David Lynch Dunesince 1984 – the proverbial turkey. It was panned, bombed at the box office, and for decades, the director who later became cinema's greatest surrealist. refused to talk about it in an interview. He even went so far as to remove his name from the credits of some extended versions.
After some time, DuneThe band's reputation went from being a dud to a camp cult classic and even, among some fans, a failed masterpiece. But the successful adaptation of Frank Herbert's monolithic sci-fi novel on which it was based – a book that had been in development for more than a decade by directors as diverse as David Lean, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Ridley Scott by the time Lynch picked it up – remained a white whale for the filmmaking community. When Denis Villeneuve released the first part of his acclaimed adaptation in 2021, everyone breathed a sigh of relief; now we could all pretend Lynch's creative failure never happened.
But 1984 Dune“Like all Lynch films, it has an uncanny, impressive power. It's as visceral and dreamlike as Villeneuve's films are rational and grandiose, and it addresses the uglier, weirder edges of the material than the invariably exquisite Villeneuve, the director of the recent film. Dune And Dune, part 2can digest. Here are just a few things it does better.
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Space Guild of Navigators
Villeneuve refused to portray the spice-using Space Guild of Mariners as having a monopoly on interstellar travel on Herbert's world, although it is their need for spices collected on the desert planet Arrakis that drives the plot. Lynch is not such a coward. In his film, the Guild is the sinister force behind the throne, embodied in the nightmarishly mutated Navigator – a sort of wrinkly whale monster who arms the Emperor from inside the glass coffin of his spice tank.
Lynch even includes a completely bizarre attempt to visualize the mystical process of the Navigators' journey into space, which he believes involves floating inside a light show and then – there's no other way to put it – emitting beams of light from a pulsating back vent, which then seem to manifest the planets they're traveling to. It's distractingly weird and terrible, but in Lynch's book DuneThere is no mistaking the fear and awe that the Space Guild inspires, nor its stranglehold on galactic power.
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Baron Harkonnen
Another area where Dune really benefits from Lynch's willingness to embrace the grotesque and horror in his main villain. In Villeneuve's films, Stellan Skarsgård's Baron is impressive and sinister, at one point rising on a long, serpentine tail. However, Lynch's Baron is truly and unforgettably vile. In Kenneth MacMillan's deranged performance, he's an obese, barking madman with a face covered in disgusting pimples who floats around like a vengeful hot air balloon. It's ridiculous, but in a way it goes beyond stupid and into the realm of extremely unnerving.
The scene in which the Baron is introduced is one of the most disturbing Lynch has ever put on film, and that's really saying something. It's a montage of truly nightmarish images: attendants with their eyes sewn shut, cut boils, blood spattering on trembling tulips, and the strangely obscene sight of the Baron's naked feet with black nails floating just above the floor.
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All-round weirdness
Like a Lynch movie DuneThe author's biggest problem is that he is so overwhelmed by the mechanics of world-building and grandiose plotting that he can't sustainably balance either the disarming directness of his storytelling style or the subconscious weirdness of his imagery. However, this is quite strange. Lynch's surrealism doesn't help him capture the epic scope of Herbert's narrative, but it does evoke a deep, alien strangeness in the details Dunea distant future society is more efficient than Villeneuve's monolithic brutalism.
The soundtrack is dully drowned out by the whispered internal monologues of the characters. Harkonnen architecture is riddled with gaping mouths, and the docking bays of Imperial starships are surrounded by baroque picture frames. People use inexplicable machines that make nasal sounds. The Harkonnens threaten a prisoner to milk an emaciated cat strapped to a strange machine with a rat taped to its side. The Fremen's blue eyes emit a bright, crudely drawn light that is quite disconcerting. Lynch may not have achieved the enigmatic inspiration of Jodorowsky's vision. Dune – some of them ended up in Scott's hands Strangerwhich featured members of the same team, including artist H.R. Giger, but managed to avoid the slick futurism and fantasy references of most sci-fi films.
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Aliya
Apart from one fabulous cameo, Villeneuve excludes Paul Atreides' equally godlike sister from the plot of his Dune films; Aaliyah, played by Anya Taylor Joy, is expected to appear in 2026. Dune: Part Three. But that means we won't see a tiny girl in black Bene Gesserit garb psychically tear apart the Emperor's high priestess and then kill the Baron. There was no way David Lynch was going to miss this opportunity.
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Do it in one go
This is quite controversial because Lynch's main mistake Dune it's an attempt to cram the events of the novel into one film, which is inevitably clunky and incoherent. Lynch himself at one point intended to split it into two films. There is no doubt that Villeneuve's decision to do just that resulted in a much richer and more coherent narrative.
And yet… there is some feverish satisfaction in the way Lynch Dune Speedruns is the best space opera. Condensing Paul Atreides' messiah into a warped two hours strips the character of the apathy that plagued Villeneuve's first film and compresses his story into something more genuinely mythical, if less epic.
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Patrick Stewart goes into battle with a tiny dog
Lynch's film certainly miscast Patrick Stewart as Gurney Halleck, the brave House Atreides warrior played by Josh Brolin in Villeneuve's films. (He was a last-minute replacement for Aldo Ray.) But is there any spectacle in Villeneuve's films like watching the great Shakespearean actor shout a battle cry and lead Atreides troops into battle against the Harkonnens while inexplicably clutching a small pug to his chest? They don't.
