On David Lynch's 'Dune' | Hacker News Reader

On David Lynch's 'Dune'

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Lynch's Dune is one of my all time favourite movies. I watched it a lot growing up and it didn't make a lick of sense to me, but I still loved the world it created. Later on I saw the extended edition (on laser disk baby!) and it became a lot more clear. And then finally I read the book and it all made sense to me.

Yes the SyFy Mini-Series is more true to the book, but their pronunciations make it unbearable to watch for me. "Hark-e-nin" vs "Har-ko-nin" drives me up the wall.

Another thing I love about it is how surreal Lynch creates the future. To me it's one of the most immersive sci-fi movies that really takes you out of this reality and into it's own and it does it with minimal flash and special effects.

The Guild navigators are gross and amazing. The Lynch Baron Harkonin is possibly my favourite Sci-fi villain of all time.

Mostly agree... I have always loved the look of Lynch's Dune... I want the look of Lynch's Dune with the story telling of the mini series... :)

Yes! I love this movie! I watched it often growing up and still revisit it today. It wasn't until I was a teenager when I found out it was supposedly 'bad.' I've been having conversations where I'm on defense about it ever since. Most people just tell me I like it because I grew up with it, they might be right, but that won't stop me proudly declaring "that movie is fucking rad," when I hear co-workers or friends bring it up.

Any fans of Dune should check out the exceptionally good documentary about the aborted film version by surrealist film maker Alejandro Jodorowsky.

The vision he had for his film far outstripps anything seen in the Lynch film or TV show.

Trailer here: http://youtu.be/GOaGoFqTWtw

Jodorowsky is an avant garde filmmaker. I suspect we would have gotten more of an interpretation than an adaptation. It still would have been interesting, but I don't think it will fill the void that a lot of people seem to have for a true Dune movie. I felt like this documentary sold it as a adaptation. Regardless, this documentary, and Jodorowsky's works are worth checking out.

It would have been amazing if Jodorowsky's Dune actually got made and released. He really was too far ahead of his time for the studio.

I feel that in order to make a roughly 2-hour long film on as complex a subject as what the novel portrays, the only way to illustrate that complexity properly is to ascribe to surrealist elements. That is the only form that can provide the necessary density, if done properly. Lynch knew this, which is why he took on the project, but was later pressured by the studio and his vision was lost. He did a pretty admirable job considering.

Lynch's pedigree speaks for itself:

Blue Velvet: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090756/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_23 Lost Highway: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116922/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_16 Mulholland Drive: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0166924/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_14 Twin Peaks... etc...

I really liked "Jodorowky's Dune" but I'm convinced his film would have been a disaster. For example, the ending would have consisted of Dune, the newly sentient "enlightened" planet, flying around the galaxy to enlighten the other worlds.

It really had little to do with the book.

The soundtrack was recorded:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExNDte-KrCA&list=PLYhc50FbOD...

I have to assume Jordorowsky was trying to be so excessively exuberant about the film making process just for the hell of it.

I've seen the movie about the movie, and I've seen some of Jodorowsky's work.

I dunno, man.... :) Too bad CGI wasn't available earlier in his career.

I'm not sure whether or not it would have been a good movie, and its deviations from the source material would surely have driven me up a wall, but there we parts of that documentary that gave me goosebumps.

Absolutely recommended to watch.

I read the book before the movie, yet I still liked the movie. It's not a pure adaptation by any means but it has style, it's not really good but it's glorious. It's a mess but there's imagination and it took guts to make this movie. And I love the guild navigators!

By contrast the Scyfy mini-serie is closer to the book but is boring in that it doesn't bring anything compared to the book.

Granted last time I saw the Lynch movie was 20 years ago about but I'll watch it again this month :-)

Another completely different take on Dune that used scenes from the movie and was really great even though it was very loosely based on the book was the game from Cryo. If you have a chance to play it, do it. It's a very weird and interesting mix of adventure and strategy.

It's actually kind of amazing how much inspiration this book gave to multiple innovative projects from the Lynch movie, the Jodorowsky movie (I wish I could go to a parallel universe where this movie got made...), the first real RTS Dune 2, the weird and imaginative Dune game from Cryo...

The Dune game from Cryo is one of my favorite games of all time. It has cartoony graphics and solid controls so it is still a very playable game and the combination of adventure and strategy is really well done. Would love to see more games combining adventure and strategy like that. Though I am afraid as a genre it doesn't cater to a very wide audience.

I actually like Lynch's Dune. There are dozens of us, dozens!

I actually really liked that movie. It's not action packed, but IMO it captures what it feels like to read a book better than most movies.

