Welcome to Close Reads! In this series, Leah Schnelbach and guest authors will dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to a single television episode—that have burrowed into our minds, found rent-stabilized apartments, started community gardens, and refused to be forced out by corporate interests.
Everyone knows that David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Dune is bad. Hell, this film—dubbed “worst movie of the year” by Roger Ebert—was such a disaster it basically drove Lynch from mainstream films. It’s one of SFF’s most famous flops. A disaster. So please believe me that I’m not trolling or looking for a controversial “hot take” when I say that Lynch’s Dune is one of my all-time favorite science fiction films, and perhaps the SF movie that influenced me more than any other.
When I was a child, there were no streaming networks and my parents eschewed cable. What we did have was a handful of movies on VHS tapes—most recorded from TV—that my brother and I watched over and over and over. One of those was Dune. I remember laying on the gray couch in our basement, watching gigantic worms and rotoscoped armor and strange fish monsters float across the screen. Honestly, I’m not sure I really followed the plot. More than a few times I fell asleep halfway through. But I remember the images seeping into my dreams.
So certainly, my love of the film is influenced by these circumstances. And yes it was a mess, but it also was a film that felt strange in a way I wanted science fiction to be. With alien worlds that seemed alien, and a space opera that actually felt beamed from a far region of space.
It’s not that the criticisms of the film are all wrong. The awkward pacing, the confusing plot, the big exposition dumps in dialogue. It’s a mess. But it’s a beautiful mess that’s far more memorable than the average aesthetic-free, polished-to-dullness blockbuster SFF films of today. So while we all wait for Denis Villeneuve’s version of Dune—one I have some hopes for, I should say—to be released and replace it in the pop culture consciousness, I want to praise David Lynch’s Dune for keeping science fiction strange.
To say that Lynch made a weird film is like saying water is wet. But put Dune in context. It was released one year after Return of the Jedi, a film more concerned with corporate toy sales than otherworldly visions. Science fiction literature was still full of mind-expanding ideas and boundary pushing concepts of course, but Hollywood was successfully turning the genre into something safe, kid-friendly, and prepackaged for the masses. In this context, Dune was a breath of fresh spice in a mutated human’s space-folding aquarium.
Compare Star Wars’ stick-wielding teddy bears or Star Trek’s actors with pointy ears or forehead makeup (The Search for Spock was released the same year) to Lynch’s guild navigator. It’s not just that the guild navigator looks alien—plenty of Star Wars characters have cool costumes—but he also feels alien. (Even while technically a human who has been deformed by ingesting the “spice.”) This bloated newt-baby with cheese-grater cheeks, puffing orange dust into strange aquarium as its attendants scrub the floor with black vacuums, somehow isn’t comic. Watching the scene, even with its clunky dialogue, feels far more mythic and mysterious and estranging than the SF blockbusters of its day.
Star Wars might have had the dark side of the force, but Dune had actual darkness. Dangerous occult trials and villains who stitched shut the ears and eyes of their servants while squishing tiny hippo-bugs in sci-fi juice boxes for refreshment.
Even when Lynch’s Dune gets a bit absurd—as it most certainly does—at least it’s in a fun and memorable way. Yes, Sting in a dystopian speedo is goofy, but you sure as hell remember it. In general, the film is a visual feast, with sets and costumes that still look spectacular nearly 40 years later. Just look at the eerie grandeur of the emperor’s palace in that guild navigator scene.
Poking around the internet for this piece, I read the same complaints over and over again. The “worldbuilding” doesn’t make sense. The details aren’t fully explained. Why do the Mentats have bushy eyebrows? Why are the Bene Gesserit bald? And why on earth are there so many pugs in space?
Well, why not?! Why is science fiction—especially far-future space opera SF—supposed to be explicable and contained? Lynch is a director who famously works with the Surreal in the truest sense. He adds images that appear to him in dreams and in transcendental meditation. He takes accidents on set and adds them to his scripts. The resulting details might not all be technically faithful to the book, but they are faithful to the spirit of Herbert’s otherworldly creation. (Herbert himself apparently was pleased with Lynch’s film.)
