DIRECTOR/SCREENWRITER
David Lynch
based on the
novel by
Frank
Herbert
PRODUCER
Raffaella De Laurentiis
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Freddie Francis
MUSIC
Brian Eno
Roger Eno
Daniel Lanois
Toto
Marty Paich
EDITOR
Antony Gibbs
CAST
Francesca Annis (Lady Jessica)
Leonardo Cimino (Baron's Doctor)
Brad Dourif (Piter De Vries)
José Ferrer (Padishah Emperor Shaddam)
Linda Hunt (Shadout Mapes)
Freddie Jones (Thufir Hawat)
Richard Jordan (Duncan Idaho)
Kyle MacLachlan (Paul Atreides)
Virginia Madsen (Princess Irulan)
Silvana Mangano (Reverend Mother Ramallo)
Everett McGill (Stilgar)
Kenneth McMillan (Baron Harkonnen)
Jack Nance (Nefud)
Siân Phillips (Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam)
Jürgen Prochnow (Duke Leto Atreides)
Paul Smith (The Beast Rabban)
Patrick Stewart (Gurney Halleck)
Sting (Feyd-Rautha)
Dean Stockwell (Dr. Wellington Yueh)
Max von Sydow (Dr. Kynes)
Alicia Roanne Witt (Alia)
Sean Young (Chani)
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running
time: 137m
U.S. release: December 14, 1984
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other David
Lynch films
reviewed on this website:
- Lost
Highway
- Mulholland
Drive
- The
Straight Story
- Twin
Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
- Wild
at Heart
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Dune, the notorious 1984 flop directed by David Lynch
(Lost
Highway), has now been reissued as a priced-to-own letterboxed
video [note:
also now available on DVD],
and it deserves serious reappraisal. When first released, the
movie disappointed fans of the Frank Herbert novel, baffled American
critics, and swiftly disappeared. About the only people who didn't
detest it (though even they were lukewarm) were admirers of Eraserhead
and The Elephant Man, the only other features Lynch had
directed at the time.
Lynch's fans, dutifully justifying what they consider a megabudget
anomaly in an otherwise offbeat ouevre, have stuck to
a party line: "Dune isn't really a David Lynch film.
He was a hired hand for producer Dino DeLaurentiis. Anyone could've
directed it." Not true. Dune is loaded with Lynchian
oddities, which, in the context of a $40 million sci-fi epic,
seem extremely odd. This isn't just one of the weirdest
sci-fi movies ever; it may well be the weirdest David Lynch film
ever.
During the first half hour of Dune, you really feel sorry
for Lynch, who has to shoehorn Frank Herbert's entire mythos
into a series of exposition scenes to get us up to speed. This
happened, then this happened, and this is important
to everything that's going to happen .... It's headsplitting,
and Lynch resorts to corny inner monologues that only add to
the movie's surrealism. Typically, characters look serious while
we hear a pensée like "I must not fear. Fear
is the mind-killer."
Kyle MacLachlan, later the indelible Lynchian hero of Blue
Velvet and Twin Peaks, made his screen debut here
as Paul Atreides, who leads the people of Arrakis (Dune) out
of the clutches of the evil Harkonnens, who control the valuable
spice mines of Dune. The spice enables one to "fold space"
(travel without moving) or receive divine visions -- both of
which are right up Lynch's hallucinatory alley. The movie is
as trippy and visually dense as Bram
Stoker's Dracula.
If, like me, you've previously only seen Dune on a cropped,
pan-and-scan video, you've only seen half of it. The new widescreen
version is a revelation. The compositions, by cinematographer
Freddie Francis, embrace the most ravishing desert vistas this
side of The
English Patient. And you finally get to bask in the elaborate
sets, which presumably ate most of the $40 million (pricey in
its day). The money obviously went into the sets, not into the
semi-cheesy special effects.
Then there's the unmistakable hand of David Lynch. Dune
is as lovably absurd (absurdist?) and strikingly perverse as
any Lynch film. When the hideous Baron Harkonnen (Kenneth MacMillan
in a raucous turn that anticipates Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth)
has captured Paul's mother, he informs her, "I want to spit
on your head," then goes right ahead. My favorite Lynchian
shot among many in Dune is a tight close-up of Dean Stockwell's
mouth as he intones, "The tooth! The tooth!"
The movie is insane; it's textbook Lynch.
Most surreal of all, though, is the voice-channeling method of
combat the heroes employ, called "the weirding way";
it's weird, all right -- it sounds like nuclear sneezing. My
Closed Captioning translates it as "Chusah!" Gesundheit.
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