AG Monday
Lynch's Dune.
Dune-A-Palooza continues! Big fans of the Dune novel were excited about the pending release of the film adaptation, directed by David Lynch. And then…we saw the movie. Tom attended the premiere. Steven just saw the movie.
We give our unvarnished opinions on the film. We grade David Lynch’s Dune as a motion picture, and then as an adaptation of the novel. Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy sandworm ride!
Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of culture. We were geeks before it was chic!
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I posted about this movie back when I re-watched a few years back while waiting for the new movie to come on streaming. I may rehash it later as work permits.
Some movies are so bad one has no choice but to mock them. That’s all the entertainment one gets from them.
One thing, though. I first heard of Dune a couple of years before this movie came out. I was assured at the time it was unfilmable, and the sentiment has been repeated countless times since by dozens of others. Having seen two movie adaptations of it, I don’t get what was unfilmable about it.
Not having read the book, and not intending to ever read it, I may be missing something. For all I know, both movies cover about a third of the book and leave the rest out.
Last, obligatory Futurama reference: It’s pronounced DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNg. The “g” is almost silent.
This piece, written shortly before the 2021 release of Denis Villeneuve’s excellent adaptation of the novel, highlights why Lynch’s Dune is actually an incredible film that does not deserve the hate it gets.
Before the new version, let’s revisit 1984’s Dune—the greatest movie ever made – Ars Technica https://share.google/04H0eRGlzG42R1KDc
@Mikey: I will give it a look!
@Kathy: Great clip.
@Mikey: Thanks for sharing that. It is an excellent read!
@Steven L. Taylor:
One of the DUUUUUUUNg beetles is voiced by Kyle McLachlan, who played Paul in the Lynch movie. I didn’t watch the whole clip, though, so maybe he doesn’t show up in it.
I’m not going to say that David Lynch’s Dune was good, but I’ve watched it many times while I never got around to watching Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune, Part 2.
I think it’s that Paul Atreides was allowed to have and show emotions in the David Lynch movie. The weren’t always the right emotions, and were almost never in the right amounts, but if you ignore the fact that Kyle McLachlan has the air of a 38 year old playing an 18 year old*, it rings true for the character.
I don’t know what the right emotion should be when your mom’s coworker stops by after dinner to shove your hand in a torture device under threat of death, and neither did Kyle McLachlan or David Lynch, so I think a bit of every emotion known to man plus three new ones was a perfectly reasonable choice.
It’s a messy, messy movie. But very watchable. And not in an ironic way, but just in a “yup, that was released in 1984” way.
*: it’s surprising that he was only in his mid-20s. And, given that Paul is supposed to be the product of generations of breeding to create the fancy special man, that “38 year old playing an 18 year old” works.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Do you think it could have changed your opinion on the film as expressed in the podcast, had you read it before doing the podcast?
I’m at the point in the podcast where you and Tom are moving from discussing the movie as a movie to discussing the movie as an adaptation of the novel. I love the movie as a movie, but then I have liked pretty much everything Lynch has done. The melodramatic-yet-flat acting in Dune seems to me to evoke a feeling of us looking in on a truly alien world, where the people’s interactions are just a bit…off to us Earthlings. And the really over-the-top weird Baroque of the sets and costumes is just perfect for what’s basically a quasi-feudal universe that has space travel and personal shields and still duels with knives.
All that being said, I think I will agree with you and Tom a lot more in the movie as adaptation section, because as much as I love the movie, I’ve read the books, and I know the movie is a flawed adaptation. The ending, in particular, as you point out in the podcast (I agree with you that it was likely done that way because back then there was no assumption a Part 2 might get made).
Finally, I’m in 100% agreement with you two on one point: the voice-over narration sucks and I would love to get a release of the movie that doesn’t have it, as was done with Blade Runner (and you’d think the studio would have learned from how much everyone hated the narration in that otherwise excellent film).
I look forward to listening to you and Tom talking about the movie as adaptation.
Late to comment as usual, but I and the dog traversed Dune Peninsula and saw the sand worms a few weeks back. Really. Park in tribute to Frank Herbert. Old slag of a smelter that contaminated the area with lead and arsenic (little fact about lead, sinks, not an issue after a few decades) https://www.parkstacoma.gov/place/dune-peninsula/ Obviously a reuse of a Super Fund site (with a shady Mexican mining/minerals firm trying to avoid responsibility for ASARCO liabilities).
I was expecting a Lynch mob.
🙂
@Mikey: In all honesty, I think that the piece kind of reflects my view, just in a more tongue-in-cheek way, although maybe that’s me projecting my views onto the piece. The movie is truly bizarre!
@Richard Gardner: Interesting!
@JohnSF: Ha!
Have not finished listening yet but.. I’ll have to put myself in as one of the fans of the movie. I could never figure out people complaining about it being confusing.. I was pretty young when I saw it, and I wasn’t confused at all. Perhaps more importantly, I saw the movie well before I actually read the book, so wasn’t influenced by any disappointment at the adaptation. I was rather startled when on reading the book, there were no weirding modules!
It’s certainly fun to see the homages to the 1984 movie in the new ones, including some shot-for-shot reproductions.
Getting simplistic and focusing on fundamentals: Maybe Lynch did not know science fiction well enough to make a science fiction movie?
Of course, this assumes Dune is science fiction.