A Duke's son leads desert warriors against the galactic emperor and his father's evil nemesis when they assassinate his father and free their desert world from the emperor's rule.
Starting in 1971, the film burned up millions as it passed through the hands of Planet of the Apes producer Arthur P. Jacobs, Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, and sci-fi maven Ridley Scott before landing in the hands of avant-noir director David Lynch. Jodorowsky’s aborted 10-hour, Salvador Dali-starring, Pink Floyd-scored version is the subject of a documentary, Jodorowsky’s Dune.
Dune was like the anti-Star Wars, undoing everything Lucas's trilogy did to make sci-fi a friendly place. A New Hope took audiences to far away galaxies, sure, but it smoothed the transition into the fantastical with a simple, recognizable tale: A gentle farmhand meets a wise old man and a cowboy, gets himself a sword (of sorts), and goes adventuring. It's almost baffling, in retrospect, that producer Dino de Laurentiis, who bought the rights to the notoriously obtuse Dune project in 1978, one year after Star Wars became a hit, could look at Herbert's novel and think that something as warm, friendly, and accessible could be squeezed from its pages.
Herbert's book offered a meticulously detailed saga of a dark future where royal houses war for control of the desert planet Arrakis and its precious resource, the spice melange. Fitting all of that tale into movie length proved comically impossible for Jodorowsky. Lynch’s film palpably suffers from numerous cuts and recuts to the final edit, which clocks in at two hours and 17 minutes.
It’s certainly a different kind of sci fi than Star Wars, which was created to comfort and entertain. Dune wanted to challenge, and though its stumbling attempts to pontificate on religion and ecology may have been its downfall, those attempts also produced some of the film's most resonant moments.
If the movie's goal was to create, like the book, a world that felt utterly alien, then Lynch and his surreal style were the right choice. With its bizarre dream sequences, rife with images of unborn fetuses and shimmering energies, and unsettling scenery like the industrial hell of the Harkonnen homeworld, the film’s actually closer to Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey) than Lucas. It seeks to put the viewer somewhere unfamiliar while hinting at a greater, hidden story.
dir: David Lynch
Year: 1984
country: US
run-time: 2h 17mins
rating: 18
Full £6.00
Concession: Pay What You Can
Doors 19:30 - Film 20:00