I know it has its defenders. Like Metallica’s album Load. People line up pro and con, and fierce debates rage.
Dune, to me, is stiff, formal, and humorless. I mean, I get it I get it, giant worms, a huge brain-like creature with a mouth like a vagina speaking from some huge black box, a young man must face the evil … etc. But the STYLE of the movie is just way too formal for me to engage on any level. It’s like a medieval tapestry. Which would be fine if it WERE a medieval tapestry – but it’s a motion picture!
I saw Dune when it first came out. I was in high school and I mainly wanted to see Sting nearly naked. That was my motivation.
Mission accomplished.
I didn’t understand one word of the movie. So naturally I read the book to try to figure it out. I liked the book. Sadly, there was not enough Sting in it.
So now I have watched it again. And my motivation is the same as when I was in high school, only now I mainly want to see Dean Stockwell with a little red dot on his head being mysterious and intense.
Mission accomplished.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
But I can barely keep my attention on this movie.
Is it just for Frank Herbert fanatics? Because I’m not one, never gonna be one, so I don’t know what to do with this movie! Except fast forward to the next Stockwell scene and take some screen grabs. For my growing archive.
The story of Stockwell getting INTO Dune is a great story – because that was really the thing that lifted him out of the outer darkness of dinner theatre in Nevada. It was a significant project and he had a significant enough part to warrant some attention. It didn’t put him back on the map, Blue Velvet really did that. Paris Texas was the real breakout part of this period – but Dune came first.
being a Dune fanatic, i’m ashamed to say of the two versions, i’ve only seen the newer SciFi miniseries from 2000 with William Hurt and Alec Newman. [[and in that one, i was bothered by how whiny they made Paul…]]
now i’m not sure i want to see the 1984 version…
amelie – but I could be totally wrong!!! If you’re a fanatic, then this movie may be for you, you know?
I didn’t know they made it into a new miniseries – cool!!
Not that this means anything but Stockwell is a Herbert fanatic, too – and he has mentioned being disappointed in the 1984 version – but he was IN it, so his opinion is colored by that experience obviously.
yeah, it’s 4.5 hours long? i enjoyed it, read the books half a dozen times, and when i was rereading most recently, i decided to watch some, and found myself annoyed with how whiny and immature they make paul at the beginning. still, it’s really good.
in 2003, they made a miniseries of Children of Dune, combining parts of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. James McAvoy [[mmm]] is in it with Alec Newman. also 4.5 hours, i think.
i’ve seen small sections of the ’84 version before — but not all of it. so, i do know what you mean, and that’s why up to this point, i haven’t seen all of it. you just made me confront why i never picked it up to watch it all the way through, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
sadly, no Stockwell in the newer versions. no nearly naked Sting, either. but very well done, nonetheless.
//why i never picked it up to watch it all the way through, and there’s nothing wrong with that.//
That’s so true, isn’t it? Sometimes we feel obligated to finish something – but then at a certain point it’s like: But it’s not grabbing me – it’s not doing what it’s supposed to do! So I shall turn it off!!
I have a REALLY hard time admitting that I don’t want to finish a book, for example. It takes a lot for me to go, “You know what? This sucks. NEXT.”
Although I will concur that the nearly-naked Sting is tasty indeed, that movie version of Dune is kind of a big mess. I don’t think it’s “just you.”
Actually, maybe the movie’d go down a little better with some “Spice” (to riff on your mushroom idea).
“a big mess” indeed!!
I appreciate the attempt – I usually do – but I’m like: WTF???
sheila — that is hard. especially with books! i normally just keep reading unless the writing is so bad that it makes me ill thinking about it. we’ve had some close calls…
with this movie, at least, it’s not the issue that i started watching and then just stopped, it’s that i’ve seen bits and fragments on tv randomly, and never was intrigued enough to rent it.
As a BIG SF fan in general, I have to agree its not just you. I have issues with the book. ( I did finally finish it, but I think it was one of the years I was having problems with my hands and living on painkillers….read into that what you may.)
The movie is worse. The longer miniseries is somewhat better, but IMHO, the story is a mess, the world Herbert creates is complicated, and Paul eminently unlikeable.
It’s definitely “not just you.” There have been David Lynch projects that I loved, but he was not the right match for this one. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but I remember it being excruciating.
Classic Ebert:
“It took DUNE about nine minutes to completely strip me of my anticipation. This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time. Even the color is no good; everything is seen through a sort of dusty yellow filter, as if the film was left out in the sun too long…”
The movie is horrid. The newer mini-series are tolerable. The book is excellent.
It would really take a Peter Jackson type director to do a Dune movie jsutice.
First of all, I laughed at your cynicism way too much in this post.
//giant worms, a huge brain-like creature with a mouth like a vagina speaking from some huge black box//
You owe me an LCD monitor, and a new cup of chai.
Anyway, I recall very vividly how people who went to see Dune were encouraged to read through pamphlets that explained gobs of backstory. These days, doing such a thing would seem horribly desperate, but they got away with it for this film in 84, it seems.
My friends and I loved Sci-fi adventures, we loved Star Wars, we respected Star Trek for the more cerebral bit of science fiction that it was (even in syndication) and we all had what was a healthy mental diet of comics and action figures. With the exception of actual novels, we felt we could handle it as a film.
