DUNE
Reviewed by Steve Biodrowski
David Lynch's film adaptation of Frank Herbert's DUNE is a frustrating, fascinating failure. Herbert's novel is one of the great pieces of science fiction literature, but its story is too dense with detail and too sprawling in its scope to be successful translated into a feature-length movie. The resulting film, greatly condensed, plays out like a Reader's Digest condensed version, with a multitude of characters flashing past the screen without the necessary time to understand their importance, their presence seen but seldom felt, their dangling plot threads left unraveled. On the plus side, as tangled and sometimes confusing as the patchwork storytelling is, it does still retain enough features from the original to suggest some small portion of the grand design of Herbert's book, and the production values convey the epic sweep that the story deserves.
On the plus side, DUNE is not a safe, conventional movie adaptation, wherein the text is embalmed in celluloid without any cinematic life of its own. Lynch, one of cinema's most idiosyncratic talents, creates numerous interesting and memorably bizarre visuals suggested by the text, and he does have a certain grasp on the mystic element of the story. However, he may have been too unique to handle a job that could perhaps have been more safely entrusted to a more straightforward filmmaker, and his strengths and weaknesses do not always compliment the material. Most obviously, he fails as an action director, never capturing the excitement and thrills that should have been seen in abundance in a film that is, effectively, a combination of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and STAR WARS.
The cast is perhaps the finest ensemble ever assembled, and their talent is enough to bring a glimmer of light to the proceedings; unfortunately, too much characterization has been pruned away in the truncated screenplay. Complicating matters, Lynch has trouble dealing with the idealistic and heroic characters, directing all of them to speak in slow and somber tones that suggest a pseudo-Shakespearian approach to the material, weighing it down with a ponderous attempt at profundity instead of letting the actors breath something like genuine life into the roles. As if to counter this dead weight, Lynch allows his villains to chew scenery in a merciless fashion that borders on camp.
In the end, Lynch's film is too slow and misguided to be regarded as a success, and Herbert fans are likely to be highly disappointed (although the late author expressed considerable approval when the film was made). Lynch fans, on the other hand, are likely to find some redeeming value, even if it is only the curiosity value of seeing what their favorite independent filmmaker could do when turned loose upon a multi-million dollar production from a major studio (a sight we are not likely to see again).
Despite its there is just enough good in DUNE to make it easy to imagine a better, longer version, one that retains more of Herbert's story. A longer version does exist, but sadly, it is little improvement over the director's original cut.
EXTENDED VERSION
In 1988, Universal Pictures prepared an extended cut of DUNE that would fill a two-part, four-hour slot on syndicated television stations. The running time was reported as 187 minutes (excluding commercials). David Lynch had his named removed from the credits as writer-director; the on-screen credits in this version are "Screenplay by Judas Booth" and "Directed by Alan Smithee." It is not hard to understand why.
Lynch's original cut featured Princess Urulan (played by Virginia Madsen, who was later nominated for an Oscar for SIDEWAYS), setting the scene by speaking directly to the audience. This was the writer-director's somewhat forced attempt to capture an important element of the novel, which is laced with excerpts supposedly culled from books written by the princess. While not totally successful, this filmic device at least set the tone and let viewers know from whose point of view this exposition was being delivered. The longer cut removes Urulan and replaces her with a feeble-voiced anonymous male narrator.
The film begins with an intolerable ten-minute prologue, during which the voice drones on and on while paintings of the different characters and planets flash on screen. There is not enough visual material to wrap up this heavy load of exposition, so the same paintings are used and reused until the scene seems interminable.
The longer version does add several bits and pieces that help make more sense of the film, clarifying plot points and filling in details of characterization. But it was cut for broadcast television, eliminating several of Lynch's disturbing visuals, and the absurdly patronizing narration intrudes at regular intervals, explaining far more than we need to know, as if assuming that the audience is comprised of idiots who won't understand what's happening unless they are led by the nose. In fact, the narration often merely states blunt facts that will eventually emerge naturally through the dialogue. Worse, the voice-over further slows down the pace of an already plodding film: in several cases, long takes with no action have been added of individual characters standing in front of the camera while the narrator tells us who they are.
As if this were not bad enough, the restored footage is completely lacking in visual effects. During the battles at the climax, characters brandish "weirding modules" that emit no flash when fired, and the optically enhanced blue eyes of the Fremen (a sign of addiction to Dune's major product -- a spice that grants psychic powers) are also painfully obviously missing.
As a result, the extended cut is at best a curiosity, a further aborted glimpse at what DUNE might have been on film if given the chance to break the confines of feature-length limitations. For viewers willing toe endure the narration, it is interesting to see the longer, intact scenes that give a fuller sense of the story and universe that Frank Herbert created, but these small virtues are hardly enough to compensate for the fact that many of these new scenes were clearly never finished before being cut into the movie.
