Saw Dune when it first came out. All I can remember about it is Sting’s line, “I WILL kill him!!!”
May your [DEL][COLOR=“Black”]knife[/DEL][/COLOR] keyboard chip and shatter!
CMC fnord!
OK, so it would look almost perfect and someone could edit out the stupid crap he thought necessary to add. But still, how many things are we allowing PJ to get almost right and at the same time terribly, terribly, wrong before we force him to stop?
I kind of think of Dune being one of thoise unfilmable books (like Watchmen). There’s just too much going on, and so much of it is subtle. The wheels-within-wheels plotting and counter-plotting is positively Byzantine, and the only way to make it clear is with tons of dialog (Think of Vizzini deciding which cup to drink.). Not to mention the history that is necessary to understand the culture. What do you do with the appendices?
The subtlty is the beauty of the book. The way Paul has to see five moves ahead, keeping ahead of the Bene Gesserit thinking four moves ahead, and the Harkonnens thinking three moves ahead. And never knowing if you’re not being fooled. The physical fights, while visually impressive and good for a film (I will always visualize them in bullet time now. 
) are secondary to the political fighting, which is visually boring.
What hurts the books now for me, now that I’m no longer 17 and ignorant of the world, is that I actually hate the Fremen! They’re not the good guys, but any filming of just Dune can’t make that clear. Even before Muad’Dib’s influence, they’re worse than the Sardaukar. They kill people for merely being in the desert. They can’t think of any solution to any problem that doesn’t involve killing. I view them as Afghan Mujahideen. Just because they are fighting our enemy doesn’t make them our friends.
No, it’s not a good movie. (It’s a mess, actually.)
But I still enjoyed it. (If that makes any sense.)
Maybe that’s all that’s needed to make a cult film… If I enjoy a film that everyone else hates, it’s a guilty pleasure. If a bunch of people enjoy a film that everyone else hates, it’s a cult favorite.
Tremors is an excellent little movie! It has an 85 on Rotten Tomatoes, a great cast, excellent special effects - and an adorable young Kevin Bacon. It did only modest business when it came out but is now a huge cult movie. (I’ve never seen any of the many sequels.)
Actually, I like how this was handled in the mini-series - Paul and his mother fight with blurred speed, which is much more like what the book describes (another movie that uses a similar effect is the final fight scene between Riddick and the Lord Marshal in Chronicles of Riddick). Bullet time would, I think, be the wrong aesthetic - it would be from Paul’s POV, when we really want to see others’ POV of that sort of thing, to get a sense of why the Weirding Way was viewed as witchery. Unfortunately, post-Matrix, bullet-time has lost its sense of wonder (for me, YMMV).
I was 10 when it came out and I saw it in the theater, then. I remember my parents telling us something like “we’re going to see a movie… set in space… with battles… like Star Wars, you know”. I loved Star Wars so I was psyched.
Needless to say, I was massively disappointed. And puzzled. Really puzzled. WTF was this movie about? Oh and that disgusting, huge slug-thing in a glass tube creeped me out.
I saw it a couple more times when I was older and, while I can’t say it’s really a good movie, I came to appreciate parts of it. Visually, it’s certainly distinctive and the scenes with the sandworms are pretty exciting. I’d probably watch it again if it was on tv (which is not very often, it seems).
I only read the book in 2008. Liked it all right.
I always thought it was a good movie. It feels a bit too dense and crowded, as if Lynch was determined to preserve every last shred of exposition when cutting the film down to a reasonable running time. Other than that, though, I think it’s terrific, bold, and incredibly creative.
Oh, and I did read the book several years before seeing the film. I wasn’t crazy about it and never quite understood why it was so highly regarded. National Lampoon’s parody novel, Doon, nails the Herbert stylistic quirks which I found so annoying.
I had read and digested Dune long before the film was released. Sure, the original story was baldly butchered, but how could anyone compress that book into a 2 hour film? So, putting aside the terrible screenplay, I enjoyed some of the art direction. Back then I don’t think there was “Steam Punk” and I thought some of the stuff was “Art Deco”, but I liked that part.
I’d put it this way: story-wise the screenplay is not well-done; if you haven’t read the book you’d struggle to follow anything. And like with most sci-fi adaptations the universe doesn’t feel big enough. And it’s pretty camp.
But it’s stylistically interesting. As I’m typing this many of the scenes from the movie are flashing through my mind, and that’s not true for the majority of films. And not just images that I’m passively viewing, but a very alien world that somehow pulled me in, and I really need to get my hand out of that box!
So somehow it’s a bad film that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend someone to watch. Go figure.
What was interesting in the book was how they were constrained to fight because of shields and how that was complicated on Dune by shields attracting worms. They took all that and threw it away in favor of zap guns and a couple of badly choreographed knife fights. At no point in the movie did I get an impression of just how inhumanly lethal Paul, Jessica, Duncan, et. al. were supposed to be. A few well-staged fights with edged weapons, even without wire-fu or other FX, would have made a lot of difference for me.
Read the book years before the movie, but I wasn’t overly disappointed in the film for that, since I knew there was no way you got all the subtleties and politics into the film. I think Lynch probably did about as good a job as was possible given the 2.5 hours he had, but all-in-all, not a great film or even what I would call a cult film.
It does have the one advantage of being a better adaptation than Starship Troopers…
Fantastic. Maybe he can turn it into 15 films of CGI sandworms and Sardaukar.
Heh, I actually kind of like Starship Troopers, too. Much to my wife’s chagrin, it’s been on basic cable a hell of a lot.
I’d read Dune and a couple of the sequels before the movie came out, but the differences didn’t seem to bother me much. Even though I was a teen, I assumed they’d have to streamline it. I’d seen the Bashki LOtR, the Rankin/Bass Hobbit and the animated Watership Down. I instinctively knew that any book adapted to the screen was going to lose something, and the more complex/internal the story was, the more that was going to get mangled. Lynch could have done better if he had the ability to move it into multiple films, but he could have made it worse with his single film (and budget) constraint, too. As others have pointed out, it at least gave the world a look that matched the strangeness of its story. Its images, ideas, and the central concept of a messiah being a dangerous, violent force are matched by the visuals and the story presented. Both the book and the movie implied a vast universe without showing much outside of five planets.
So, that being the case, I can’t side with the Dune purists on the movie. I also can’t really put myself into the place where I can see the movie as the confusing mess that people seem to see it if they haven’t read the book. That seems to be an obvious failing of my imagination, and I apologize.
On the other hand, I haven’t read all of Starship Troopers, but I have read quite a few excerpts, because I wanted to know what I was missing. I understand their objection, it’s nowhere near the same. Even though the excerpts and the movie present themselves somewhere near a comic-book level of…umm, not depth…something else…texture? I don’t know. But I can see where if you were expecting a faithful recreation of that book, you were gypped in every way.
I quite liked the steampunk aesthetic of the movie (and having read the book, could follow the plot), but I can absolutely see how the film would be confusing to anyone who hadn’t read the book or only knew the series from the videogames.
That’s “lens flare”. Ignorance fought. 
Lens Flair would be hiring Alan Cummings to star. 
I was disappointed in the film. I saw it when it was first released. Perhaps another viewing is in order.
I wartched it again a couple months ago, after not having seen it for decades. I, like you, thought maybe it needed another chance. I am older, I have more experience to weigh the film against. A more mature mindset with which to view the film.
Still sucks.