Plus, do you really want concerns about “worldbuilding logic” to stop us from seeing the absurd glory of Patrick Stewart charging into war with a pug in his arms?
I’m not saying there’s no place for Star Wars or Star Trek of course. I love both. (Well, some of both.) Steven Spielberg’s contemporaneous family-friendly SF films are fun too. Science fiction is a big tent and needs all sorts of modes. But watching Lynch’s Dune as a kid provided me with the expansive vision and strange concepts that captivated me in the novels I was reading by authors like Dick, Le Guin, and, yes, Herbert. It’s a film that imparted in the young me the sense that science fiction is a place for strange ideas, disturbing visions, and mind-expanding concepts. (This is something that I certainly tried to achieve in my own novel, The Body Scout.) If science fiction can’t be a home to weird and the new, what can?
Lynch might not be a science fiction scholar. But Lynch understood the mystic and strange side of Herbert’s creation, and of so much brilliant science fiction literature that gets scrubbed on its way to a film adaptation. So yes, Lynch’s Dune is a mess with many flaws. But science fiction cinema would be a poorer place without it.
Lincoln Michel is the author of the story collection Upright Beasts and the science fiction novel The Body Scout, which is out this month from Orbit. His short fiction appears in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. You can find him online at the newsletter Counter Craft and @thelincoln.
Hello!!!
Sorry in advance for my english, I’m brazilian :)
I didn’t watched this movie or read Dune (yet), but I do agree with you when you say science fiction being the home for the weird. Not just science fiction, but fantasy too. After expending years reading traditional science fiction/fantasy (like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, to cite some more mainstream examples). I started to read a lot of manga and watch some tokusatsus, and the thing that I love the most about japanese entertainment is that they don’t stress too much about the details. Here, people keep discussing why something is like that or why this alien has red skin.
In manga and tokusatsu, the things are weird just because the author wants, it’s doesn’t need a long explanation. I didn’t write a book (yet, I’m trying but it’s hard as hell), but the fantasy in my books it’s not totally explained. Some things are like that just because I liked the way it is.
Anyway, good article! See ya!
I love this :) I read Dune in high school as part of a sci fi class and enjoyed it and we also watched the movie. And yeah, it’s campy but there are still so many images (and music) that stick in my head from it. It still does something special and for awhile I had the soundtrack on my computer.
Obviously you can argue that it misses someof the wider thematic points so I won’t belabor that.
Lynch’s Dune is the cinematic equivalent of a pop song that sounds great so long as you take care not to listen too closely to the lyrics.
That it still has an impressively distinctive visual aesthetic, one which influences SFF films in general and any attempted Dune adaptation in particular, four decades after box-office disaster would seem to qualify it for the label “heroic failure”.
I liked it, too, except for the stupid bit at the end, “He IS the Kwisatch Haderach (sp?)!” Yes, I knew that.
it was a really SF film, in contrast to Star Wars which showed that George Lucas and I had watched the same b/w B movies as kids. Dune had a solid cast, who did some good work, in spite of some silly visuals. I’m interested to see how the new one goes.
I agree that Lynch, a FAMOUSLY idiosyncratic director (like Villenueve, as it happens, although gonzo where Villenueve is cold) swung for the fences, but ultimately fell far short. I don’t know everything about why, but trying to adapt a famously complex novel in a typical movie runtime strikes me as the prime suspect.
Speaking for myself, I feel that Lynch’s Dune suffered insofar as, given time constraints, in order to tell the story at ALL coherantly he had to assume you’d read the book, while at the same time making so many changes, because, hey, David Lynch, that anyone who HAD read the book was angry.
Thus theaters that ended up filled with 49% angry viewers, 49% baffled viewers, and 2% die-hard Lynch fans.
I remember – somewhat fondly – seeing this in the theater. One of the things I discovered discussing with all my fannish friends afterwards was that everyone’s favorite sub-plot was set up, and none of them were resolved. That and the ending (rain?!?!?) were the two really big complaints I recall at the time.
