Or, rather, the worst David Lynch movie I’ve seen all year
Dune isn’t actually all that bad. It’s just not that good.
Unlike, say, its protagonist, Paul Atreides. Who is only good, through and through, or his nemesis, the Baron Harkonnen, who is so thoroughly evil his skin bubbles with evil (or maybe it’s just malicious pus) and he’s so lazy he floats around everywhere with special effects. He chews up scenery and drinks the blood of his subjects, or anyone else handy with a convenient heart plug, or something like that.
They might as well have given him a black hat, too. Almost everyone in the movie has such clear-cut, obvious motives. But this is a David Lynch movie, you say. Where is the ambiguity, the perplexity, the strange? I’ll get to that.
Permit me to admit up front that I’ve never read Frank Herbert’s novel* of the same title (and possibly the same story), and that probably meant that I was going to be more confused or less interested than I might otherwise be.
In the end, all that matters from one source to the other is determining which one is the root of my complaints about the film. My guesses will follow.
First of all, and as I mentioned above, the sides are too simple. The House of Atreides is too good (the traitor is among them but not of them) and the house of Haddaddaddaway too bad. Where are the shades of grey? There’s a total of one person who isn’t necessarily aligned with who he should be, and even then it’s beaten about our heads just in case we’d miss it.
Which is odd, considering all of the things that were left unexplained and not shown so blatantly, but I can’t really say what I missed. I’m willing to bet this is from Lynch compressing and abridging Herbert’s novel.
I didn’t pay attention to all of the dream sequences. Here was the largest showing of Lynch’s touch. Weird, jarring dream sequences that were either foreshadowing or far-sight, that served more to slow the film down and telegraph upcoming scenes (sometimes even afterward the characters would repeat the foreseen dialogue, just uttered ‘live’, in the ever present inner voices).
What was with all of the inner voices, anyway? I know a big difference between novels and movies is that in general, it’s impossible to get in the characters’ heads without the written word; in this film it was difficult to stay out of their internal monologues. I don’t mind one narrator with the occasional voiceover, but to have every major character, on the good guy side, get his or her moment in the spotlight, makes me recall much more fondly the scene in Wayne’s world where Mike Myers grabs the camera back from an Ed O’Neill character who is attempting to, literally, walk away with the movie, and Mike admonishes him that only he and Garth can talk to the camera. If only this movie had the same restraint. Maybe Dune should’ve been named Paul’s world. Probably not. I’ll blame Lynch again for writing us into the innermost thoughts of so many people, and not just Herbert for probably having some of the thoughts in the novel, too.
More annoying than the dream sequences was all of the magic and other mystical cop-outs for moving the plot forward. At the risk of spoiling them, I won’t mention any. Probably more Herbert, again.
I don’t know who wrote most of the dialogue, but I kept hearing mantras everywhere. So much of the dialogue sounds like they’re reading it off of propaganda posters. Again, this is probably Lynch. Check out these examples: “Fear is a mind killer.” “Moods are for cattle and loveplay, not for fighting!” “He who controls the Spice, controls the universe!” “My name is a killing word.” “He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing.” “Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.” “And how can this be? For he is the Kwisatz Haderach!”
Well, probably not that last one. The movie, and probably the book before it, is filled with the requisite ridiculous lingo that litters many a ‘great SF novel’. That last line above is the movie’s final line, and it makes absolutely no sense unless you know what the Kwisatz Haderach is, and even then, there’s no good explanation for why they don’t just call the Kwisatz Haderach the Messiah or some other simple, not-fabricated noun. So much of the rest of it is made up, too. By the end I knew what “wormsign” was, but I’m still not certain what the whole “weirding” process entails, and those are just two examples brought to you by the letter “W”.
In the end, it’s visually interesting, technically impressive (for its time, by now the matte work looks quaint if not altogether dated), but all of the focus making things like the worms work right could’ve been spent working on making the story more fleshed out, or the dialogue more natural, or many other little fixes that are probably only with the years of hindsight.
Although at the time, somebody must’ve wondered why they’d spend so much time (and money) on a special effect like the blocky personal shields, only to revisit them once later in the film, and in a rather inconsequential moment. Or was somebody being clever, setting us up to think that this neat and useful technology would be used for good (or evil) later. Instead, it was just tossed aside, no doubt so another epic dream/drug flashback could be shoehorned in.
An epic, Dune certainly is. Interesting, it isn’t so much. I gave it some thought, and decided it was no worse than Waterworld, though certainly no better. It’s about the same level for combining high-concept ideas with high-profile talent, but forgetting to add in rhyme or reason. Interesting effects alone don’t make the journey interesting if you already know at the beginning where you’re going to end up.
* While that in itself is rare for me, I moreover do not plan on ever reading the novel (and by extension, its sequels). Nothing, not one thing, in this movie convinced me that I’d have any interest in the book.
