Lynch encourages his actors to flatten their emotional expression, which make the moments of iconic dialogue stand out starkly. But as Lynch aficionados know, the director also has a gift for heightening random details till they make you shiver. The visual wtf of the film is a campy pleasure. The servants of the Spacer’s guild speak for their bloated slug-like masters through what appear to be old-timey portable radio microphones. Sting as the evil Feyd Harkonnen steps out of a steam shower wearing nothing but a bizarre stylized eagle speedo and a smug expression. Patrick Stewart as soldier Gurney Halleck runs into battle carrying a pug dog. Things only get more inexplicably awkward from there. In the film’s opening, a princess explains the history of imperial politics while her head fades in and out against a background of stars. If dumpy dream state Dune is the Dune you love, then Lynch is the director for you. A filmed version, arguably, should be dumpy and misshapen and filled with people looking like they’ve just been hit in the face with a flounder.

It’s a book, after all, about giant worms and their psychedelic space poop. Much of the joy of the novel was that it was a top-heavy bombastic wallow in trippy goth weirdness. And there’s nothing wrong with Hollywood blockbuster epic!įrank Herbert’s Dune, though, wasn’t just about the action and the adventure as House Atreides fights to control the planet Arrakis, its spice, and its indigenous Fremen. So, yes, the new Dune is much better at being a Hollywood blockbuster epic action-adventure than the old Dune. And Lynch’s decision to add magic sound weapons to Herbert’s novel…why? The second half of the movie collapses narratively as it tries to get in all the plot that Villeneuve has been allowed to spread over two films. Meanwhile, back at the 1984 Dune, Kyle McLachlan as Paul spends most of the film looking as if he’s just been hit in the face with a flounder, while his voice-over narration tries desperately, and not very successfully, to convince the viewer that he has an inner life. Timothée Chalamet gives our hero Paul Atreides a subtle intensity, and Jason Mamoa’s Duncan Idaho radiates heroic swash and buckle. His massed troops look genuinely massive, and he deploys tactile wind-whipped fabric with the loving attention of a man who has watched a lot of Kurosawa. Director Denis Villeneuve has a real gift for monumental screen composition.

The new Dune is infinitely sexier and more stylish than Lynch’s version. It has a wretched 44% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, in comparison to the 2021 Dune’s 83% Fresh.Īnd I get it. Once, across the sand blown waste, there rose another Dune, and the people looked into its gaping maw and said, “feh.” David Lynch’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel has been mocked ever since 1984 when it stuck its massive, clumsy snout out of the sand and started exhaling ill-conceived spice clouds of expository dialogue.

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