My Favourite Movies: Dune

I think I saw this 1984 SF classic movie on video (remember that?) rather than at the cinema. I certainly can’t imagine my brother or any of my college friends wanting to see this. At the time I was probably the only person I knew who had read the book and without that as a prompt I doubt if they would have had the slightest interest.

Dune, for those of you who haven’t read the book and its 5 sequels (plus seemingly endless new novels based in that universe), was a massively influential SF novel by the late great Frank Herbert which had been published in 1965. I read it (and the two sequels) in my late teens and it completely blew me away. I think occasionally that I should read them again – basically every time I watch this movie – but haven’t been back for over 35 years. I sometimes wonder if it will have anything like the same effect it did the first time.

But to the movie – Dune is a hugely complex tale based in humanities far future where, thousands of years after humanity has thrown off the shackles of machine intelligence a power struggle exists between two of the great houses, House Harkonnen (the bad guys) and House Atredies (the good guys). As the Emperor of the known universe is afraid of the growing power of House Atredies he basically sets them up by giving them a juicy planet to run – Dune of the title – and then double crosses them. Unfortunately for him (and the bad guys) the young Duke – Paul played by Kyle MacLaclan – escapes with his life (and his Mother) and falls in with the local inhabitants known as the Fremen and ends up leading them – with his knowledge of new technology and his superior genetics – in accordance with their age old prophecy. That in a nutshell is the very bare bones of the story. It’s actually much more complex than this and immeasurably more complex in the book(s). Even running to almost 3 hours the film needs to constantly trim the plot, meld things together and skip over whole chunks of the story (one of the things I was most disappointed in is the almost negligible presence of my favourite character Duncan Idaho played by Richard Jordan) and because of this seeming either badly edited (which I think it might have been) or even incoherent (which it will probably appear to anyone who hasn’t read the book(s). In fact watching this film is probably a bad idea to anyone who hasn’t read them as it would raise far too many questions – probably all prefigured with a WTF moment – for a novice to really enjoy it or get that much from it.

I’m really not selling this very well am I? The question is, I suppose, despite all of its many problems why have I watched it 5-6 times at least and why am I putting it in my favourite movies pile? One of the things going for it is that it’s a fair attempt at what is probably an unfilmable book. The novel is just too deep, too complex and too intricate to be a single film. If it was made these days it would be at least a trilogy with the next two books being parts 4 and 5. That I think could work. Another thing is that MacLaclan makes a creditable Paul Atredies both before and after his transformation. Likewise the Fremen are pretty much as I imagined them to be. The look and feel of the movie – almost steam-punk at times – is very good and I loved how Paul explained the new weapons to the Femen and then demonstrated them to devastating effect. The SFX on the whole where reasonable for the time but look very dated by today’s standards. The acting was generally overblown with more than its fair share of cringe worthy moments – Sting in particular was truly awful in his role of the Harkonnen assassin Fayd. Generally the cast list was very impressive but so many world class actors in one film inevitably left some very little to do except strut around looking important. Luminaries such as Francesca Annis, Brad Dourif, Jose Ferrer, Linda Hunt, Freddie Jones, Virginia Madsen, Jurgen Prochnow, Patrick Stewart, Dean Stockwell, Max Von Sydow and Sean Young peppered the screen sometimes with mere walk on parts. I imagine that most of their talents ended up on the cutting room floor due to time constraints if nothing else which was a real shame.

I think I basically liked this film, not because of what it was but basically of what it could have been. It was most definitely ambitious – overly so for its director (David Lynch) who admitted that he had no real feeling for or understanding of Science Fiction. Given enough time to tell the story properly this could have been the Star Wars of the 1980’s. Unfortunately for all of the reasons above it unsurprisingly bombed at the box-office. It still remains however one of my favourite movies deeply flawed as it is. If you’ve read the book I’d certainly recommend it. You’ll probably be disappointed as I was but you should also be able to see the intent behind the failure which is definitely worth seeing.