It really should have been a mini-series.
Peter Jackson changed LoTR, right? And I understood why he made those changes. Cinema is a different medium than the novel. But you could tell Jackson loved the source material.
I had no sense at the time that Lynch had read the same book as I did.
I saw this in the theater when it came out, and re-watched it recently, and had roughly the same reactions – it got points from me for respecting the material (especially the production design, which is firmly based in the original Schoenherr magazine illustrations from the Analog serialization). It’s a respectable failure, an awesome movie without having been an actual good one.
In a way, it’s not actually a narrative movie at all, more a series of very nifty tableaux vivants with (sadly, rather lame) voice-over narrative to move the plot along. I would cheerfully watch a six-hour version that filled in all the missing parts of the story, if that actually existed.
But no, I can’t honestly tell anyone that I think it’s a good movie.
Pugs in SPAAAACE!
Personally I very much enjoy watching Lynch’s Dune with the sound off, just looking at the pretty pictures.
Teen-aged me thought that a sweaty Sting in a dystopian speedo was one of the highlights of the film.
But yes, visually, the film remains extraordinarily striking. It’s just a pity the other portions of the production are… whatever they are.
I don’t know if it was such a failure, given that its source material is essentially “white savior in space with DRUGS!”
I was 11 when I dragged my parents to the nearest cinema showing Dune.
At the end of the show I was embarassed for them, because it had been a shocking movie, a violent movie and a not-so-good movie… I then realized that for them it had been mostly a confusing movie, because they didn’t know the book and had not followed the story.
My mother still remembers Dune as the movie with ‘naked Sting and the flying Baron’.
After watching the new Dune, I think the old one deserves a rewatc
I loved Lynch’s film. Yeah, there’s some major problems, but Lynch has always impressed me as someone who’s unafraid to utterly fail, and because at that he’s brilliant at times. I read Dune in high school many years before the movie. I’ve always felt it’s impossible to film because so much of it is internal to the thoughts of the characters. That said, I loved Lynch’s vision, even if he did many things I hated. It was far superior to the more faithful to book miniseries done on SF channel years ago. I thought the casting was pretty good, and Kyle Mclaughlin was a believable Paul Atreides and did a fine job.
Great piece. But can we please stop saying Lynch’s Dune is awful? Granted, it did a few things that exposed it to legtiimate criticism. The two primary offenses were that some of the special effects (the cartoonish personal force fields and the matting in some of the battle sequences in particular) seemed like a step backwards in the development of sci-fi EFX realism – how was it t hat in 1984 we had a film with EFX that seemed a step backwards from 1968’s 2001 and 1980’s Alien?
The second issue was the plot development in the last third of the picture, the palpable “hurry up and finish” as things headed toward the finalie. After the great exposition and character development of the first two thirds of the film, it is clear that the film could have run another hour but that Lynch was constrained in doing this. (Indeed, after Twin Peaks Season 3, which was in essence a damn fine 18-hour film, it would have been nice to see a 5 or 6 hour Lynch Dune with room for a lot more interesting ideas).
While these critiques are legit, look at the great things Lynch brought to Dune. The mood he captured with his sets and lighting was nothing short of incredible. The steampunk meets Pharoah set design was truly original and successfully conveyed the past/future remix of the story. The casting was absolutely amazing – Jurgen Prochnow, Max Von Sydow, Sian Phillips, Jose Ferrer, Brad Dourif, Dean Stockwell and of course Ken McMillan as the Baron and Freddie Jones as Thufir Howat – I mean, what can you say? Each of them turned in amazing, indelible performances. Sean Young was positively luminous and ethereal as Chani. The lapses were not insignificant (while Sting looked suitably crazed, he just carried too much baggage to be cast in that role). But overall the cast was a frigigng barnburner and the acting just wonderful.
So while it is debatable whether Dune holds together as a whole, it contains no shortage of delicious components and pieces that make it an extremely satisfying watch.
