Watching Dune is a bit like trying to dig your way out of a sandstorm. Wave after wave of lore and nomenclature pile up around you until you finally succumb, and are buried. At which point you’re best off giving up on the movie as any sort of coherent, compelling piece of science-fiction and simply embrace it as camp.
The opening narration alone – delivered by Virginia Madsen in a pointless part – is like having the title crawls of all nine Star Wars films spit at you at once. There is talk of an emperor of the known universe, the “spice melange,” the planet Arrakis, a Spacing Guild, the ability to “fold space,” and a prophecy about a messiah. You’d be advised to take notes, but be sure to save space; plenty more names, locations, mythology, and plot points are to come.
All of this derives from the 1965 Frank Herbert novel of the same name, which writer-director David Lynch – coming off the Oscar attention of The Elephant Man – tried to wrestle into a blockbuster fit for the first Star Wars era. Dune is a Lynch film in fits and starts (these are by far the more interesting moments), but even those qualities are overwhelmed by mountains of minutia. It’s a reminder that when auteurism goes up against genre, genre often wins.
Kyle MacLachlan – who would have more success in Lynch’s next film, Blue Velvet, as well as his television series, Twin Peaks – stars as Paul Atreides, the son of a duke. Paul – who also comes to be known as Muad’Dib and the Kwisatz Haderach for various, complicated reasons – travels to Arrakis to oversee spice production, but gets involved in an interplanetary political struggle that leads to war.
It’s not like a space opera needs a charismatic central figure to work (again, see Star Wars), but MacLachlan makes Mark Hamill look like, well, Harrison Ford. Paul stands around with a blank look on his face as other characters dump exposition on him, then suddenly becomes an authoritative (though still boring) military leader when the plot calls for it. It’s not even an interesting performance on the level of camp, which is at least what you can say about nearly everyone else in the cast. Consider Kenneth McMillan, who floats about in a levitation suit as an evil baron, spewing commands from a face covered in pustules. Or Brad Dourif, who delivers catatonic line readings as a mad scientist. Even Sting at least brings some fun to the proceedings, prancing about as a wild-haired mercenary in a space Speedo.
Sting and MacLachlan have a climactic knife fight that’s absolutely comical in its staging and execution; in fact, the action elements are where Dune particularly fails. The non-practical special effects are nowhere near up to par with other sci-fi efforts of the 1980s, so that the image of Paul harnessing a giant worm and riding it across the sand looks even sillier than it sounds. (The worms, one of the more prominent elements of Dune lore, are especially disappointing; they’re often hidden in darkness and never really feel like they occupy the same physical space as the actors.)
The practical effects – as well as the elaborate production design – are the only areas where Dune succeeds. Not coincidentally, this is also where Lynch’s hand can be felt the most. Early on, the emperor (Jose Ferrer) meets with a member of the Spacing Guild, who appears in a giant glass case that is rolled into the throne room. Fog fills the case, and out of it emerges an enormous, brain-like creature – with eyes, a mouth, and tiny hands – that could easily be one of the nightmarish grotesqueries in Lynch’s masterful Eraserhead.
And so you can see what drew Lynch to the material. He and cinematographer Freddie Francis also give the Arrakis sequences a distinctively eerie orange glow that hints at the property’s aesthetic potential. But in the end, Herbert’s novel proves to be too literal for a mind like Lynch’s, which is more adept at navigating dreams, mysteries, and visions. In a true Lynch movie, exposition doesn’t really matter. In Dune, that’s about the only thing that does.