Me too... I think it is the narration that kills it for most people. I get the distinct feeling that someone decided at the last minute that the audience needed to be spoon-fed explanations for everything. Star Wars did just fine with equally cryptic dialogue ("Many Bothan spies died to bring us this information"; "bulls-eyed womp rats in my T-16" etc.). It's like life: people sometimes say things you don't understand.

Its on my top 10 movies of all time.

I love that movie.

Why would anyone think it's bad?

I also liked it. Perhaps it had something to do with being 10 years old and never having read the book, but I think it stands on its own as an artistic achievement. There are many ways to adapt a screenplay, but I don't think any of them could really satisfy true Dune fans.

Oh, I love it. Not because it's good, it's not, it's an incoherent mess; but it's a great incoherent mess. By which I mean that it tries so hard and fails so badly I end up somehow seeing through it to the vision of the film Lynch was trying to make, which is a masterpiece. It's fascinating.

And there are moments of brilliance to it. The Guild Navigators! The Emperor's Court! The spacecraft design! I even love the poorly matted and ludicrously scaled sandworms, which convey a sense of grandeur that modern films somehow have trouble with. Oh, and Toto's soundtrack is great.

Ah, here we go.

David Lynch's sandworm ride: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld2DMsyy0go

Scifi channel's sandworm ride: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVqXE9ZY5wk

Which of those is more fun?

I'd rather have a glorious failure like Dune over the polished insult that was Avatar any day.

Next I will explain why Van Helsing is one of my favourite films...

Next I will explain why _Van Helsing_ is one of my favourite films...

That would be interesting.

Kate Beckinsale at her most beautiful and full auto Gatling crossbow.

Also vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein's Monster, the Brides of Dracula, Mr. Jeckyll and Doctor Hyde, a secret religious order with steampunk antivampire Bond gadgets, an excellent soundtrack, decent production quality, and some surprisingly good performances with just the right amount of scenery chewing (which in the case of the actor who plays Dracula is AS MUCH AS IS HUMANLY POSSIBLE).

To my mind it neatly hits the sweet spot where there's just the right amount of ludicrousness to be fun but which is then played completely straight, so it doesn't quite cross the border into camp. The result is something which I find enormously entertaining. I suspect that leads had a lot of fun making this.

Bear in mind it did get 23% on Rotten Tomatoes, so YMMV. (Obviously everybody except me must be wrong.)

> Next I will explain why Van Helsing is one of my favourite films...

I hope it wasn't sarcasm because you made me look for it on Netflix :).

For me, the Lynch one is better because it was clearly filmed in a desert. The SciFi one is just too obviously a soundstage.

It was the CGI equivalent of matting for nearly the whole movie. Sill a very nice looking but unnatural film. Which seems appropriate.

I think Lynch's characterizations were superior. But the SciFi one was long enough to do a better turn to the book.

One of the YouTube comments on the SciFi version sums it up best for me: "Dune, a miniseries from Roger Corman"

I saw it in 1984; fell asleep (seriously). Watched it again over the years and it is in my top ten. The author of the article insists Paul became a superman? Or (and I am way out on a limb here) did it rain because of the massive sandworm activity, creating so much atmospheric dust and electrostatic lightning, creating larger nucleating particles, causing it to finally rain? Admittedly never paid that much attention to that part, just the ambiance.

I'm with you. I definitely don't hate it like many seem to. No, it's not a to-the-letter portrayal of the book, nor does it do a great job of portraying the "subtleties," but it's probably much better off not doing that. Look at the evolution in the Harry Potter movies. The first few tried to jam pack several hundred pages of detail into 2 and change hours, and miserably fail to make "good" movies on their own or good enough adaptations for the rabid fans of the books. The last few stopped trying to cover every chapter of the book in favor of better scenes and movie storytelling and were (IMO) much better for it. No, there isn't a navigator portrayed as a slug in the first book (though they show up that way in later books), and the Weirding Way is just some overthought martial arts, but I'd rather watch a movie with space slugs folding space and mmmbop sound cannons to visualize the things that don't translate well into visual/auditory space from text. If I were to pick an issue with the movie, it's that Lynch used a bunch of narration instead of coming up with creative ways of representing that stuff.

There is an uncanny valley for book to screen adaptations. Lynch's Dune is just far enough out of the bottom of that valley that I can enjoy it as an incredibly expensive, overproduced sci-fi movie based on the Herbert universe by the same name.

A related epic failure, that gave so much to film even though it was never made:

Jodorowsky's Dune

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg4OCeSTL08

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky's_Dune

They discuss Lynch's version in the film. Highly recommended viewing for all sci-fi enthusiasts.

Dune needs/needed the Game of Thrones treatment. Full seasons to develop the story and characters.

