Dune

One of the greatest examples of a two-and-a-half-star movie ever made. Of course, these days, when most people think of Dune, they probably picture Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya with black things in their noses, looking out over a vast desert. But for many of us, the images we associate with Dune are ones that were burned into our brains by David Lynch and Dino De Laurentiis’s spectacular misfire adaptation from 1984. While I can’t call this a great film, or even a good one, it’s one of the most fascinating failures in cinema history. Most of the lingering power comes not from its mere association with its director but from the haunting imagery of Lynch and the incredible craftsmen who created this picture. From its opening scene in which the Spice Guild Navigator, warped and deformed by the stuff into some giant snail with a vagina mouth who must be transported around suspended in a huge aquarium of gas, to Kenneth McMillan's grotesque Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, whose genetic disease causes boils and blisters on his face that has to be drained regularly while he’s pulling out the "heartplugs" of underlings, to an impossibly fit Sting with flaming red hair wearing a metal loincloth with his body all oiled up and ready for a fight to the death with the young Paul Atreides, played by twenty-five-year-old Kyle MacLachlan who entered many of our screens and consciousness for the first time.

I’ve never read any of Frank Herbert's Dune novels, but I can’t imagine they’re for me. The book was famously deemed “unfilmable” by many readers wary of a cinematic adaptation. Still, lots of filmmakers tried to make a go of it. The most famous of these, thanks to the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky's Dune, was the Chilean avant-garde cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose failed attempt brought together many of the artists who would go on to create Alien. David Lean was also rumored to be circling an early film version. In 1976, Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis purchased the rights to the novel and tried to set the picture up with several directors and screenwriters, but nothing ever got off the ground. With his option set to expire in 1981, he sought out the most promising young filmmaker around at the time, David Lynch, and made him an offer. The young Lynch had only made two films, his deeply personal industrial nightmare midnight movie, Eraserhead, and the multi-Oscar nominated period biopic The Elephant Man. Both of these small, black-and-white pictures had made Lynch a hot commodity, and, just like today, young indie filmmakers got offered big-budget Hollywood tentpole pictures despite not necessarily being the best fit for them. Lynch was famously offered Return of the Jedi and met with George Lucas about helming the third Star Wars installment. He tells an amusing story about meeting with Lucas and starting to get a headache as the laid-back Californian explained the plot; when he got to the bit about the Ewoks, Lynch’s head couldn’t take it anymore. Lynch wasn’t interested in telling stories in the world created by people other than himself (though I have always been curious to know what Jabba’s Palace would have been like with him at the helm). 

Lynch had never read Dune, but when De Laurentiis came a-callin’, he devoured the book, loving the world it opened up in his mind. He agreed to helm the picture and started on his screenplay adaptation. The $40M production was shot entirely in Mexico and was plagued by a lot of production problems, but, contrary to the legend, it was a pretty happy shoot, with things not getting ugly until the editing. The cast was populated by wonderful character actors, several of whom would become part of Lynch’s world by appearing in several of his later projects. The world of Dune, as created by Lynch, Italian special effects and makeup legend Carlo Rambaldi, British matte painter Albert Whitlock, and many other amazing artists, is mesmerizing to look at. Nothing in the more successful Denis Villeneuve’s films can touch this picture for memorable imagery. But the story makes little sense unless you’ve read the novel. Set in a distant future in which most technology has been abandoned, Dune is a story of mild palace intrigue in which various noble houses control planetary fiefdoms. This invented history of feudal interstellar society gave its creator, Herbert, a compelling way to explore enduring religious and ecological themes, for which there’s little time in this movie. The young hero Paul Atreides is hair to a family that accepts the stewardship of the planet Arrakis—the only source of the valuable commodity mélange. Also known as “spice,” mélange is a drug that enhances mental abilities and enables space navigation. Since the spice can only be found and mined on Arrakis, control of the planet is a coveted but dangerous honor. Other families and worlds vie for control of the titular inhospitable desert planet.

In the movie, most of this is explained by the disembodied head of the Princess Irulan (a young Virginia Madsen) in a pre-credit monologue, which goes on for so long it’s laughable. This intro was not in Lynch’s script. The bad blood between Lynch, Dino, and Dino’s daughter, producer Raffaella De Laurentiis, all came about during the editing of this movie. Lynch’s screenplay indicated a close to a three-hour film, but he was contracted to produce a standard two-hour movie, and the Laurentii took over post-production. They insisted on a shorter film, adding the intro as well as Madson's continuous narration to cover for delegated sequences, and had Lynch record the actors voicing their character's internal monologues at multiple moments so the audience could “hear their thoughts” and have the movie explained to us whenever it got confusing. This spoken word aesthetic is the film's weakest aspect, rendering MacLachlan's otherwise fine performance into something that's often embarrassing. The technique is about as cinematic as reading CliffsNotes on screen. Of course, Dune actually had CliffsNotes as well. When the movie came out, theaters were given a little glossary of terms to hand out to patrons when they bought their tickets. You can just picture folks lining up at the box office, buying a ticket to Dune, being handed a glossary of weird names, looking at how dense that little sheet was, and sliding it back in exchange for a ticket to the other big sci-fi film that opened this week, 2010: The Year We Make Contact. 

Regardless of the truncated editing and absurd character voice-overs, Dune was faithful enough to Herbert’s novel that the author embraced it. But this Dune makes the classic sci-fi movie mistake of confusing world-building with storytelling, though not nearly as badly as the Villeneuve Dune does. In a novel, an author can create a rich fictional history that’s fascinating to read about, but a movie needs forward momentum, not ruminations on the past or explanations about how the present works. That’s part of why Star Wars is so successful. The first scene of actual exposition in Star Wars comes a full 32 minutes into the picture when the young hero Luke Skywalker is given his late father’s lightsaber by Obi-Wan Kenobi, his mentor figure. Obi-Wan then speaks to Luke about the past, referring to the Old Republic, the Jedi Knights, the Clone Wars, and the Force. When Luke asks how his father died, Obi-Wan delivers a brief monologue, only twenty-five seconds long, explaining the events that occurred before the story we are now watching. That short scene spins enough of a backstory for the viewer to imagine a whole complex world in our minds based on what we've seen of the Star Wars universe up to this point—a far richer world than the one Lucas eventually created for us in his prequel trilogy.

What’s astounding to me, as someone who has not read Dune, is that all film and TV versions of this story spend so much time on the first half, which is the least cinematic part. Denis Villeneuve devoted a whole 156-minute film of endless, meaningless world-building in his Dune: Part One and then made viewers wait more than a year for the actual movie part of the movie. For any Dune adaptation to devote most of its running time to creating a world that readers of the book already know and non-readers of the book will never fully understand or care about, no matter how much awkward expository dialogue is shoehorned into the mouths or minds of its cast, is ridiculous. The second half of Herbert's novel makes for a pretty entertaining and thematically interesting picture that lends itself far more readily to visual storytelling. Ironically, that’s the half that was the most truncated in the Lynch/De Laurentis film. It’s hilarious, but also a little sad, that just when the story that Villeneuve devoted even more time to in his far more entertaining Dune: Part Two gets going in the 1984 version, that film just kind of yada-yada-yada's over all of the potentially exciting, action-packed stuff in which the main character has his most significant revelations.

Oh well, David Lynch’s Dune is still eminently watchable and rewatchable. It’s gorgeous to look at; almost none of it looks or feels like the dozens of Star Wars knockoffs that were still flooding cinemas at this point, and it’s got a terrific cast making acting choices that are as big and bold as everything else in the picture.  "The tooth... the tooth... the tooth!"