My purpose here is partially review but mainly preparatory, because I'm really looking forward to the upcoming release of another Dune adaptation given my previously documented affinity for the works of its director. In order to have a broad platform from which to judge the coming release, I decided not too long ago to re-read the book, and then watch this movie for comparison.
It's a trash fire.
And I mean that in the kindest way possible. I cannot fathom how somebody sits down to adapt the story of the novel Dune and winds up here, unless they passed through several levels of Hell first. Characters are misrepresented or fundamentally altered, major story points are omitted or outright changed for no gain and quite a bit of loss, and in an attempt to outdo Peter Jackson a full 30 years in advance they added content from the sequels that didn't need to be there and makes the story objectively worse. The end product is so far removed from the source material as to be nearly unrecognizable, and I haven't even started to touch on the technical aspects of the film-making that make this haphazardly thrown-up vomit-slicked toilet-bowl of a movie essentially unwatchable.
Bless. Its. Heart.
The Movie Itself
So in a break with tradition for me I'm going to start by whining about the production itself. The things that will make you want to tear your hair out whether or not you ever read Dune. Things like a cast of characters with wildly varying accents even in cases when they're ostensibly supposed to be in the same family. There's this thing in books called a narrator, or POV character. In the case of Dune you can think of your narrator sort of like God; it's third-person omniscient. This means that every main character's thoughts get presented to the reader in real-time as they're thinking them. This is a literary device that helps readers understand the motivations and intentions of the characters they're reading about.
It's a literary device. I don't care what you think about David Lynch, but taking that literary device, which really only works in written-word formats, and using that exact thing in cinema is... Well, go watch Dune and I'm sure you'll agree that it's pants-crappingly awful. Every single character is constantly stopping to deliver hyper-present ASMR narration describing their internal monologue. This tendency starts almost immediately, and doesn't ever actually stop. It is, bar none, the most obnoxious thing I've seen in a movie with an actual production budget. And, bizarrely, this movie was nominated for an Oscar for its sound design.
The Academy was clearly smoking something that year. Par for the course though, really.
The acting was also largely emotionless, and where it wasn't it was outright disturbing. Again, I get that one of the key points of Dune is that humanity, as a whole, has evolved into a state of widespread moral decay that renders them essentially alien to us, but if you give a performance that is so far removed from your audience that there is nothing they can relate to, they're going to check out pretty quickly. Also, turning the navigators into literal aliens in a fictional universe with no actual aliens... um, that was bold.
And there were good chunks of the production design that just utterly failed to be inspiring. The alien navigator thing was one of them. That creature design was grotesque and stupid, and the puppet they made for it was actually worse than the puppets in the cockpit of the ship from Flight of the Navigator. The ships themselves were also uninspiring, all of them seemingly designed as a giant space suppository. With the exception of the Harkonnen ships, which apparently came from a Sesame Street episode brought to you by the letter T.
And then there were the plot holes, of which there are many. The movie is a speedrun through a 500 page book, and some idiot somewhere decided it would be a good idea to add more content to that speedrun than was actually in the book. So of course there are plot holes. At this point I'd like to mention some of the most frustrating places where the movie changed the book, so from here on out beware spoilers for Dune.
The novel Dune, I mean. I couldn't care less about spoiling this dumpster of a movie.
The Lady Jessica and the Bene Gesserit
There is a lot to hate about the portrayal of Jessica and the Bene Gesserit in this movie, between Jessica's lack of backbone and the overall lack of development regarding the order, by which I mean that essentially nothing was developed besides their hairlines. But the single most damaging omission, as far as telling the story at hand goes, is to remove the effects of the Bene Gesserit Missionaria Protectiva. No mention was made of past voyages to the planet that sowed the seeds Jessica used to ensure the loyalty of the Fremen. Yes, they mentioned the Kwisatz Haderach several times, but in the context of the film that appears to be a literal messianic figure, not a cultural scapegoat seeded by the Bene Gesserit throughout the galaxy to ensure they had the handles to steer a populace if needed.
Yes, it turns out that Paul is the Kwisatz Haderach, but all that means is that he's a genetically perfect human, the result of centuries of selective breeding, and so he can see the future better than reverend mothers or navigators. There were no actual prophecies, no actual involvement of deity, all of that was Jessica ensuring the survival of her children. The jihad Paul saw in his visions was a result of the Bene Gesserit's meddling, not divine will. The movie makes it look like Paul is a literal messiah, which completely changes the story being told, and not in nice ways.
House Atreides troops and Duke Leto
This was my most consistent gripe with the movie, considering it cropped up in literally the first scene. The Pradishah Emperor suggests that Leto is raising an army to rival his own Sardaukar using some kind of technology related to sound. When this was first mentioned I had hoped that it was simply misdirection, intended to show that the Emperor and the Baron simply had no idea how to actually lead. But then they reference "weirding modules" that Paul uses to train, that are destroyed by the Harkonnens, and which are then recreated to give the Fremen the fighting prowess needed to defeat the Harkonnens. This utterly destroys Leto's character value, undermining Paul's development and rendering Jessica functionally useless.
