DUNE (1984) - **



"The Worst Movie of the Year!" - Siskel & Ebert

"The only real failure of my career." - David Lynch

What looks good on paper doesn't always translate as well in reality. Some weeks back, many folks on the Internet including me were raving Marvel's decision to hire the Oscar-nominated actor/director Kenneth Branaugh to helm the THOR movie, if because somehow his celebrated cinematic background with the works of William Shakespeare from HENRY V to HAMLET is perfect for a divine Nordic comic book superhero. Hell, I remember back in 2004 when most of us thought Warner Bros. had scored a touchdown by signing Bryan Singer to craft their SUPERMAN franchise relaunch. I mean the genius behind X2 doing the Man of Steel? Perfect!

No, not really. Who knew that a better flick would have been IRON MAN shot years later by the director of ELF?

A similar miscalculation happened back in the early 1980s with the DUNE film adaptation. Published in 1965, Frank Herbert's classic book is the best-selling science fiction novel in history, and been acclaimed over the decades by many as the greatest literary work of its genre. It's also goddamn weird. From people using this futuristic spice melange to fold space to fetuses into the world with all the knowledge of their ancestors to flying obese sadist dictators to...well, go read it for yourself. Anyway, when producer Dino De Laurentiis bought the film rights, he figured that for such a story, it needed to be told by someone with already a bizarre off-beat reputation.

David Lynch by this time had made the shockingly fucked-up cult underground classic ERASERHEAD, and you know this young Lynch was going places when the great old master Stanley Kubrick used it as a reference for his THE SHINING. Then Lynch shot THE ELEPHANT MAN, the biopic about the grotesquely deformed Joseph Merrick which was a hit that scored eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. So Lynch had street cred with both critics and being....off.

So what the hell went wrong? I mean looking at his work before and after DUNE, whatever you like his pictures or not, Lynch is an incredibly powerful filmmaker, even if you don't really know exactly what he is striving for. He's like a pretentious David Cronenberg. The cast itself is good from Jurgen Prochnow to Patrick Stewart to Richard Jordan to Linda Hunt to Virginia Madsen to Brad Fucking Dourif to Jose Ferrer to ERASERHEAD's Jack Nance to Kenneth McMillan to Max Von Sydow to Dean Stockwell to lead Kyle MacLachlan (his film debut, in fact.) They do try to make you forget the rest, from the media stunt (Sting) to the outright useless (Sean Young).

Reportedly, the basic problem was that Lynch and DeLaurentiis had a fundamental disagreement over the direction for DUNE. DeLaurentiis and Universal Studios both saw DUNE as basically STAR WARS meets LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, a fantastical soap opera epic out in outer space...and they're wrong. If you read DUNE as a kid, like say around middle school, you may imagine it as such a grand pulp tale about a deposed Atreides prince (MacLachlan), betrayed and left for dead in the deep deserts of the planet Arrakis ("Dune") by the rival royal house the Harkonnens (led by McMillan), who leads the abused indigenous Fremen in a successful insurgency against both the Harkonnens and the Galactical Empire itself.

But if you read DUNE as a mature adult, like say around College, then you actually read between the lines. The prince manipulates the Fremen's faith for his own means to ascend the leadership ranks as the charismatic "messiah" of these people. They launch a nasty guerilla war against their imperial overlords, who by proxy the all-powerful foreign Guild monopoly, rule the universe because they undisputedly rule Arrakis, the sole source of the universe's most essential natural resource in the spice. The Fremen are suicidal holy warriors that take their bloody toll on the Harkonnens. The victorious prince, as the new Emperor, launch a religious jihad across hundreds of worlds where millions are murdered in his name.

He's not Luke Skywalker, he's Osama Bin Laden!

Anyway, Lynch didn't have final cut, so DeLaurentiis/Universal got their way. I'm not saying this is a BRAZIL or a Sergio Leone situation where the corporate bad guys raped a classic away from us, but consider this. I've read Lynch's last script draft of DUNE, and it's quite a contrast from the movie we got. The storyline is basically the same, but in slashing down Lynch's three hour edit and lacking faith in the audience, the producers added tricks from voice-over narration to prologue graphics to endless exposition montages to explain in every detail the whole fucking film's universe, even apparently passing out "cheat sheet" cards to some theatre-goers back in 1984.

Call me naive, but I would like to think that outside of broad strokes, people can figure out and accept the rest for themselves. I mean look at such quality sci-fi cinema examples like Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY or Norman Jewison's ROLLERBALL or even Sir Ridley Scott's BLADE RUNNER, which ironically Scott shot after he had quit the DUNE project. There is an art to self-realization, and when that is denied, what fun is there? Not that I'm saying Lynch's unmolested DUNE would have ranked among them, for probably it would have exhibited too a critical flaw that is all too evident in the theatrical edit.

It's deadly stiff. Some folks argue that if you've read the book, its better because you understand everything in context. That's complete utter bullshit. It's duller than dishwater. It's as stale as three year old cookies. It's as exciting as hearing Al Gore read a phone book. Drying paint is more riveting than the big battle sequences. DUNE had the gall to advertize itself as "A Movie Beyond Your Imagination." A more truthful tagline would have been "A Movie Not Beyond Your Boredom."

Even the cheap-looking special effects themselves feel uninspired as well. DUNE tries to push the button with its brief CGI shots, but I'm reminded of TRON, which in if you look closely in its legendary light-cycle race, the CGI and human actors never share the screen together. In DUNE, you see why for the CGI obviously wasn't ready for prime time. Consider too the scene when we see one of the giant sandworms of Arrakis swallow up a spice harvester. With such a visual, it's supposed I assume to be a Holy Shit! moment, and instead you try to keep yourself from falling asleep.

Not a good sign for the most expensive movie ever produced at the time.

Another trouble was Lynch's approach to encompass inner-monologues from the novel as voice-over "whispers," a good idea that just comes off as annoying. But what wasn't or maybe is Lynch's fault is how unbalanced and messy DUNE's editing narrative is. You have a considerable build-up in the downfall of MacLachlan, but damn DUNE just rushes through the Fremen and climax like Jack Nicholson needing another whore, as if the movie internally remembered that it was running out of time, and was trying to cram itself this side of Cliffnotes to finish the story.

DUNE is seen as one of the great artistic and financial failures of the Reagan Decade, and yet it has attracted quite a dedicated following. My guess is that the appeal for those outside of the book's fanbase is similar to that of many Tim Burton films, where the art direction and costume design combine into an exclaimation point of memorable nightmarish visuals. Or maybe they just like the cheesy lanquid progressive rock soundtrack composed by the pop group Toto, I don't know. I do admit for instance that such things as the Grey's Anatomy-inspired stillsuits are impressive.

As far as I'm concerned, the only real good thing to arise from DUNE is that due to contractual obligations, DeLaurentiis funded and produced Lynch's follow-up BLUE VELVET, which made people forget all about that big budget flop that scared Lynch away from ever again trying to seriously embrace or tap such an approach at the Hollywood mainstream. I hate that Lynch refuses to assemble his director's cut for DUNE, as if like Michael Mann with THE KEEP, he is trying his best to move on with his career, pretending that it never happened if simply out of sheer embarrasment.

I mean come on David, your DUNE can't be as bad as the DUNE we have now, right? Then again, believe it or not, the extended version as seen on television found a way.

(NOTE: Here is David Lynch's Final DUNE Script Draft, btw: http://www.scifiscripts.com/scripts/dune.txt)