I remember seeing the trailer, and my brother letting me borrow his copy of the novel. I remember trying to fathom that which was explained in the novel, but mind you, I was in like…the 5th grade, or something, I had SUCH trouble understanding it, so I did what every kid would do given the same position. I pretended to know what it was about when ANYONE in earshot talked about it, and it worked, until someone who read the novel, and asked me about the story, where I gave answers like ‘Is that the guy Sting’s playing in the movie?’
We went to the theater, and I remember I was so excited to be going to see that with my Brother and his friends, and that my facade of knowing what Dune was about had worked to the point of getting me in on the ‘Saturday Movie trip to see Dune’ that I gobbled my whole bag of Twizzlers, and drank my Hawaiian punch early on in the flick, and was NOT conscious by the time anything significant happened in the film.
Decades later, I get it on DVD, and watched it from beginning to end. It outpaced Krull on the scale of terrible films. Mind you, I liked Krull as a kid, but Dune didn’t deliver as a film then, and it didn’t deliver now. The armor was cool. the worms were cool. I found myself tallying how many people went on to star in ‘Beverly Hills Cop II”. The floating fat bastard who killed that underling by pulling its heart plug, not cool. Did well for a villain, because he was just…terrifying on many levels that I couldn’t understand, but overall, the film didn’t keep my interest. I have to tense a muscle when thinking about that film just to stay on the level with the Lore. I’ll possibly read through it again someday when I have absolutely f_ck-all to do.
No, I didn’t see the newer version, because I chose not to. You’re not alone in thinking it was poorly done, Red.
Lynch was hosed from the git-go. This is a tough book to try to film – for what it’s worth I didn’t think it was bad, but I got the impression that Herbert’s already-contorted world required a more straightforward kind of treatment to help bring a sense of order. Lynch’s style strikes me as kind of the opposite of that.
But what I really wanted to say was…
I wiiiiillll kill hiiiiim!
//my facade of knowing what Dune was about had worked to the point of getting me in on the ‘Saturday Movie trip to see Dune’ that I gobbled my whole bag of Twizzlers, and drank my Hawaiian punch early on in the flick, and was NOT conscious by the time anything significant happened in the film.//
HAHAHAHAHAHA
I love the details you remember!! I’m dying!
And that floating fat bastard was horrible – I was particularly disgusted by the huge festering BOILS on his face!
I think the movie is quite faithful to the book in that
Oh, sorry. I fell asleep.
bren – hahahahahahaha
You’re such a smartass and I love you!!
Yes, Dune is widely understood as one of the very worst sci-fi movies ever made, which is saying something.
I’ve seen it at least twice, which is also saying something.
Lynch seems to have had no understanding for the book or the story or the mechanical needs of reweaving a wide canvas into a useful film. To be fair, he has never been an adapter – he creates his own macabre stuff. And to be even fairer, sci-fi films at the time were in a very difficult period, and dreamy gauzy wtf golly ain’t space big crap was common (or gosh aren’t machines weird, or gee I bet if we keep playing this synthesizer music the audience won’t mind as long as we can get some boobs out soon: as you see, there were several useful themes to choose from).
I’m pretty sure Lynch was seduced by a vision of stately design and huge scale – you might remember troops loading onto that gargantuan transport ship, for example – and a few other visual motifs that must have struck him like lightning. His complete disregard of everything and everyone who wasn’t in the Atreides household says to me that he didn’t get the book at all and just wanted to project aristocracy into a technological future. The Harkonnens, though entertaining, have nothing to do with the characters Herbert wrote; same for the Fremen, same for Paul as Muad-dib, etc. etc.
The film is a total loss with some real memorable moments. The second time I saw it I went in figuring it couldn’t be as bad as I remembered. Heh.
Maybe I’ll try again some day, for some real laughs.
Linus – I love your comments. Thanks!!
yes – there was a sense of scale to the movie – and (to my taste) there was some truly spectacular footage of those dunes. With the tiny little line of people walking across it. Like Arabian Nights or something.
But it was so ponderous! And I couldn’t care about ANY of it.
It is interesting to see Lynch – already working out the style that would serve him so well on his own movies (and already had, come to think of it) … and that sort of psychedelic dream-space he directs from which would be SO effective in Twin Peaks (my opinion) but just doesn’t fly here.
Also, gotta say: I get sick of seeing futuristic/outer space movies with even more rigid gender roles and sexist stupid attitudes than we have here. I am already sick of it in THIS day and age.
Like when Kyle and his mom were running across the dunes to reach the haven at the big rock – You know, in movies women can’t seem to run on their own – they need to run hand in hand with a man or they won’t keep up. (Roger Ebert always makes note of this when it happens and it cracks me up: “Uhm – wouldn’t you BOTH run faster if you didn’t have to hold hands??”) Anyway, I notice crap like that and I find it very annoying – especially when it seems to come from a place of lazy stereotyping – rather than LOOKING at a stereotype and COMMENTING on the stereotype (which I think Lynch does amazingly well in some of his other films). The Isabella Rosselinni character in Blue Velvet could easily be “labeled” – but then there are elements in her character that are TOTALLY disturbing – she’s not just a victim – she does get off on being hit – and yet at the end: was she not raped and brutalized?
Stereotypes and trashing the stereotype at the same time.
I suppose none of that has anything to do with Dune, the original material, ANYway! Not a good fit of director and material, I suppose.