Movie Review: Dune (1984)

Frank Herbert's book is singularly ill-served in this movie, made in 1984, with screenplay by David Lynch, big name special-effects people, and very competent if not exactly superstar actors. It should have been a good movie, but it's not. Boring, tedious, pointlessly repetitious, it looks like a patch job, cobbled together from a much longer movie, the gaps bridged by voice overs that do little to explain the long and complex story.

Dune is a huge book, a movie of it should be in at least three parts of about 2-1/2 hours each. The interpretation is crucial, and Lynch's concept of a fascistic, decaying imperium doesn't help. The story's backbone is simple enough: Arrakis, a desert planet, is the source of melange, a drug that not only combines the effects of pot, LSD, cocaine, and assorted other goodies, it enables spaceship pilots to fold space, and so bring any spaceship from one location to another in no time at all. Paul Atreides is the long-prophesied stranger from the sky who will set the Fremen of Arrakis free, a task at which he succeeds despite the opposition and machinations of the Emperor and House Harkonnen, the Atreides' traditional and evil enemy. He does so by taming sandworms, which he and his Fremen use as battle tanks.

The Bene Gesserit, an order of telepathic nuns, complicate the story because of their attempts to breed a superior human (female, of course) that will rule the known universe. Paul's mother, a Bene Gesserit, conceived him despite orders not to conceive a male child, because she loved Paul's father, who wanted a male heir. But she does later conceive a girl, and this girl becomes a crucial player in the last battle, when her psychic powers overcome those of the Bene Gesserit Mother Superior who is the Emperor's adviser, sometime concubine, and collaborator. For the girl, like Paul, is the superior human the Bene Gesserit have been working towards.

Frank Herbert hung a complex plot on this skimpy skeleton, with many subplots, a huge cast of characters, and that mix of myth, legend, and realism that almost guarantees a cult following. His gift was character and social ambiance, the plot creaks and groans under the weight of sheer narrative stuff that Herbert has piled into this book. He also wrote shorter pieces that fit more or less well into the universe of Dune, and left an enormous quantity of notes, which his son and collaborators have written up as still further parts of the saga. Turning all this into a movie is daunting at best. I don't know the history of the project, but it looks very much as if was conceived on a grand scale, a la Star Wars, but that money or energy or enthusiasm ran out. Maybe all three, but most likely money. I suspect that the producers realised too late what the project entailed, stopped the filming, and shot a few voice overs to stitch the footage together.

Not that we lost a masterpiece. As I said, concept is everything, and David Lynch (and whoever worked with him) conceived a fascistic imperium, but Herbert conceived a Byzantine one. The Fremen are nothing like what Herbert describes, the Harkonnens are merely nasty, not evil, the Emperor hasn't enough character to convince as a Machiavellian plotter, the Guild of pilots could as well have been played by cardboard cutouts, and the final battle scene goes on too long, with laughably unhurt Fremen, very peculiar psychically powered weapons, (which fire when the wielder grunts, and of course always hit their (evil) targets), and far too many repetitive shots of sandworms rearing up and opening their vast fangy throat. Someone wanted a Ran-like Goetterdaemmerung, but manages only a hokey shoot-em-up.

Well, I can now say I've seen it. I'm sorry I put Marie through it. Paul watched it too, but I don't think it was a high point in his movie life. They both found it hard to follow, and the characters weren't engaging enough to make us care for them. Pity, since one of Herbert's gifts is characterisation. Thumbs down.