![]() But beyond that, we can relate to Knievel's need to achieve transcendence at such a, shall we say, niche skill. A feat of motorcycling and physicality? Absolutely. The example the radio interviewee gave was of Evel Knievel, the '70s daredevil who wore a cape and jumped dirt bikes over rows of buses. The two can be inseparable, like the gravitational pull between a gas giant and its moon-or Riggs and Murtaugh. The relatable can sometimes be reached only by going through the ridiculous. I once half-heard a radio interview with someone speculating that the then-current artistic moment was not "so bad it's good," and it wasn't "ironic" either-it was actually "awesome." (I didn't catch who he was, so if any of this sounds familiar, hit me up in the comments.) Art can speak to you while at the same time being absurd. So which group am I in? Both. Am I about to describe Dune as "so bad it's good"? No, that's a loser take for cowards. Little did I know that this was kind of the ideal approach to Dune, which feels like a partially remembered dream that you have to piece together later. While I drifted in and out of consciousness, Matt provided color commentary about which characters would be cloned for 10,000 years and who would eventually be turned into a giant worm. Matt had read most of the 58,000 books in the series by scribe Frank Herbert and (later) Herbert's son, and he was eager to nerd out on the lore. ![]() I saw roughly the last half again around 2001 or 2002 at my buddy Matt's apartment while late-night channel-surfing. But I was young and stupid then now I'm older and taller. Herbert’s ancillary themes which, knitted together in book form, allow an equally potent gallery of ideas to be gradually formulated, are well beyond the rather wooden characters on display, no matter how hard Kyle MacLachlan, Francesca Annis, Sting and other more veteran talents try to invest their lines with meaning.MY HISTORY WITH DUNEI first saw Dune on VHS in junior high. The battle for the spice which can only be found on the bleak wastes of Dune, and for which the House of Atreides and their mortal enemies, the Harkonnens, compete, is essentially a battle between good and evil, peopled by the usual representations of humanity endowed with superhuman powers. And there isn’t a lot Lynch and his experts can do about it. What seemed unique on the page now seems slightly old hat on the screen.Īll this is a back-handed but genuine tribute to Herbert whose ideas have been copied almost as much by now as Kubrick’s in 2001. No matter what original production designs Anthony Masters can come up with, it has all been done, better or worse, before. The Star Wars cycle, and even the Star Trek episodes, have left an indelible mark that Dune can’t entirely erase. The trouble is that, no matter how hard it tries to make Herbert understandable to those who find the saga resistible, or even to make Dune hang together for devoted fans, there is an overwhelming sense that this is familiar cinematic territory.įreddie Jones and Sting in Dune (1984). Which if I read it right, is to gut the literary origins for a recognisable plot and then to hint at some of its many sub-themes. The film does not lack an overall strategy. Dune is an epic that vouchsafes eyeful after eyeful, aided by Freddie Francis’s glowing, dark-hued cinematography. And there’s no doubt that he is a real film-maker, rather than just a competent orchestrator of resources that even Croesus wouldn’t readily contemplate tying up in a year’s orgies. Lynch, of course, made Eraserhead, the cult horror movie produced on a shoestring, that led to The Elephant Man. ![]() Only one other venture this year has seemed more impossible to translate from book to films, and that was Huston’s version of Under The Volcano. ![]() Yet if Dune on the screen still seems a little like skimmed milk after cream, it was perhaps predictable. Herbert, however, has expressed himself satisfied with David Lynch’s multimillion dollar summation for Dino De Laurentiis, and it is certainly accomplished, cramming a lot into just over two hours, though depth is inevitably sacrificed for width. ![]()
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