The theatrical cut was a bit of a mess, but at least it was an interesting mess. As the writer-director would later do with WILD AT HEART, David Lynch grafted his own obsessions and weird visuals onto an excellent narrative, creating an uneasy and not totally satisfying mixture. He didn't have a good feel for noble heroics, and when it comes to handling action and space opera, he was a bit out of his depth.
At least he had a strong grasp of the surreal and mystical elements in Herbert's story, and he rendered them on screen in terms that displayed Lynch's own unique vision, resulting in a film that was flawed but distinct -- not just another anonymous Hollywood blockbuster. Perhaps a better cut of the film could have been fashioned from the material that Lynch shot, but the expanded edition is not it.
DVD DETAILS
Universal Home Video's two-disc DVD set contains two versions of the film: David Lynch's original cut and an extended cut. There are also a handful of good extras; unfortunately, there is no participation from Lynch, who has apparently disowned the project since it was re-edited against his wishes.
The DVDs comes in a nice metallic box, containing a four-page booklet that lists the bonus features and also provides a useful "DUNE Terminology" -- i.e., a list of definitions of the unfamiliar words and phrases heard in the film.
The first disc contains the theatrical cut (2 hours and 17 minutes) along with seven bonus features. The second disc features the extended cut, with a listed running time of 2 hours and 57 minutes. (This is ten minutes shorter than that the reported running time for the syndicated television version, presumably because the film runs continuously, without a break, and therefore does not need to show the credits twice or provide previews of the upcoming episode or a wrap up from the previous episode.) Both versions are letterboxed at the 2.35 Panavision aspect ratio, with Dolby 5.1 surround sound in English and subtitles in English, French and Spanish. The theatrical cut offers a French stereo track; the extended cut is English-audio only.
None of the bonus features comes to grips with the heart of the DUNE problem, which was grappling with how to faithfully translate Frank Herbert's excellent epic novel to the screen; instead, the focus on technical details. The closest any comes to providing real insight is the first feature, "Deleted DUNE." The rest offer fairly interesting snapshots of specific behind-the-scenes details, of interest mostly to techno-geeks rather than general filmgoers.
- "Deleted DUNE" begins with an introduction by producer Raffaella DeLaurentiis, who explains that the first rough cut of the film, before special effects were added, was over four hours long. Realizing that this was far too much footage, Lynch cut out large portions of the film and scripted a new sequence to fill in the exposition that had been deleted. Raffaella her confirms what Lynch himself has said in interviews: there was a four-hour cut of the film, but it was only a rough cut, never a "director's cut," and the film was never meant to be released in that form; in fact, the deleted scenes were never completed in terms of post-production sound and special effects. This missing footage itself is quite interesting, providing numerous glimpses of events that would have helped fill out the story and make it more accessible to an audience unfamiliar with the book. Curiously, several of these deleted scenes do not appear in the extended cut or appear only in highly truncated form. (And as a matter of fact, much additional footage in the extended cut does not appear among the deleted scenes included here.)
- "Designing DUNE" provides a glimpse of the extensive production design that went into bringing Frank Herbert's universe to life on film. This featurette provides about the only admission that the DUNE adaptation was not a complete success, in terms of capturing the story, but extols the films visual virtues.
- "DUNE FX" looks at the pyrotechnics involved in the film's battle sequences. The most amusing anecdotes revolves around the car tires burned to create black smoke in the desert -- a technique that would not be allowed in today's more environmentally conscious era. Also of note, the footage showing the sand explosions in the desert clearly reveals, on at least two occasions, that springboards that launch the stuntmen into the air as the pretend to be hit by a blast.
- "DUNE Models" examines the miniature and mechanical effects used to create space ships and to fly the film's obese villain, the Baron Harkonnen, with an apparent show of anti-gravity. The funniest bit is Raffaella DeLaurentiss lamenting the difficulties of creating sandworms in the days before computer-generated imagery; she admits that the miniature worms always looked like "phallic symbols or giant turds."
- "DUNE Wardrobe" reveals the extensive costume demands often kept the wardrobe department up until all hours of the night, finishing their work just in time to film the next day. Many details had to be fabricated at the last minute, using available bits and pieces; for example, the Sardaukar breathing apparatus was actually made of car radiator hoses. Also of note: the costumes for the Guild Navigators were made from body bags retrieved from a 1920s firehouse.
- "DUNE Photo Gallery" is an extensive collection of behind-the-scenes photos (many including director Lynch and author Herbert), along with numerous production design paintings.
- "DUNE Production Notes" provides a thumbnail history of the making of the movie. There are some interesting details: for example, Mexico City was chosen for filming because it offered desert locations conveniently close to a viable film studio, but the thin mountain air (the city is located on a plateau) was an extra burden on the cast, as was the 120-degree heat during filming on the sands of the desert.
RELATED ARTICLES: Dune: The Long and the Short of It (the story behind the extended cut)