Now, I’ve seen Villenueve’s Dune. Not the promos, the whole thing. And I can tell you its a Villenueve film – flat, deadpan performances, cold, distant, unemotional. It manages to make Dune look like just another millennial-age sci fi miniseries. It’s not nearly as compelling as any episode of Mandalorian you’d care to pick, much less Lynch’s Dune. And despite the critique of Lynch for hacking up Herbert’s book, Villenueve picks pretty much exactly the same passages and scenes to dramatize, and really doesn’t veer far from Lynch is doing these key scenes. But the acting isn’t there, the CGI is generic, and his penchant for closeups where Lynch would do a medium shot to include other strange actors and the strange sets makes it feel just unremarkable.
YMMV but in my view its time to acknowledge Dune as a flawed masterpiece rather than a failure, and in my view the new one falls far, far short. It’s not special. Lynch’s Dune was special.
Forgettable for me.
I saw this in a cinema during the original release, and with the ticket came a full page, front and back, of “Dune terminology”, which I still possess. It defines the various groups, proper names and equipment featured in the film. I haven’t received a similar handout for a film before or since. Oddly, its copyright date is 1983.
I love every second of Dune. It’s weird and fucking awesome to the core. I never understood the hate it continues to get. Baffling.
Too bad Lynch doesn’t want anything to do with it. Nothing else I’d love more than to see him put together the supposed “directors cut” with all the cut material.
My first encounter with the Dune Universe was sneak I Nguyen my Da’s copy of Heretics of Dune in 1986 when I was ten. I understood little of the philosophy or religious implications inherent in the novel but was captivated by the story. I watched the Lynch Dune when it aired on television on WBFS tv 33 in Ft. Lauderdale, FL and was mesmerized by the film. I think David Lynch was brilliant trying to portray the omniscient third person narrator that changed POV with every paragraph, but detractors make fun of the “mental voices” with closed lips. When I turned 13 and was able to get a Bus Pass I read Dune eagerly and was saddened when I realized Lynch told the first half wonderfully, but the last act was rushed.
I never understood why people said this movie was bad. It has old-school black-and-white dramatic pacing and dialogue. It has visuals that repay re-watching. (Bushy-eyebrowed Mentats? Because they’re bred for their abilities, which is a line earlier in the movie–i.e. they are inbred.) It has giant monsters that still look awesome and a truly creepy child ditto. It has Big Music and Big Fights and Big Stakes. It has stuff that wasn’t in the book but is cool anyway and also assists the plot–e.g. Muad-Dib’s name being a power word as a sign that the Bene Gesserits’ plan has spun far, far out of their control. It’s affecting and dramatic and fun. I can’t look at the screen for some of the Evil Family of Evil’s time being Evil, but I re-watch this movie regularly.
Re my second sentence–I won’t be watching the new Star Wars anime compilation because just the trailer gave me a headache. Too loud, too fast! Even when Dune is being thunderous, it’s also being stately.
I remember quite enjoying Lynch’s version of “Dune” when I saw it on its release. A major problem though was its length – it was trying to pour a 10 litre novel into a 2 litre film. At least this time they’re telling the story over 2 films, so that shouldn’t be as much of a problem. However all film & tv adaptations face the problem that they lack the original novel’s ability to provide extensive background information and explain terminology via its lengthy appendixes. I am see why some cinemas provided the information sheet mentioned by an earlier commentator!
IIRC, there was a longer cut, something like 4 hours, which was just as bad. Yes, the visuals were pretty good. But the rest was a mess.
If they had been able to use the visual aesthetic (and budget) of the movie in the SciFi miniseries (which was very good) it would’ve been awesome.
I watch this movie about once a year or so. I went to it in theaters and even though I’d read the books I remember thinking ‘Oh, it’s a bad sign when they give you a glossary sheet for all the terms along with your ticket’.
