Review of Dune

Introduction

I have three kinds of movie in my collection. The majority are good films, films I like because I enjoy for their quality. The second type is the bad film, films that are so bad that their very rankness is a virtue, think worse than Waterworld and you get the idea. Finally we have the rarest of breeds, the nice try. Films that you just have to stand up and applaud for their ambition. These films attempt to scale the highest of heights and fail miserably, spectacularly and crash to earth, deafening in their failure.

Dune is one such film. The scale of the David Lynch`s vision is mind-boggling; he attempted to bring an epic novel, vast in scope and complexity to the screen. They condensed the story down to two and quarter hours, bringing the epic vistas of four worlds on to the screen. Having read the book, the fact that they failed isn`t surprising; the fact that they even made the attempt is astounding. You won`t be surprised when I decline to summarise the story. Suffice it to say that this is a complex tale of politics, eugenics, and war. Two rival houses, the Harkonnens and the Atreides battle for control of the planet Arrakis, both sides manipulated by the Imperial court of Shaddam IV and the Spacing Guild. While this occurs, the Bene Gesserit sisterhood is trying to breed a messiah, the Kwizatz Haderach, by manipulating the bloodlines of both rival houses. On Arrakis, the Fremen are fighting for their freedom and await the fulfilment of prophecy, the arrival of the messiah who will lead them to victory.

Video

The DVD has a 2.35:1 letterbox transfer and here the problems continue. Aside from the fact that the magic word these days is anamorphic, I think my copy at least has a problem in the transfer itself. The brightness is set way too high. The black bars are grey, which means resetting the brightness on my TV. It`s bloody inconvenient having to remember that every time. The film itself has been wonderfully preserved. The sets are massive and the design lush. The Atreides live in beautiful reds gold and browns. The Harkonnen live in an industrial nightmare, all dark greys and greens. The Imperial court is strangely retro and seems like an art deco cruise liner including the costume design. The worms are impressively gargantuan and the dunes themselves expansive. The film`s scale is accordingly vast. Why be big when you can be bigger seems to have been the credo. This film is a masterpiece of design. A minor niggle is that the darker the setting, especially night scenes, the murkier the picture and harder to define. This film needs to have an anamorphic transfer to do its sense of scale justice.

Audio

Sound is a DD 5.1 track and is perfectly competent. However two gripes spring to mind. One is that because of the reliance on inner monologue. Most of the speech is whispered and is easily lost in the background. This is a problem of the film rather than the transfer but an obvious solution is missing (see extras). My other problem is the soundtrack. It`s a curious mix of orchestral pieces and what I can only guess is prog rock. It`s not big, it`s not funny and has no place in movies.

Features

Extras are limited to eight stills from the movie and the trailer. There are also production notes but these are in an eight-page booklet supplied with the disc. Paper, talk about primitive huh? What are conspicuous by their absence are foreign language soundtracks and most importantly, subtitles. Subtitles would have solved the whispering problem but you are left guessing instead.

Conclusion

All the elements of the story combine to make for an intriguing and intertwined tale of conflicting motivations and destinies, that could barely fit into 10 hours of screen time let alone 2. The film has therefore dispensed with massive swathes of the story, trying to cut to the core of the story. However, this has gone too far, the story is disjointed and almost nonsensical. At the beginning of the film, an hour or so is spent on character development, and the pace is pedestrian, yet once attention shifts to Arrakis, the years fly by with no mention, the flow of time is haphazard. You don`t know what happens when, and the only sign of aging is the length of Gurney Halleck`s hair.

Another problem is that the story relies too much on inner monologue. The characters actually say little, but the action seems to pause, while off screen their voices supply their thoughts. This is the way that novels and other written entertainment work, but this is just meaningless for the medium of cinema. A picture is worth a thousand words; actions speak louder than words, a couple of clichés that apply here.

Aside from a couple of pieces of utter miscasting, the cast is top notch. The less said about Sting and his metal codpiece the better, it`s too easy a target. My particular problem is Jose Ferrer`s portrayal of Emperor Shaddam IV. He is far from imperial and majestic. In fact, he looks more like a put upon old man given to temper tantrums. He looks far too much like someone`s genial uncle rather than the Emperor of the known universe. Kyle MacLachlan is competent as the young Paul Atreides. A pre-Star Trek Patrick Stewart is here as Gurney Halleck though he does have a tendency to lapse into a Yorkshire accent at times. Brad Dourif has made a career of playing the strangest of characters; here he is the Mentat, Piter de Vries. Dean Stockwell is brilliant as the tragic traitor Dr Wellington Yueh, but Kenneth McMillan`s evil Baron Vladimir Harkonnen effectively steals the show. Watch the spittle fly as he bellows, pontificates, rants and rages with impunity. Again the piecemeal nature of the script means that many cast performances are reduced to cameos. Blink and you`ll miss Max von Sydow, Linda Hunt, Richard Jordan, the ever beautiful Sean Young and a young Virginia Madsen. At least Virginia Madsen has the memorable prologue. I think her sultry enunciation of "Dune" is burned into the surface of my brain.

In conclusion, this is a beautiful failure. You have to credit David Lynch and Dino de Laurentiis for making the attempt. It could never have worked but as a sci-fi fan this film is worth it just to realise what to aim for. It`s a shame that the quality of the transfer is so poor and such necessities as subtitles have been neglected. But look around, you can probably pick this up for under a tenner. Be aware, there is a special edition of Dune available, it`s 4:3 format with mono sound but has around 45 minutes of extra material. Also, a Dune miniseries has recently been made. Perhaps this longer format will finally do this story justice. Here`s hoping.