Good Lord, it [Dune] was even worse than I remembered

Cafe Society
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As a passionate fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune series of novels, I went to see the 1984 movie with mixed anticipation and dread. Dune has got to rank high in in the category of unfilmable books, in my opinion. But perhaps David Lynch had managed to pull it off?

I stumbled out of the theater two-plus hours later with my answer: No, he hadn’t. The story had been mangled almost beyond recognition; the movie dragged; its visual goodies couldn’t compensate for the wooden acting and clunky dialog.

Well, that was then, and this is now, a quarter-century later. My tastes and perspective have changed over time. I find value now in things I’d been too callow or limited in experience to appreciate way back when. Perhaps it was time to go back to Dune for another look. So I Netflixed the movie (original theatrical release version), and watched it last night.

Good God. It’s even worse than I’d remembered. What an utterly silly, plodding, pointless dumbing down of that complex novel. It took a concerted effort of will to sit through the entire thing, although after a while I developed a sort of morbid fascination with just how atrociously each element of the story was butchered.

Item: Baron Harkonnen, the blemish-blotched bobbing balloon. He should be a figure of menace, of sickening devious evil. Instead he’s ludicrous. He’s impossible to take seriously as a villain.

Item: Paul Atreides’ transformation into the Fremen Muad’Dib. Never mind that the beginning of the movie slights into insignificance the telling of Paul’s intensive training by Jessica in the techniques of the Bene Gesserit; one could argue that the heart of the book is Paul’s education in the ways of the Fremen and the changes thus wrought in him that climax in his drinking of the Water of Life. The movie barely glances over the beginning and end of this process while cutting out entirely the bulk of it.

Item: The relationship of the worms and the Spice. Beyond some vague mystical mumbling, the relationship is never even mentioned, much less made clear. Dammit, I wanted to see a worm get drowned! Now, I understand that a scene showing this was cut from the original theatrical release and is in the extended version, so I give Lynch a partial pass on that particular complaint. Still, it’s all dreadfully vague, what Spice is, how it’s created, and so on.

And so on, and so on. I could rant for much longer, but have run out of steaming indignation, and will conclude by observing that at least the sand worms were wicked cool, with those double tripetal mouths. So at least there’s that.

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Never saw the movie, but have a clear memory of meeting a buddy in a bar right after he’d seen it. His comment: “Holy cow! those sand-worms were nothing but giant penises! And people were riding them!”

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:confused: Penises have gaping tripetal mouths? How come I never noticed? :eek:

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I’ve watched Lynch’s “Dune” twice. One time too many IMO.

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Have you looked very closely at the business end of one?
God knows I haven’t! No sir-ree! Nope. un-uhh. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

And more on topic.
I finally read the book when the Sci-Fi channel put out a mini-series.

What really struck me was that the main character was supposed to be a young teenager. Not some guy in his twenties.

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All of the Harkonnens were portrayed poorly. I think they read about them having pouty lips as a hereditary trait and locked in on that aspect to the exclusion of everything else. How else can you explain Sting preening and pouting the entire time he’s on screen?

There were plenty of things wrong with the movie, but your point about Paul’s assimilation with the Fremen is dead-on. In the book, there’s always a palpable amount of tension as to whether Paul will survive his assimilation and be fully accepted by the Fremen. In the movie he seems to be accepted as their leader from the get-go.

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I saw this movie on opening day. I still have the little vocabulary page they handed out at the theatre, I think.

Anyway, seeing it once was one time too many, but prolly like most of y’all, I was a fan of the book and had to see it for myself.

Mind you, when I came out of the theatre, I did what I could to help spare other people what I had just been through, loudly telling everyone in line for the next show that they should go get their money back right now.

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And God help anyone going to see it if they hadn’t read the book. At least we Dune fans knew what the story was that was being butchered into incoherence, and didn’t exit the theater mumbling “What the hell was that all about, anyway?”

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Dune is a masterpiece of tone and atmosphere. I can’t think of a single movie ever made that so thoroughly transports you to a world so utterly different from your own.

My theory is that this is ultimately what Lynch focused on: that he probably realized early on that the book was, indeed, unfilmable, so he threw his hands up at the story and instead created what is essentially a 137-minute painting/sculpture/unique hybrid medium.

This paper’s reviewer at the time, Dave Kehr (now wit the New York Times) wrote:

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I’m in 100% agreement with Lissener. Aesthetically the movie is absolutely amazing.

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Sting.

Actually, that was my reaction after finishing the book. My reaction to the movie was, “The story’s still a mess, but at least it looks really cool.” The quasi-baroque design anticipated steampunk.