The film was interesting mess. It was very beautiful visually. It was also very stupid - both Harkonen and the Aes Sed .. I mean Ben Gesserit were just a pale shadow of themselves without the depth in the book. And we had naked Sting in thongs which is something that the Geneva Convention strictly forbids to be unleashed on civilians.

Robert Jordan wrote the Wheel of Time long after Dune.

Frank Herbert seemed to like it...

http://io9.gizmodo.com/5458417/new-evidence-that-frank-herbe...

The extended directors cut edition was much better.

I saw the film before reading the book and it inspired me to read the book.

I thought the movie whilst not perfect was very well done.

Man, these book-movie comparisons always annoy the hell out of me.

If a painter paints a cliff-side seascape, and a dozen years later a sculptor sculpts the painting as a bas-relief, you don't judge the sculptor because his sculpture didn't measure up to the painting. He's not a painter. He didn't paint a picture, he made a sculpture. It's the same subject, even the same perspective, but they are two completely independent works of art made by two separate artists. The fact that the cliff was in both works is inconsequential because the works stand by themselves.

The same goes for novel-film "adaptations". It's a different work, produced by a different artist, and involves a completely different process to accomplish. They aren't supposed to be the same. They can't be the same. If you like the novel, enjoy the novel. If you like the movie, like the movie. If you don't, that's fine too. But stop comparing them, please.

It's an implied promise when someone announces they are adapting some beloved work that there will be some level of faithfulness to the source material. That is why many people pay to see it, and they have a right to be disappointed when that promise is unfulfilled. No it is not required or even possible for it to be 100% faithful, but it's ridiculous to say an adaptation should not be compared to the original. "Don't act offended by this movie of bacon cooking that is my adaptation of Casablanca. What did you expect it be exactly the same?"

If only it had more sex in the novels, it is basically the next Game of Thrones scale.

Maybe if they "fleshed" it out with more drama between the houses, and Dune's portion only came as the later seasons.

Fleshing out the badassery of:

- Bene Gesserits - Sardaukar - Navigators - Spice use - Mentats

The alien culture of Dune is kind of it's problem. GOT is basically just a middle ages Europe riff, much easier to understand.

But Dune is still close since it's technology use limits makes it accessible to our imagination. And the things that aren't can be teased out...

It's amazing to me that Dune, in 412 pages, develops a more fully fleshed-out universe than A Song of Ice and Fire does in 4,223 (so far).

It's too easy to criticize the film, but I wouldn't want to be in Lynch's shoes. He was too inexperienced and the book is far too large and there were many other constraints. All in all it must have been a terrible experience.

I however really like the art style. A weird mix of 19th century uniforms and steam punk(?). Also: The navigator is the best navigator I've seen so far.

"To that point, one of the more prevalent criticisms, specifically from Roger Ebert, was that the movie was ugly."

The movie is intensely influential on me, aesthetically.

I really disliked the that Dune miniseries[1]. There was some really awful acting and very cheap looking sets throughout a lot of it.

I also thought they got the tone of Paul's character completely wrong. To me he came across starting off as an arrogant thug whereas my perception of him from the books was a very thoughtful and reserved young man. (Obviously subjective viewpoint, but it put me off right from the start.)

OTOH, the audiobook produced by Audible I thought was very good. I've probably read the book four or five times, the last time well over a decade ago. I listened to the audiobook recently and really enjoyed it and reminded me how much I liked the first book[2].

[1] Have not seen the Children of Dune miniseries.

[2] I'm in the "first book was good, the rest was crap" camp. I read through 'til about halfway through Heretics of Dune before asking myself why I was still reading and stopped.

I have to login and comment to express my disappointment with the bad reviews this movie has always gotten.

Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 56%, which is really sad. Here are two of the negative reviews.

Corliss:

   Most sci-fi movies offer escape, a holiday from homework, but Dune is as difficult as a final exam. You have to cram for it.

Ebert:

   This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time.

This movie is Lynch interpretation of a very complex book and he did so while still being faithful to its uniqueness. He gave us visual aesthetics that are very different from our standard views of space travel (ie: arabesque spaceships and gothic outfits) and didn't skip over the less popular concepts of mind evolution present in the book

What can I say? This movie deserves more recognition than a 56% score.

I am a David Lynch fan, I loved Dune. I lent out my DVD copy to a few people and everyone hated it. I've never read the book, I really should, considering that when I do actually read (very occasionally), it is more than likely sci-fi; and I've never seen any of the series' that were made. Basically I watched Dune because I'm a David Lynch fan and all of my knowledge of Dune comes from the film, so I guess it's not all that accurate? Anyway, I liked it because of the atmosphere, and the story; it's certainly unique, but that's Lynch for you.

