My main problem with Lynch’s Dune, aside from the obvious criticisms, is that it doesn’t get the book, especially some of the stuff that makes it weird.
#DAVID LYNCH DUNE MOVIE#
Michel is right to identify this scene as one of the best in that movie - even if it also is guilty of a big exposition dump: At its best, Lynch’s Dune does capture that. Dune created an immersive world somewhat rooted in our own - all the characters are human after all (well, except the Harkonnens) - yet also wholly distinct from it. In this context, Dune was a breath of fresh spice in a mutated human’s space-folding aquarium.
#DAVID LYNCH DUNE FULL#
Science fiction literature was still full of mind-expanding ideas and boundary pushing concepts of course, but Hollywood was successfully turning the genre into something safe, kid-friendly, and prepackaged for the masses. It was released one year after Return of the Jedi, a film more concerned with corporate toy sales than otherworldly visions. To say that Lynch made a weird film is like saying water is wet. So while we all wait for Denis Villeneuve’s version of Dune-one I have some hopes for, I should say-to be released and replace it in the pop culture consciousness, I want to praise David Lynch’s Dune for keeping science fiction strange. But it’s a beautiful mess that’s far more memorable than the average aesthetic-free, polished-to-dullness blockbuster SFF films of today. The awkward pacing, the confusing plot, the big exposition dumps in dialogue. It’s not that the criticisms of the film are all wrong. Writing for Tor.com, however, Lincoln Michel finds something to admire in Lynch’s Dune: It is quite appropriately weird: Yet he largely considers Dune a disaster, a product of his inexperience with large-scale film production and of over-interference by the studio. Lynch, then fresh off The Elephant Man (and having turned down the opportunity to direct Return of the Jedi), is now probably best known for the exquisite weirdness of his work, particularly as manifested in the TV series Twin Peaks. In writing about the greatness of Frank Herbert’s 1965 epic sci-fi novel Dune in the latest issue of National Review in advance of the release of Denis Villeneuve’s forthcoming film version, I alluded to “a misbegotten prior adaptation.” By that, I meant director David Lynch’s 1984 attempt to bring Herbert’s vision to screen.