Class of '84: Dune

We have wormsign the likes of which GOD HAS NEVER SEEN!

Frank Herbert’s Dune is one of the greatest science fiction literary masterworks—its influence is beyond compare, going up to little things you may have heard of such as Star Wars. As a sprawling saga with infinitely intricate worldbuilding, you can bet that Hollywood producers had their eye on it since its publication in 1965. The first major attempted was by Alejandro Jodorowsky in the early seventies, who envisioned a trippy visual extravaganza incorporating the songs of Pink Floyd and other prog rock of all things. Might sound ridiculous now, but compared to other seventies scifi drugfests like Zardoz, it’s positively restrained.

For better or worse it never got through, but a lot of the production team moved on to an up and coming film called Alien. I recommend the 2013 documentary made on Jodorowsky’s Dune for more, as well as the recent one made for the former film, Memories.

Anyway, in the early eighties, a young director called David Lynch was given the task of bringing this to the big screen. People might know Lynch as the oddball Twin Peaks guy who makes really bizarre shit, even though he’s not that far out compared to some other loony directors once you dig in. Lynch hadn’t read the book nor was he that into scifi, but he went for it anyway, passing over a chance to direct friggin’ Return of the Jedi (now that would’ve been something!).

The result was…haphazard. The film starts with a character who’s peripheral at best basically spouting off a Wikipedia entry to convey as much of the book’s dense setting as possible as soon as possible. There’s ways to convey this all to an audience, and then there’s…this. The studio even went as far as to put printed primers in theaters just for the Joe Schmoe viewing public to make sense of it all.

But after that, we get to see why the film remains a cult favorite to some, in the form of all the visuals and costumes. We’re greeted to a vast Navigator mutant, whose guild makes a dark deal with the setting’s feudal emperor, and it’s a hell of a sight.

Man, Disneyland parades are getting weird.

 From rubber to robes to uniforms, be it of the protagonist House Atreides or the Bene Gesserit mystics, everyone has their own look that’ll stick with you. The modelwork is solid for the time, with the mighty sandworms of Dune itself still looking pretty dang good to me.

And the cast, despite everything, takes things on with gusto. You’ll recognize faces and voices like Brad Dourif, Jurgen Prochnow, Max von Sydow, and even Patrick Stewart with a mullet (not his silliest appearance in the eighties, as we’ll get to).

"Terrible hair styling, ENGAGE!"

There’s hamminess ahoy, especially from the main bad guy Duke Harkonnen, played by Kenneth McMillan. And if there’s one thing, one critical visual element, one iconic aspect above all that will burn into your lobes, it’s Sting as a rubber-clad henchman. And, at one point, emerging in his fancy futuristic Y-fronts just for you to laugh at. It’s glorious.

Kyle MacLahan plays protagonist Paul Atreides, who eventually takes up a crusade to avenge his family once they are betrayed on the titular desert world. Now, fans of the book will certainly take umbrage at the film’s huge simplification of his character. In the novel, Paul is certainly conflicted on the jihad he launches with the desert Fremen people, and his role as an apparent Messiah. Not here! Lynch has him fight his war with gusto, using these really silly sonic weapons that require people to make funny faces just to work! Admittedly you do have to simplify things on screen, but around here it becomes apparent just how much you have to spread things out just to get a workable adaptation.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but enjoy the final sequence, ludicrous as it is, involving a sandworm assault and explosions galore. The soundtrack is also great, swelling and bombastic, and while the script is a flawed adaptation riddled with cheesy dialogue and an onslaught of weird names and terminology to baffle the hell out of the public, there wasn’t that much else like it. A lot of eighties space opera, like Last Starfighter, tried to ape Star Wars, but here, we at least get an attempt a serious work of interstellar political intrigue, guerrilla war, and religious manoeuvring. The result was mixed at best, but there’s something to be said for the effort many people put in here.

This wasn’t the last attempt to adapt Dune; the Scifi Channel, or SyFy, or Siffy, or Shit Who Cares What They Call it Now, tried again in the 2000s. It was low-budget, but reportedly tried to be closer to the spirit of the book. But beyond that, the 90s also had a computer game series by the people who gave us the classic Command and Conquer. These ones mixed together aspects of the book and film to make their own continuity, with the gameplay bookended by silly but enjoyable live action cutscenes that mostly drew from the Lynch film.

Now, Denis Villenevue is trying once more with a two-parter flick. Time has passed that there’s more technology available, and with the book being something akin to Game of Thrones in space, it might just be more palatable to viewers. Still, if there’s one thing that can be said for Lynch, is that he always gives you something unique, and for all its flaws, that’s what 1984’s Dune is.