We'll talk more about the "weirding way" in a minute, but I just want it to be clear that the reason House Atreides troops were so effective is two-fold. First, they were being trained by the likes of Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck, two of the most accomplished fighters in the galaxy. Second, they were motivated to train hard by loyalty to and love of their Duke, not fear the way every other army was trained. The loyalty and love Leto inspired in his friends, family, and troops was what made him special. There is no sign of that in the movie, which sorta begs the question of why he's even there.
Duncan Idaho and Liet Kynes
A lot of the main characters are misused and abused in this movie, come to think of it. Thufir Hawat is just sorta there, and his plot thread is abandoned pretty unceremoniously at the end. Gurney Halleck is similarly just sorta there, though I guess he rescues the Duke's dog? Or something? But I was actually livid with how under-developed and under-utilized Duncan and Kynes were. Look, it's a minor thing, but between the two of them they are the reason Paul and Jessica don't actually die during the Harkonnen attack. Duncan is the reason the Fremen even care about the Atreides, and Liet is a Fremen leader who paves the way for outsiders to be accepted among them.
Instead we get a Liet Kynes who does... well, as far as I can tell, nothing. Remove him from the movie and nothing is missing. And Duncan gets basically no screen time and then just sorta dies for no reason while Paul and Jessica are being dragged away. Again, serving functionally no purpose in the narrative of the film. Also, he got shot in the head? With an active shield? The whole freaking point of the shields in Dune is that they don't let fast moving things like bullets through at all. If you want to kill a shielded person, you have to stab them with a knife. Slowly. They even point that out at the beginning of the movie, so that bullet falls squarely into the plot hole category in addition to being wildly inaccurate to the source material.
The Fremen and the Weirding Way
And then there's this. Look, the last issue in this post serves to explain why we didn't get nearly the development of the Fremen as we should have, but the first thing you've got to understand is that they are, to a one, magnificently skilled fighters. When the Sardaukar first show up the Fremen fight them. These are the Emperor's elite soldiers, supposedly the best in the galaxy, and the Fremen are killing them at a rate of 1 to 5. This is before Jessica or Paul have done anything. The "weirding way" is simply a label the Fremen give to Jessica's Bene Gesserit training, a sort of intense self-control that makes her and Paul even more effective killers than the Fremen. This impresses the already hyper-competent Fremen, and it's that awe combined with Liet Kynes' and Duncan Idaho's preparations that cause the Fremen to take Paul and Jessica in instead of killing them outright.
The whole "weirding module" was fabricated for the movie. The Fremen didn't use guns much, they mostly used knives in close quarters because that's how virtually all fighting in this universe happens. There was no shouty words-of-power technology, Jessica just taught them better self control and they became even more effective killers than they already had been. Thus, when the final battle arrives, they mow through the Sardaukar with vigor, strong in their own right. The movie's invention makes no sense with the rest of the universe, reduces the competence of the Fremen to triviality, and renders Jessica's presence in the second half of the movie entirely unnecessary. Genuinely, she could have died in Arrakeen and nothing. Would have. Changed.
Two-Thirds of the Book in One-Third of the Movie
Honestly that's generous. The last two-thirds of the book were compressed into maybe 30 minutes of the movie, which has a 137 minute run-time. Entire fundamental plot points were glossed over with a single line of narration, and it's not just the story that suffered. The literal structure of the movie, the basic building blocks of entertainment, were dumped on by this fact. The rising action toward the actual climax of the film? About 5 minutes. They shove all of that, plus Paul's actual relationship and understanding of his powers, into a 5 minute montage before the final battle. Which is itself then boring as snot.
From what I understand the original edit of this film that David Lynch delivered to the studio was five hours long, and then the studio hired some other crappy director to cut that edit down to two hours. I'm sure that a lot of connective tissue was lost in that edit, and that's probably largely responsible for this particular... issue. Which means that, unlike all of the prior problems, you probably can't blame Lynch for this.
Look, in the end, the movie is awful. It's awful as a movie, and it's awful as an adaptation of Dune. It's simultaneously too short while also being too bloated. You can cut half the named characters without altering any major plot points (Duncan, Kynes, Gurney, Leto, Stilgar, Irulan, Feyd-Rautha, Rabban, Shadout Mapes, Jessica for about half of it... okay, maybe more than half of the named characters). Don't watch it. Not even for the "Dune fan cred", it's not worth it. David Lynch's Dune is a directionless torrent of diarrhea that just sorta splashes around for two hours until everyone has drowned in feces.
No amount of stillsuits are gonna recover all that lost water.
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