Visions of the Future: Dune (Dir David Lynch, 2h 15m, 1984)

David Lynch's Dune is a strange beast. Condemned now to stand in the shadow of Denis Villeneuve's two-(or more)-part 2021-2023 adaption, which now acts as the definitive cinematic version of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel. It's also something of an outlier to Lynch's filmography as a whole. This purveyor of the dark underbelly of Americana is not the first director that comes to mind when considering an epic science-fiction tale that matches technology and religion, mysticism and ambition, and especially not when they distil a several-hundred-page novel into a two hour movie, soundtracked by 80s rock stalwarts, Toto. Yet, Dune remains fascinating. despite its failure. Why?

The year is 1981, and people have been trying to make a film of Dune for a decade; the novel has been a runaway success, but adapting it for the screen has been fraught with difficulties. This has included the death of the first owner of the rights, Arthur P Jacobs whilst a David Lean-headed adaption was in development, Alejandro Jodorowsky's attempts remain as outlandish as they were ambitious, (spawning the concept of what would become Alien (1979) with artist HR Giger and effects wiz Dan O'Bannon, a 2013 documentary and an ongoing legal battle by a consortium of crypto-currency owners keen to produce adaptions based on the colossal artbook made for this adaption). Ridley Scott has then dropped out of Dino De Laurentiis's adaption, which retains Giger on art duties, and would have consisted of two parts, citing the death of his brother, and proceeds to make Blade Runner instead.

Here, after optioning the unwritten sequels to the original Dune-three novels would be published in the aftermath of this deal-De Laurentiis's daughter, Raffaella (also to produce both Conan films), comes across The Elephant Man (1980), Lynch's second feature and breakthrough film, and approaches Lynch to direct. In perhaps sci-fi cinema's greatest what-if, Lynch has already been approached by George Lucas to complete the Star Wars trilogy, with the then-titled Revenge of the Jedi. For all Lynch's enthusiasm for the novel, it is here that Dune's flaws begin; rather than a duo of films, to cover the massive scale of the novel, as many of Lynch's drafts had been, working alongside Eric Bergren, with whom he had written The Elephant Man, Dune is to be a single film.

Set in the year 10,191, and following a condensed history of the known universe, presented to us by the Princess Irulan (Virginia Madsen, nearly played by, but for scheduling conflicts, Helena Bonham Carter), and the planet Arrakis, sole producer of the hallucinogen, spice, invaluable in space travel, we are introduced to the Emperor Shaddam IV (Jose Ferrer), and the noble houses of Atreides and Harkonnen, the latter in cahoots with the Emperor, the bizarre Spacing Guild and his fearsome Sardaukar soldiers, who will war over Arrakis, also known as Dune. Dune's own populace, the Fremen, have been driven deep into its sandworm infested deserts. 

Lynch then introduces us to the doomed Atreides: Paul (Kyle MacLachlan, who would go on to work with Lynch on Blue Velvet and the cult Twin Peaks), his father, Leto (Jürgen Prochnow) and mother, Jessica (Francesca Annis), a member of the shadowy Bene Gesserits, a psychic sisterhood with mysterious motives, a member of which tests Paul. Moreover, the organisation bent on eventually bringing forth the messianic Kwisatz Haderach. MacLachlan is perhaps the film's biggest misstep in casting, simply too old to play the teenage boy, too mannered to play a figure weighed down by prophecy and expectation and too blasé a performance to feel like a character changed by their journey. 

Also plotting in the background, especially after their withdrawal from Arrakis, is the malevolent forces of the Harkonnens: taking heavy influence from Giger's work on Jodorowsky's adaption visually, they are also the film at its most Lynchian. Look no further than Baron Harkonnen (an unsettling, predatory performance from Kenneth McMillan), a bulky man with syphilitic sores on his face and a disturbing set of sexual tastes, and penchant for violence, and one can see echoes of Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. Against this barely controlled psychosis is Feyd Rautha (Sting, continuing a connection between rockstars and the violent Harkonnen scion that runs from Mick Jagger in the Jodorowsky adaption to Austin Butler's turn in Dune Part Two (2023), nigh-simultaneously shooting Elvis (2022)). Sting, sans infamous underwear scene, is fine, it's more that he, like everyone else, never gets a chance to do much more than an abridged version of their character

From here, the film proceeds to adapt Dune at breakneck pace: the Atreides arrive, are betrayed, flee into the desert, and from here, Paul slowly develops into the prophesied war, and spiritual leader, dubbed Muah'Dib, before the film gathers pace for conflict between the usurping Harkonnen, and the native, Middle-Eastern coded Fremen. Here, Dune arrives at its critical, fatal flaw. The film is a mess. In raw mathematical fact, two hours and fifteen minutes isn't enough time to begin to adapt the novel into a competent film: compare it to Villeneuve's near six hours, and it becomes stark; his first film is nearly twice the length of the hour and a half of Lynch's version of the first half of the novel, and his second nearly quadruple the mere forty minutes the rest of the film runs.

This is bad enough, but to cover these gaps, to give the film any sense of coherence, the film either uses voice overs, often plucking lines straight from the book as inner thoughts of Lynch's characters, because there simply is not enough time to show the necessary bit of character development; the entire experience is an underdeveloped, rushed route-march over the bones of the novel's plot and its characters' development. This is not to blame Lynch and editor Antony Gibbs entirely for the final brutally edited film, with both Dino and Raffaella, beholden to Universal's demands, cutting an entire hour out of the picture, requiring Madsen's introduction and the voiceovers. Lynch, for his part, has largely disowned the film, the television version, the closest the film will likely ever get to a director's cut crediting Lynch's direction and script by Alan Smithee and Judas Booth respectively. 

 To him, it remains a curio of his early career. So why bother with Dune 1984? The Villeneuve version is superior in almost every aspect; 1984's special effects, with model work by Emillo Ruiz del Rio and visual effects by Barry Nolan, and the art direction, overseen by Benjamin Fernandez, are certainly striking, from the Byzantine-inflected palace of the Emperor, to the colossal sandworms to the unsettling clinical look of the Harkonnens’ dwellings to the blocky but charming shields the film's warriors use, is charming but it feels quaint, outmatched by the science fiction of the early 80s let alone the stunning work of modern effects houses. For all intents and purposes, Lynch's adaption should be consigned to that shadowy corner of bargin bins and online retail that previous, unloved, adaptions go to.

Yet, Dune 1984 has one thing the polished, admirably serious Villeneuve version lacks: it retains Dune's weirdness, from Patrick Stewart's Gurney Halleck, a warrior who plays a curious instrument, it has cats being milked for an antidote to poison, it has the Atreides family pug, it has Brad Douriff being wonderfully creepy as human computer Piter De Vries, it has a preternatually aware, and thus, extremely creepy child with magical powers-Paul's sister, Alia, (Alicia Witt), who acts as his emissary, and executioner, it has Toto, at the height of their 80s powers blasting a guitar riff whilst two men ride a 300 foot worm across a desert, it has a knife-fight with Sting; it has all this and a hundred strange and quintessentially Lynchian things to show us.

Dune 1984 may be a butchered adaption, may forever stand in the shadow of a worthier cinematic realisation of a colossus of science fiction, but by hell does it try, and even in failure, it is memorable. Long live the noble failures! 

Rating: Recommended

Dune is available via streaming on AppleTV, and on DVD and BluRay from Universal Studios in the UK and via streaming on HBOMax, and on DVD from Universal Studios in the USA

Next week, we conclude our adventures through the worlds of 1980s science fiction and meet the future of law enforcement in Paul Verhoeven's Robocop.