Dune

Rating:
Summary: The definitive Dune movie..
Review: Even though this movie is old and outdated technical wise, it is by far the best version of Dune released to any screen. Even though the recent TV version showed alot more of the story, I found it just too cheap and badly put together. This Dune movie feels solid as a whole, maybe a little boring at times, but I enjoy It very much.

Rating:
Summary: rhyno
Review: One thing that must be understood about this movie is that it was originally about four hours long. This is obviously too long for the big screen. The original followed the book much moer closely because of the detail. With the two hour version you miss out on a lot of the important aspects which can lead to some confusion in the storyline. It is still a well made movie with good acting (much better than Frank Herberts version, with a budget of about $20) For those people that did enjoy this, Sci Fi channel runs the extended version about once a year.

Rating:
Summary: Ugh!
Review: Who decided to make this? This is nothing like the 6 hour version on DVD, and The Baron looks horrifying! Just a bad movie. Can anyone tell me why Sting was in the film? ECH! Anything with Sting in it will probably be bad.

Rating:
Summary: Good, worth buying 1984 release
Review: I appreciated the angle this version played, granted, the cinimatagraphy isnt the greatest. Its clean for the most part, a little shady at times, but on the whole a great slant on the book. I would recommend seeing before you buy. MOst video stores have both the 1984 and the 2000 version, rent and watch both. Also, reading the book is extremely helpful, the 2000 version doesnt explain much although it does stick closer to the book then the 1984. A word of caution about the 2000: Pink is an evil color. At times this movie is a little risque.

Rating:
Summary: An unfortunate film
Review: Released in 1984 and made on a then mammoth budget of $40 million, the film of Frank Herbert's cult novel DUNE was eagerly awaited by sci-fi fans and it should have been awesome. Director David Lynch (BLUE VELVET, ERASERHEAD) was working on his biggest production to date, a mammoth undertaking filmed under trying conditions on location in Mexico. The screenplay was Lynch's own, chosen after the script submitted by original author Herbert was rejected. DUNE is set in a universe ruled by powerful families overseen by a successive line of Emperors. The key to cosmic power is the planet Arrakis (Dune), a windswept desert planet that's home to giant sandworms and the precious spice melange. The spice is the most valuable commodity in the universe. It extends the life and expands the consciousness of those who consume it. Most importantly, it allows the navigators of the Spacing Guild (once human but now hideously mutated) to "fold space" and navigate their spacecraft across mammoth distances instantaneously, enabling interstellar commerce and trade to flourish.

Lynch's film by necessity excises parts of the book while retaining the story's two main strands. One is the long-standing rivalry between two families, Houses Atreides and House Harkonnen, and their battle for lucrative mining rights on Arrakis. The second strand is the emergence of young Paul Atreides as the reluctant Messiah long-awaited by the natives of Arrakis, the Fremen. The deeply religious Fremen want control over their homeworld, and young Paul may be the fulfilment of their prophecy that a man would come from the outer worlds and lead them to freedom. Unfortunately, this epic story unfolds in a confusing and haphazard manner in the theatrical cut of the film, which runs 30 to 60 minutes shorter than what Lynch originally intended. The thinking among Universal's oh-so-wise money men was that films over two hours in duration were not popular with audiences at the time and would not do well at the box office. With Lynch's initial cut running at closer to three or more hours, the studio demanded that further cuts be made. What a great idea! Why not trim down an already complex film so as to make it almost incomprehensible? HA! Also, with such a big budget (for that time) I would have expected better FX. They are shoddy in many places; the spaceship designs do not stand the test of time and the boxy pink energy shield used in Paul's hand-to-hand combat practice sequence looks like something out of a primative Atari game.

The film is not totally without merit. David Lynch puts his directing skills to good use, especially when the material allows him to exercise his talent for dark, surreal imagery. Indeed, the film does achieve a very hypnotic atmosphere. Lynch captures and recreates the wonders of dry desert winds beating against frail human flesh; in a wilderness where water is as precious as blood. Paul Atreides's mysterious visions can stand alongside any Lynch-directed dream sequence, and the unnerving horror of the scenes with the sadistic Baron Harkonnen is enough to make him a classic Lynch villain. 'Toto' (heh) did compose a very good score, and the costumes are great. But while these things DO make the film worth watching, they simply cannot make up for the obvious weakness that dooms this product. There is simply not enough time to tell a coherent story with fleshed out characters. Very frustrating....

The DVD: The video transfer of the movie is quite good. Although not an anamorphic transfer, the quality of the picture is great. The unbelievable sets used are a wonder to behold. This movie has some very good looking shots in it. There are very few artifacts noticeable on the screen. Even though the movie is full of the color black and tan, the blue of the eyes of the Fremen stands out and looks beautiful. Certain reds jump off the screen. The special effects change the color of the sky from its usual light blue to the omnipresent tan. The Dolby Digital 5.1 sound of this movie is absolutely wonderful. The voices are easily understandable and the music has a good ambient feel. The special features on the DVD are limited. There is the original motion picture trailer for the movie. The production notes are very complete and are ten menus in length, with different still photos in the background. There are cast and crew biographies and filmographies of certain characters in the movie.

Rating:
Summary: Not adjective can describe this monstrosity.
Review: I have to give some credit to Lynch's "Dune" - the movie did have wonderful special effects, especially for 1984. But can special effects make a movie out of such an intricate and detailed novel as Frank Herbert's "Dune"? No way. First of all, whoever decided to butcher the book down into a two-hour movie was a moron. There is no way you can tell Herbert's story in two hours. The beginning of Lynch's "Dune" is excellent; while omitting ample detail, as anybody would have to, Lynch still stays true. Once Paul and Jessica travel into the desert, however, the movie takes a plundering drop down hill. It didn't even make sense to me, someone who has read the original "Dune" several times. What Herbert took 300 pages to tell (the last half of the book), Lynch does in 30 minutes. By the end, I was so disgusted I was nearly cheering for the Boron. It was repulsive.

