that means blasting through a mountain range.
That’s why infantry shield combat is hand to hand. Using projectiles is ineffective because they can’t be fired from within a shield and if you set *your* shield to not cover your weapon, the bullets are just going to bounce off the other guy’s. Energy weapons aka “lasguns” or LASERS are right out. Blow up the enemy soldier, his buddies, yourself and your buddies with one zap. Not a good thing. So you’re stuck with running in, getting close, attacking *just slow enough* to penetrate the other guy’s shield, then quickly stabbing or slicing. I suppose one could do the same to push a pistol through but that’d just be fighting dirty.
The shields are involved in an important plot point with Dr. Yueh and Baron Harkonnen. The Baron is super paranoid about assassination so he always wears a personal shield, turned on at lowest setting so it’s ready to turn to max as fast as possible. At highest setting *nothing gets through*, not even air or light. Once can suffocate.
It’s that lowest setting that saves the Baron when the Dr. blows the poison gas at him. It blocks the gas while he quickly backs away, and I would assume cranks up his shield strength.
In the movie he’s in a closed room and doesn’t inhale any of the poison. He just gets a facefull of supposedly super deadly poison and *doesn’t die*.
It’s for situations like this when writers and directors need to add *but lightly* some little bit so the audience doesn’t think the movie has pulled a fast one or they’ve missed something important. Some little bit of dialog between the Baron and someone about how much wear he puts on his personal shield leaving it turned on low all the time.
If you’ve seen “Good Omens” there’s an excellent added piece which condenses an important bit of narrative exposition into a bit of informative and entertaining action. It’s where Crowley explains how he influenced the road design to make it an evil glyph. It’s an excellent conversion of Tell into Show. (But why did they leave out the bit about any music left in Crowley’s car for a fortnight tuning into Queen’s Greatest hits?)
Dune has a lot of Tell, which is what Lynch and the script writers failed so hard at converting to Show, so they made stuff up and threw it in.
I have never seen anybody comment, that the Fremen are fairly obviously intended to be long-future racial descendants of the Palestinians, chased from pillar to post, from planet to planet through the galaxy, finally forced onto the almost uninhabitable Arrakis to sink or swim (!), and they had to toughen up to survive at all.
It’s also worth pointing out that Dune was in the DNA of Star Wars when it was conceived. The Star Wars we ended up getting wasn’t implicit in it’s beginnings. (Taking as a fact that George Lucas did not have the whole thing planned out, though he may have had general arcs and inspiration points.)
Things like Jedi, the spice that Han Solo was smuggling, a distant emperor, and a desert planet, all felt like some subtle or not-so-subtle nods even back when I was a kid. Moreso now.
All of this to say, I can totally see loving the movie due to the proximity of it’s weirdness field to Star Wars!
A good breakdown:
http://www.moongadget.com/origins/dune.html
Of course Herbert thought of using the shield-lasgun effect as a weapon. But, as the novel points out, there are some serious drawbacks, the primary of which is that the size of the fusion effect is inherently random. It might do no more than destroy the lasgun and shield, or it could be more potent than atomics. Which leads to the second problem: use of atomic weapons is punished by planetary obliteration, and it can be hard to distinguish a really big interaction explosion from use of a nuclear weapon.
Lynch’s Dune was the reason why I started reading the books, so it will always have a special place in my heart of only for that reason. Yes, some choices do not make sense , and some aesthetics are there for the sake of Lynch and nothing else, but I still think it captures the mood of Dune even when it’s completely unfaithful to the words of the book.
I first saw the movie in college; I’d read the book in high school. I’m pretty critical of movies adapted from books (or comics), but I think Herbert’s story was densely packed enough that I was pretty forgiving of the choices made and found it enjoyable. I still put it on from time to time now. Though the personal force shields are indeed quite laughable. They made me think of the animation in the video for “Money for Nothing”, it was also a product of the video tech of the time.
Dune, the movie, came out when I was 5 and I think I watched it as a child thereafter when it came on cable. I remember being awed by the visual and sound design and weirdness and just as equally grossed out by some of the scenes. In the years since, I haven’t watched it because o was discouraged by the negative reviews, but being a good deal older now and a person of my own mind, I’m looking forward to checking it out again and enjoying and laughing at the weirdness!
It’s my favourite film. My dad sat me down to watch it when I was six, and I found it deeply disturbing. This was only aided by the fact I confused parts of the narrative – most notibly I thought that the Baron had acidic spit, and that it burned through Leto’s face. But it probably laid part of the framework for me liking odd things for the rest of my life. Saw it again when I was maybe 13/14, and I just loved it. This is obviously a very personal reaction.