Alejandro Jodorowsky's version would have been incredible. There is a documentary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune) about it. Shows a lot of the concept art and describes the vision Jodorowsky and the others had. I think he got salvador dali to agree to take part under some outrageous terms.

The movie was good- for the time it was rare to see many decent SCIFI movies made at all. There is no way they could capture the nuance of those books and expecting that is a recipe for frustration.

That said, Scifi did an amazing job of the books and they are well worth watching

these books are so incredible well written, but because of their style - very inner thought and subtlety focused - I think any director would have a difficult time realizing the intricacies and tense plots of the books.

But if captured in the tone of Frank Herberts novels, I think the series could easily rival Game of Thrones, it certainly is epic enough. And that is something I would love to see onscreen.

Oddly, I have the feeling these novels aren't that popular (compared to Lotr or GoT or even some Philip K Dick), which is equally odd to me b/c they certainly are just as incredible intricant, fascinating and innovative.

Dune is probably the bestselling science fiction novel ever. By 2000, it had sold more than 12,000,000 copies[1]. It also won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. It's true that it hasn't penetrated popular culture like Game of Thrones but I think the reasons why are obvious.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/03/tv/cover-story-future-myth...

One of the those movies that critics love to bash, but it's actually pretty good -- if you don't judge it by the book. The book is in a whole different stratosphere.

The David Lynch movie was both good and original. However the bits that were good where not original, and the bits that were original were not good.

I'm referring primarily to the script. The set design was a very good 1984 interpretation of the feel for the book, I thought.

I really want somebody with a budget to take this on like LOTR.

Where did this come from? Is someone planning a remake?

There was an attempt recently but it was aborted. The concept art looked a touch dodgy too me (pink tiger strips on spaceships) so I'm kinda glad it never became anything.

Wish someone would do a full scale remake though (LotR style big)

The Sci-Fi channel (when it was still Sci-Fi...) did do a miniseries version of Dune[1]. Some people apparently don't like it, and they did make it on a relatively low budget, but I like it, and it feels more like what I imagined reading the books than the David Lynch freakshow.

Seriously, "weirding modules"...?

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0142032/

agreed. I liked them as well. Though probably heresy, the Sci-Fi series of the first two books were how I got into Dune.

I went on to read all the Frank Herbert written Dune books and I still like the Sci-Fi series.

I also enjoyed the SciFi series. While it didn't posses the same level of Artiness that the Lynch adaptation had, it definitely was a very beautiful movie.

There was very little CGI in the movie. Seriously real sets and some absolutely massive and impressive ones at that. All of the interiors of the palaces on Arrakis? Wow.

The backdrops weren't CGI either, nor were they Matte paintings. They used Translights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translight which are basically gigantic sheets of plastic that hang behind the sets meaning the actors actually got to stand on real sets and actually see the world around them and I think it showed in the quality of the acting. Actors don't act well when they aren't able to immerse themselves in the world they are pretending to be in. Watch the LOTR making-of documentary where Andy Serkis explains how he basically inserted himself into parts of filming that Peter Jackson didn't think a Voice/Motion-Cap actor needed to be involved in (not that Jackson objected, he embraced the ideas, but just didn't realize it at first).

Speaking of the acting, I hear a lot of people complain about Alec Newman, calling his character "wooden". Hard tasks need hard ways and hard ways need hard people. I think he nailed it.

Yeah. If you combine the -er- art direction [0] and fight scenes of the Lynch Dune with most everything that's not a fight scene in the Sci-Fi Channel Dune, you get something that's pretty close to the book.

[0] Though, you'd most def have to put facemasks on those stillsuits!

No not that one.

The miniseries were actually really good. Tempted to say excellent - I read the books first then saw the mini-series.

Thats not what I was talking about though...those miniseries are like 2000 or 2003ish. There was a recent attempt (2012?) to launch into this again...failed...and never made it past concept (see my earlier reference to pink tiger strip spacecraft) - thats the one I was talking about. Wasn't a complete failure though...they documented the process & I gather the docu was decent. Haven't watched that docu.

>pink tiger strips on spaceships

That sounds like you're talking about an earlier aborted adaption, before the Lynch movie. There was an (amazing) documentary about it last year.

"Jodorowsky's Dune" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935156/

You've got your dates mixed up there mate.

>before the Lynch movie

Lynch - 1984

>"Jodorowsky's Dune"

2013

So not before. But yes thats the one I mean with the pink tiger strips.

The miniseries in between those two was actually pretty damn good imo. Capture the essence well. Wish they had kept going.

"Jodorowsky's Dune" is a recent documentary about the aborted pre-lynch production.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_%28film%29#Early_attempts

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