Dune is my favorite book. Visually, Lynch nailed it. I hold the movie dear for that. The dialogue, the whispered thoughts, the “weirding machines” infuriated me because they made my favorite literary work look stupid. SciFi’s script was astronomically better but the visuals were Dr.Who/StarTrek Original Series bad. I doubt Villaneuve will be the synthesis that succeeds but I am looking forward to it anyway.
I think more and more we are forgetting that cinema is also drama, not just striking images, and this is where Lynch’s Dune totally failed for me, not just in narrative coherence but also in tone (is it camp? is it satire? is it a sci-fi mythology?). I am worried that for all the gorgeous clips and effects that Villenueve’s effort will fail just as Lynch’s did (I walked out of Villenueve’s Blade Runner 90210). Maybe Dune is fundamentally unfilmable. Maybe Herbert’s novel had its own built-in incoherence so that aspiring directors are defeated before they ever start. But a “weird and bizarre” aesthetic does not equal genius, and too often I see directors like Lynch treated like gods because of their penchant for weird shtick. Same with Tim Burton. Huge pass,
Just popping in here to say that if you haven’t yet seen the 2012 Spicediver fan-edit of Lynch’s Dune, I think you really should. They really improved some of the pacing and flow problems in the original.
I really admire Lynch’s Dune for leaning into the weirdness of a human future that is so alien to us, rather than trying to make it more relatable to a twentieth-century audience by “translating” everything into being contemporary.
I had a similar experience to the author. We had a recorded version of the movie I watched as a kid. It was a way to see an alien world, and get in touch with something epic, even if I didn’t understand it all at the time
Dune is one of my favorite books, Lynch is one of my favorite directors….and still, I can’t call the movie better than “meh”. It has some beautiful scenes, but the yelling boxes and rain at the end are just so jarring to this Dune fanboy. The Guild are done wonderfully, as are the BG, Soundtrack is good. I can’t imagine what the costume budget was, but I still don’t understand why Lynch didn’t bring in some Hong Kong wire-fu people and make the wierding way the martial art that it is…..
I got to see the first 12 minutes and the ornithopter scene in a sneak preview, the new film looks pretty amazing, I only hope Denis gets to do the 2nd movie
I thoroughly enjoyed both the book and the movie—and probably would have been happily unaware of how “bad” or “awful” the movie was supposed to be if I hadn’t read so many times over the years that it was.
I did get a momentary fright when I read in the second paragraph that the article’s author remembers “laying [sic] on the gray couch in our basement, watching gigantic worms and rotoscoped armor and strange fish monsters …”. For a moment I pictured the author giving birth to these monstrous creatures, perhaps in egg form, but was relieved to read later in the sentence that he saw them “floating across the screen” instead. (Had he used the correct verb—”lying,” rather than “laying”—I would have realized immediately that he wasn’t in labor, and he would have spared me the unnecessary fright.)
I know the Bene Gesserit sisters being bald is nowhere in the text, but man oh man is that fucking fabulous. They are these eerie, bald sinister telepathic nuns (with secret sex ninja training to boot). I dare say, the transition from the exquisite, exceedingly lovely perfectly composed porcelain figurine that was the gorgeous, gorgeous Francesca Annis’ Lady Jessica into the somber, magisterial (scary, creepy) Fremen Reverend Mother Sayyadina, her stunning copper hair all gone, is one of the movie’s greatest components even if it is nowhere in the novel.
I love this movie unreservedly.
I was not a fan of Lynch’s Dune, but it did have its moments. Loved the navigator’s rolling capsule, more Henry Dreyfuss or Norman Bel Geddes than H. R. Giger. The voiceovers were cheesy AF. Generally there was an abundance of squickiness. Lynch indeed is the master of squick, if that’s your thing.
But Sting in a space speedo I do not recall at all. Either it was not memorable or else it was so traumatic that I blanked it from my memory.
I watched it for the first time since I was a kid a few years back, and it was better than I remembered! Honestly, the only thing that really jarred was the voiceovers. Without that I’d have been totally absorbed. Yes, it’s weird, but that’s what I like about it.