Objectively, however, I think the film has loads going for it.
1. It looks absolutely incredible, and there will never be another film which will look quite like it. The combination of Lynch’s style with the tradition of science fiction aesthetics, along with the contemporary special effects mean it’s completely unique.
2. The characters act and talk like they are human beings in a genuinely different society. This may be simply an accident of Lynch’s script writing, but who cares. This is so difficult to bring off in a film – either you end up like Star Wars (good as it is) where the characters basically sound alot like us, or everything is much more strained in trying to be “otherworldly”, and usually ends up with the people not really seeming human. I always get the sense that the characters in Dune are embedded in a deeply hierachical society quite quite different from ours, but they are definitely human, with emotions recognisable to us.
3. The film is difficult to follow if you haven’t seen it before or read the books. But if you have, it always seems to reveal something else every time you watch it. What more do people want? Does every film have to be immediately digestable? I highly doubt science fiction fans, or film fans more generally, would say this – so what is the overwhelming problem with this film.
4. It’s quite a bad adaptation of Dune the novel – from one angle at least. It completely neglects the fact that Paul’s leadership of the Fremen is ultimately a disaster for them, as is clear in the later books, and is (admittedly, very) subtly forshadowed in Dune itself. It also seems to ascribe him powers which not even Leto II eventually has – does he really make it rain? From the perspective of Frank Herbert trying to warn of the dangers of charismatic leadership, it’s terrible. It’s one of the things I’m hoping for the new film. This may count as a negative for Lynch’s film, but does it render the film garbage? The political message of many popular science fiction films is often highly dubious, but I don’t think it need ruin the film, providing later film makers learn the lesson.
5. The performances are great.
6. As mentioned in the article, it’s well plotted. You can follow the whole thing, and things that are strange on inexplicable in it can be made to make sense. All the characters have explicable motivations.
7. It’s got Sting in a cod piece. Most people see this as a negative, but by this stage, I think they doth protest too much…
@25/ryan, Jodorowski wanted to take a big ol’ shit all over the story. He had no interest in following it all that closely. After watching the documentary “Jodorowski’s Dune” I no longer wanted to see it, no matter how awesome it would have been to have Salvadore Dali as the Emperor.
I love this movie and always have. Saw it before I read the books, also as a young child, and it struck a major chord with me. Reading the books only made it better… I will never understand the hate.
I also love the film, and I might be alone here, but I was wayyyyy more disappointed in the book…I thought the book was largely bland, generic, and lacking in any of the strangeness that made the movie great (despite its many flaws). I LOVE the cat with the rat taped to its side! That sort of stuff made the Harkonnens extra evil, like a contemporary heartless capitalist evolved by 9000 years. By contrast the Baron in the book is more recognizable and even has *gasp* a conscious (that really disappointed me, the Baron I knew from the movie was purely wicked).
I was expecting something with as developed of a world as Neuromancer but instead found a flat and predictable world (I have only read the 1st Dune book, maybe they get better).
All in all, the things that most people complain about as being incomprehensible are what for me make this one of the finest sci-fi films. For me what makes Alien amazing (and why Ridley Scott ruined it with Prometheus and Covenant) is this same sense of not being told and being as unsure as the characters in the story–if the space jockey in Alien was explained to me (like it is later on), I would be disappointed and the magic would be gone.
I also think Aliens is a much worse movie than the 1st and even the 3rd one!
I’m alone in this world…
@@@@@ 66,You didn’t think the book was strange? Well maybe it’s not by today’s standards but it was weird as heck when I first read it in the seventies. It’s taken me decades to fully comprehend the damn thing, and I’m still not quite sure I’ve gotten there.
I love Lynch’s Dune. I honestly can’t remember whether I saw the movie first or read the book first. Being a sci-fi-fantasy teenage nerd in the 1980s, I was enthralled by the visual spectacle and surreal quality of this movie. I love the “abiding strangeness”. The navigator scene. The disgusting boil-covered baron. Riding the worm! The tense hover of the gom jabbar. So much great weirdness and weird greatness. Sure, it has weaknesses, but it’s a very unique memorable movie that makes an indelible impression. And I don’t care about how it compares to the book (which I consider one of the greatest science fiction books).
I just watched Dune on a large HD tv for the first time. Wow. The movie looked fantastic in HD, especially after viewings on a small standard definition tv over the intervening decades. I was reminded of how marvelous the sets are. This movie still sucks me in, and time has not eroded my pleasure in it. I think it has aged well.