Speaking of the Boron, why did Lynch feel the need to change his character so much? The warts didn't held, okay, Mr. Lynch? Neither did making him look like a complete buffoon who can't add 2 plus 2. I could go on and on, but I won't......

If you're a "Dune" fan, you're going to see this movie no matter what I say. Please don't expect much, though.

Rating:
Summary: The Sleeper Has Awakened... Hits Snooze Alarm
Review: Based on Frank Herbert's brilliant, epic novel, this has to be the dopiest movie about a drug deal gone wrong ever made. Seems the whole galaxy needs the super-coke found only on a certain desert planet. A convoluted conspiracy later and Kyle MacLachlan is riding a giant male body part through the desert and stabbing Sting in the neck so he can become the new Messiah.

Features about a thousand scenes where over-acting weirdos plot and babble a lot of nonsense about nothing, then things explode and people go on freaked-out acid trips and shout things like, "FATHER! THE SLEEPER HAS AWAKENED!" HO-scale spaceships fly over the sandbox, Virginia Madsen appears as the most beautiful space princess ever (Take that, Daphne Zuniga!) and a floating fat guy with horrible acne gets murdered by a midget with a thumb tack. Nice costumes, though.

If you must see this mess, try to catch the shorter, theatrical version. Sure, the longer edited-for-tv version almost actually makes sense- but that's because they cut out Madsen's original introduction and start with a 30-minute history lesson, complete with slides. Yawntastic! PS- that midget grew up to be Alicia Witt... mrrowwrrr!

Rating:
Summary: Atrocious! Not Atreides!
Review: This is the worst possible adaptation imaginable. I would have given them credit for changing the story in positive ways -- due to the difficulty of translating such a complex novel. However, this adaptation doesn't even succeed as good space opera.

The script, the art direction, the editing -- everything about this movie sucks.

I'm not one of those people who thinks that a movie should be faithful to a novel. In fact, a few movies have been definitely better than their books -- notably Jaws, even Silence of the Lambs (book was very good, the movie a masterpiece). However, the point in changing a story is to make something worth watching. Read the book and hope someone makes a better version some day. (I don't recommend the whole of Herbert's series. Dune is excellent. The rest get worse in rapid progression).

Rating:
Summary: miserable!
Review: Here's my problems with Dune, editing, the story is very entertaining up to the part where Paul and his mom are stranded out in the desert. Then the film takes a dive off a cliff, crashes and burns. Very lengthy and important parts of the novel are skipped over with just two sentences in the second half of the movie, they would have made entertaining parts of the film too! Some very important characters are barely in the film for 3 minutes, and the last 40 minutes are mind bogglingly incomprehensible and sloppy!

I'm not talking about Lynch's direction either, I'm more talking about his editing, I mean, I have NO IDEA whats supposed to be happening in the second half, who these characters are, what they are doing, and again, that embarrassing skip through the middle and the end, and main parts of the story itself. Imagine this, a film is going fine and well and the story is great, then say some mad person got a pair of scissors and started randomly cutting large parts of the film away, well thats what your seeing, so many things under developed, not enough explored, it could have been good like that too but the again the ending so horribly edited, the best part of the novel completely left out!

But on the bright side there are wonderfully dark sets and costumes, Lynch's direction is claustrophobic and hypnotic. Some people say the special effects are pretty bad, well if your going for realism I guess they are (except for the spice mines which are great looking and very realistic, but again, they are only in the movie for about 1 minute), but they give this film an other worldly quality.

Very disappointing and very unfinished movie, still very entertaining to watch, must be seen in widescreen only! There is an 190 minute cut which doesn't do much but make the film seem even sloppier. The best way to describe this movie is as one Dune fan said, a 2 hour trailer for an unfilmed 12 hour movie.

Rating:
Summary: The sand is too shallow for the sandworm
Review: David Lynch is the director of an excellent film, yet not a masterpiece. Frank Herbert's book is too long and especially too complex, with too many levels of consciousness and interactive reactive political discourses mixing theology, religion, politics, common sense, popular rebellion, tyranny, dictatorship, genocide, greed, perversion, rottenness, decay, love, flourishing humanity, nature, wilderness, imagination, psychology, technology and the most intense science fiction. This book cannot be reduced to two big hours of film, and most of its content cannot be set on the screen. So David Lynch chooses to direct a fantasy film, an action film, a rather simple film with a clear line and a swift plot. He vaguely evokes and touches the special powers of Paul Muad'hib or his mother, or his sister, or some others too, with special voices-over for some special inner monologues. But this is not very good on the screen. So the action is limited, the exploration of the Fremen is limited. The slow construction of the mystic and mythic personality of Paul Muad'hib is limited. Everything is limited, even the end of the book, the wedding of Paul with Princess Irulan, is not touched at all, tough it is the real knot tied around the neck of the Harkonnens, and the Emperor who will have to yield, sooner or later, his power. We regret this missing complexity and the intricacy of the book's plot. The film is great adventure, fine action, good special effects, and a few titillating actors, like Sting, but it does not have the depth of the book and it does not even prevent us from reading the book. In fact it entices us to go to the book and read it to have the real stuff and not something that looks like it but is not. The film is like some surrogate alcohol of the prohibition times, but it is no alcohol whatsoever. It has the appearance of the real stuff but it is nothing but a treacherous look that may make us think the book is shallow when it is so deep that even a sandworm might be unable to get to the bottom of it, to the spice melange of its marvellous pungent desertic imagination. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Paris Universities II and IX.