Dune (1984)

Spice must blow...

When Dune (the movie) came out in 1984, fans of Dune (the book) must have been ecstatic. "Oh joy of joys!" they must have said. "What may be the greatest science fiction masterpiece ever written is now coming to the big screen! I will call only my closest friends to accompany me! [uses rotary dial telephone]" I will say this: Back in 1984, this movie must have been amazing. For people who didn't read the book, that is.

Where this movie really shines is in its art direction. The worlds of Caladan, Giedi Prime, Kaitain, and of course Arrakis are painted with a charming vibrancy that really makes them pop. While watching, I wasn't thinking to myself "Hey, that's not what that should look like..." Aesthetically, everything seems to make sense. It's still got that slightly goofy "I'm an eighties movie, deal with it" sheen or whatever, but still, it's a feast for the eyes.

How nutritional that meal might be, however, is something your mind will ponder almost constantly while your eyes are eating. The writing is a fairly faithful transcript of what parts of the novel make it into the film, but the actors deliver their lines with somewhat less than the energy and grace you might think a work of this magnitude demands. The stilted inner monologues do little to relieve the pain: while Paul Atreides saying "Arrakis...Dune...desert planet" in the book is just something that people do in books, on film it sounds silly and forced. It might be a problem of acting, and that's another problem altogether. The movie sets itself up quite nicely in its first half, then crams all the rest of the book together in the second half, making it unclear and hard to follow. A note must also be made about the soundtrack: electric guitar and does not mesh with the scope of Frank Herbert's epic.

As for the cast, it's a mixed bunch of nuts here (OhohoHOHOHO I'm such a fag). Virginia Madsen opens the movie with a monologue as Princess Irulan (daughter of the Padishah Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV, but you probably don't give a shit about any of that, you godless heathen). While beautiful and soft-spoken, her delivery suffers under the epic nature of the words she's saying. Francesca Annis is resplendent as Lady Jessica and might be the best actress in the production. She delivers her lines with a whispering, almost erotic tone that is in no way painful to listen to. Those of you waiting to learn how Patrick Stewart brings the troubadour-warrior Gurney Halleck to life...keep waiting. He had more lines in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and he was only in that game for about four minutes. I suppose some Picard is better than no Picard at all, though. Other characters are also portrayed by actors, but I'm sure you don't care—wait. Forgot. Sting is in it. He plays Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. His most thought-provoking line in the movie is, and I quote: "I'll kill you!"

What really sets this movie up in flames for me, though, is the ways in which it differs from the novel. Baron Harkonnen may have been a pig, but Lynch's antagonist is a shallow, even bumbling man, and not the sort one would think capable of enacting such a plot against House Atreides. To further weaken his stature as a worthy adversary, the makers of the film also decided to give him the ability to zoom around on his weight-carrying suspensors like some kind of Goddamned winged monkey of Oz, cackling like he's the Wicked Witch of the West. They also added some bizarre skin condition that has no bearing whatsoever on the plot or even Harkonnen himself. When an aide of the Atreides is captured and poisoned with a gradual toxin, he is told that he must—and I cannot express enough that I am not kidding—milk a cat every day for the antidote. The members of House Harkonnen are portrayed as bloodthirsty, rambunctious swine with a propensity for the vulgar. They are completely devoid of any subtlety they had in the novel, and this weakens their effectiveness at being serious villains. The Weirding Way has shifted from a supernatural martial art to a kind of sound-amplifying ray gun, which would be neat if the movie were called Sand, or Sound, even. But not fucking Dune. They had their reasons, I'm sure, but I'm also sure their reasons were dumb.

It's a worthy shot, but it doesn't live up to the depth and breadth of the book. It's difficult to even attempt it, and it must be applauded for succeeding where it does. The visuals and the performances of the better actors are held back by the stilted delivery of the main characters and needless deviations from the source material, giving it a very middle-child set of growing pains. Fans of the book will be disappointed by the changes and omissions, but outsiders trying to experience the movie as a movie rather than an adaptation will find themselves lost in the muddy plot and abrupt thematic shifts. Basically, everyone will just be scratching their heads, muttering "What the hell? I don't understand." Worth watching once for the prettiness, the old-school sci-fi aesthetic, and also to say you have and to make fun of the worse parts of it.