Lynchs’ Dune was both my first Lynch film and my first approach to Dune, so it was An Experience. On the other hand, coming to it without preconceptions, I probably enjoyed it a lot more than a die-hard fan of the books or the director would have. It’s a mess, yes, but it’s a glorious, beautiful mess with some fantastic imagery that still stands to these days.
I cannot say the same for Villeneuve’s Dune. The pacing is equally weird, and the plot is equally incomprehensible to anyone who’s not already familiar with the source material, despite that it is 20 minutes longer than Lynch’s movie while covering only half of the story. And everything is cold, cold, cold. I know it’s one of the director’s signatures but, for a movie that goes from a lush ocean planet to a sweltering hot desert, it is a really weird stylistic choice.
I remember Reading Dune first. When the movie came out, then, I was wonkily “in the know” and could explain the movie to my less enlightened fellow travelers. Plus THE WORMS! (Everything I had imagined and SO MUCH MORE!) I also loved little Alicia Witt’s most sinister portrayal of Alia, Paul’s little sis! More like a refugee from “The Village of the Damned”! And the “floating fat man” quite evilly portrayed by Kenneth McMillan (RIP)! I had the deepest crush on Virginia Madden/Irulan as well. Yeah so, David Lynch, didn’t’t have all of the cool CGI at his disposal- but this will always be one of my favorite sci-fi imaginings!
Where might I see David Lynch’s DUNE?
I watched Lynch’s Dune when it came out. I thought it felt overly fragmented and left great chunks of the novel out as I remembered it. I then re-read the novel – as it had been a while. Lo and behold it was much closer to the novel than I had imagined and what I imagined was enormous chunks that I had filled in myself from the reading, things inferred between the lines. For example I remembered side characters having bigger roles in the novel like Duncan Idaho, my favorite character, only to discover that, no they don’t in the novel either. The novel is structurally and device-wise fragmented and silly at times when looked objectively. But it remains a brilliant, iconic sci-fi tale and Lynch’s is just one artist’s interpretation, that I still thoroughly enjoy.
Oh, forgot to say, thoroughly enjoyed the original post, too.
*STANDING OVATION*
Truly great piece, Lincoln! It is a wonderfully written, wonderfully heartfelt paean to the greatness and the weirdness in that magnificent mess of a movie, and my only objection is that I did not get to write it…
And
“Star Wars might have had the dark side of the force, but Dune had actual darkness.”
Agreed, with all my heart.
One of my favourite SF films as well just because of its sheer atmosphere and weirdness. Beats Star Wars and that ilk hands down because it was stylish and serious and beautifully filmed. Cameos like Sting as Fayd-Ratutha were brilliantly realised. Oh and the Guild Navigators – steampunk before steampunk even existed! Yes there were some wooden lines now and again, but overall it took the concepts behind the novel and explored them well.
Dune remains one of my favorite movies, flaws and all. I saw it first when I was a kid. It was edited for television, it was spread out over two nights, and I recognized exactly zero actor (I saw Dune before I saw Blade Runner). But for all that, it was sweeping, it was grandiose in a way Star Wars wasn’t, and even in it’s final form, it made you think a little differently.
I read the book when I was a little older because I wanted to know what didn’t make it in. After reading it, I felt like the movie was probably the best distillation one could make of such a mammoth story. Yes, the time scale in the movie probably could have used a couple superimposed calendar references to help make things a bit clearer. Yes, Lynch glossed over a whole host of philosophical, social, and even ecological elements. Heck, this was the first movie I ever saw where “ecologist” seemed to be even mentioned as a character’s career and treated seriously. But for all those shortcomings and more, it was thought provoking. It was inspiring. It probably influenced my own creative pursuits in more ways than I can easily describe.
I didn’t enjoy the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries because it lacked that sense of grandeur. I’m seriously not looking forward to the Villeneuve version (mainly because Blade Runner 2049 was such a disappointment to me). David Lynch may not have liked what he came up with, but I like it just fine.