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This is one of the best example of the damage expectations can do to an artistic experience. If you let it be what it is, rather than what you want it to be, on its own merits it’s an amazing work.

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Oh, you must be circumcised.:o

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Did you see the version originally released, EddyTeddyFreddy? I remember reading a piece by Herbert himself complaining about how they cut away lots of scenes to make the film shorter, and that the original length was supposed to be something like four or five hours. Reading between the lines, you could sort of get the message that the final product didn’t make much sense because they cut out so much. I wonder if there ever was a complete Director’s Cut of the whole work, and if it made more sense. Knowing what I know from watching Lynch films, I’d say no.

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I like the original. It had amazing visual content for when it was made. I also did not keep comparing it to the book. I enjoyed it as a stand alone movie. I first saw it on television. After they added back some chopped out scenes removed for the original broadcasts it was smoother. I also kept hoping for the next release.

I was happy to see the new release with more modern graphics that covered the book material better. It too has to be watched not comparing it to the book all the time. Don’t all movies. The books are a source of inspiration not the God written script.

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BTW, there’s going to be a new movie based on the novel, they say, directed by Peter Berg.

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Sting has said that he was so full of drugs during the shoot that he had a little trouble keeping track of where he was and what he was doing.

“Wait – why am I in my underwear? And why is everyone standing around, looking at me?”

Dune is a great movie, for the time.

Yes, there were some odd choices… I always had the feeling that David Lynch picked Toto for the soundtrack as a way to squeeze in one of the Wizard of Oz references that he was so obsessive about at the time, more than anything else.

Overall, though - I think it turned out better than expected – and although I was always disappointed that Jodorowski’s ambitious project failed so disastrously, I’ve come to think that I would probably have been even more disappointed it if got made. “Okay, we’ll break the budget to get Salvadore Dali in there, but that’ll only buy us a minute of screen time, per his capricious demands - we’ll just use a dummy for the the rest of the shots, it’ll work.”

Good thing that Lynch was there to pick up the pieces.

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Another big fan of the film here. Obviously flawed, but succeeds incredibly well in areas already mentioned - atmosphere, world building, spectacle etc. Great soundtrack, too.

Agree with the OP that the Baron is not one of the film’s successes. He kind of works within the whole look of the piece, but cuts a ridiculous figure. It wouldn’t have been difficult to go with a more faithful casting here. Dumbing down though? Surely not the best choice of words from the OP. Can’t imagine leaving the cinema after seeing Dune and thinking - ‘they really dumbed that down to the lowest common denominator there, what a simplistic film’.

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From IMDB:

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Oh, I agree that visually it’s quite remarkable. But who wants to spend two and a quarter hours staring at wallpaper, no matter how gorgeous?

Lars, yes, I did watch the original version because I wanted to see whether my first impression of it would be changed. Alas, it was not. Now, if Lynch’s original cut ran four or five hours (I can well believe it) and put in a lot that had been hacked from the theatrical release, then yes, I can see that version being a good deal better and more coherent.

As far as comparing it to the book, well, no, not “Why is this not word for word?!?” – that’s not how I approached it on first viewing. I expected it to be different; of course a movie is. Heck, the lines of dialog that were lifted right from the book I found on this viewing to be among the clunkiest; Herbert wasn’t writing a screenplay, that’s for sure. What ruined it for me, what made the atmospherics and visuals and all that good stuff less than compelling, was the utter failure of the film as narrative.

[1]Is this the “Alan Smithee” version? (Checking) Ah, the comments on Netflix suggest that it is, and that that’s not Lynch’s vision before its truncation for theatrical release.

[2]Does this refer to the SciFi channel version? That got some decidedly mixed reviews on Netflix.

Busy Scissors, what I meant by “dumbing down” is that things like the Bene Gesserit training, the Spice, the arduous transformation of Paul into Muad’Dib, the need for constant vigilance against ever-present, lethal, cunning danger – so much was sketched in or glanced over and never fleshed out. As I said before, the heart of the book to me is Paul’s growth into the man who took and survived the Water of Life, and entwined with that story the winning of the Fremen to his leadership, the transformation of them from a complex culture of desert survivors into that plus Empire-smashing shock troops. Instead, what we got was more akin to space opera, with the focus on the OMG wow! adventure parts, overlaid with New Agey “That’s heavy, man” simplistic mystic mumblings.

Granted, space opera adventure translates better to film than internal transformations. In a visual medium, it simply works better. I understand why those of you who liked the movie seem to be focussing on the mood and visual aspects. Those, I will agree, were at times remarkable. They just weren’t enough, nearly enough to get me over the mountain of failures in so many other aspects of the movie.