My balance is a bit more towards the negative than the article, but I do still broadly agree. The movie had mostly amazing visuals and a definite flair for weird.
But it had stacks of weaknesses . . . and contrary to the article’s position, I thought one important weakness involved completely ignoring, or not getting, or something, a basic strength of the book. One of the major things about Dune the book, was machiavellian, often subtle, politics. Baron Harkonnen was an intelligent, calculating politician, a bit like the Kingpin might be if he really let himself go physically. Lynch’s Harkonnen was a raving madman that made you wonder how he could possibly still be sitting on a throne, let alone successfully taking out Paul’s dad. And in general I more got the feeling “Weird people mysteriously decided to be weird and that’s why there’s all this fighting” rather than feeling there was actual political maneuvering, jockeying for power and recognizable motivation involved.
Another problem was that for a movie that clearly didn’t have enough time to maintain plot coherence while fitting stuff in, it had amazing amounts of time wasted doing nothing in particular–long mystical shots of the moon/s, and I mean looooong, stick in my mind to this day as me thinking in the movie theatre “That’s pretty but isn’t there supposed to be some stuff happening? Maybe someone could call me when this bit is over?” If he’d taken out most of that padding, leaving just enough to get a bit of mystical feel, maybe he would have had time to make the movie make sense.
I will also never forgive the movie for weirding modules. Book: “Weirding way” of battle, mystical martial arts and mysticism-and-philosophy-informed tactics that make troops much more effective. Movie: Hold this and launch chi bolts through it. Really?!
But still, I have to admit that despite it all, it had some memorable images and bits. I actually thought Sting was fine–the book character is a young brash guy trying to break into power on his own terms, in part by creating a flashy image. Sting was great for projecting that young, brash, flashy schtick. Him looking awesome but cheesy wasn’t a bug, it was a feature–that’s how that character should look.
Good article and spot on. I actually saw this in the movie theater when it came out. There wasn’t an empty seat, which means it was a highly anticipated event. But yes, the audience was disappointed, and I felt that way myself. All of which is unfair.
The problem lies in the fact that this WAS such a highly anticipated event, and it WAS compared to Star Wars before it even came out. It was Star Wars with a big budget and a genius director, so expectations were unreasonably high. Then you add this huge problem: Dune had a legion of fans. I was one. Many millions of kids had read Dune. So there was pressure on Lynch to remain true to the novel, which almost always leads to problems. Novels are not written as screenplays. A novel can give you massive doses of information that a movie can not. So almost everyone left the theater disappointed.
But I’ve gone back to that movie over the years, and while it’s not great, it’s fairly well done. Had there never been a book, Dune the movie would possibly be considered part of the canon of must-watch sci fi films.
I’m glad you mentioned Sting. Putting him in the movie was a tremendous mistake. Not that he did a bad job, but it drew too much attention to a minor character which was portrayed as kind of weirdo. It detracted from the whole project. It almost changes the tone and even the genre of the film by bringing in a music celebrity and making him so corny. That doesn’t happen in a film that’s serious, and this is a serious film.
I also think Kyle Mc(however you spell it) was a lousy choice for lead. On the surface, it seems like a right choice. Kyle has that theater-guild kind of look to him, a little spoiled, a little soft. That probably seems right for a Duke’s son, but it doesn’t make for a good action hero at all. Compare this to the character who played Jon Snow on Game of Thrones. That guy can be both underdog and action hero and it feels believable. Casting is everything.
For anyone who read the book, the movie was comprehensible. Dune is best told as a TV series. And at this point, because so many people have read the book or seen the movie, it’s also best to change the story enough to keep it fresh.
Read Dune in its initial release as a serial in Analog, then again when it came out in hardback. Saw the initial theatrical release of Lynch’s movie. There was an attempt to do a Dune movie before Lynch, which didn’t happen. I have the Lynch movie on DVD along with the extended version. I do think that the extended version works a bit better, but it is much too long and rough for theatrical release. I saw the Sci-Fi channel version when it originally aired. What I remember are the Lynch visuals and his outstanding actors.
Hear here! This bears repeating….
“…but Hollywood was successfully turning the genre into something safe, kid-friendly, and prepackaged for the masses. In this context, Dune was a breath of fresh spice in a mutated human’s space-folding aquarium.”
EXACTLY. Having read DUNE about 6-7 years before Lynch I have always praised his film.
David Lynch’s version of Dune was a misfire. The true core of the book was the complex ecology of Arrakis which was not adequately featured. In addition, the actor playing Paul had zero charisma. I envisioned the movie as a science fiction Lawrence of Arabia which would have the audience returning to the lobby to quench their thirst. The previews of the new version look less than promising. The soundtrack indicates the movie will be oriented toward teenagers.
If anyone has read the Dune books and then saw this movie, you would have not found a major fault with this screen presentation except for the speed of the storyline versus the slow detailed book tale. I found the worm presentation to be the best part and the Guild Navigator looked pretty close to what the book presented. I was looking forward to a whole series of movies on the Dune books, which unfortunately never occurred because of the timing of the explosion of the Star Wars and Star Trek cults. I guess we Dune readers were left on the sidelines because that kind of SCYFY presentation didn’t appeal to the general public because it was not a fun story but had serious undertones of power plays and obvious discrimination.
I’m sorry, but 1984 Dune is a GREAT movie. My friends and I still quote it to this day. The miniseries from 2000 was okay and more accurate to the book, but the movie was great! Yes, it was campy, but all SF from the 80s was campy except for Alien and Aliens. Sting was AWESOME as Feyd, Sean Young was a great Chani. Paul was weak, fighting was too theatrical, but it was a great attempt and a good movie to this day. I am SO looking forward to the new Dune, can’t wait to have a Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck that will be worthy of their book characters.
I read the book prior to the movie coming out, and I was a huge Sting fan, so my main disappointment was that nearly all of Sting’s scenes were cut from the theatrical release. It was just “look at ‘im! Isn’t he gorgeous? I’m going to give him a planet!” as he walks out of the sauna thing in the plastic Speedo, and then an hour+ later he’s fighting our hero and of COURSE he’s going to lose. Easily dismissed eye candy. Gender-swapped objectification.
I lived in Los Angeles in the early 1990’s, and I got my hands on an early script for Dune, written by David Lynch. A giant stack of xeroxed 8.5 x 11 papers, held together with metal fasteners. It was much better than the movie, but it would have run for several hours. Mr. Lynch gave Feyd-Rautha multiple scenes, including a big fight scene against a Sardaukar warrior, that set him up as a formidable opponent to young Paul. I’ve never seen the extended version of the movie, so I don’t know if those scenes were ever shot.
I’ve still got that script in a box somewhere. . .
Thanks for all the comments. I have never seen Lynch’s version because of the bad reputation, but I will now. However, I have reread Dune (again) before I seeing the new Dune. To me, that one is a total failure. It completely misses what the book is about.
I’m glad I didn’t know critics panned David Lynch’s Dune movie till I read this article. I watched this movie first of an old VHS tape from a rental store and it blew me away. The concept , the scale of the worls , chanis ethereal beauty and glowing blue eyes. the fremen in their stillsuits , the tooth of shai hulud. I really loved this .
Has anyone read the Marvel Comics adaptation of the movie? I was only 6 or 7 when David Lynch’s Dune film came out. My parents went to see it but judged it too intense for me at that young age. My dad bought the comic adaptation and that, I was allowed to look at. I remember leafing through it, thinking how…weird, yet cool it was. I couldn’t comprehend the story but it sure looked mysterious and interesting. I finally saw the movie on VHS in the early 90s and it remains a classic to my group of high school friends. We randomly quote the movie at each other. But the comic adaptation is well worth a look. The art by Bill Sienkiewicz is gorgeous. https://biblioklept.org/2011/09/16/dune-cover-marvel-comics-adaptation-bill-sienkiewicz/