This last point may be the more contentious – and therefore the more interesting – so let’s start with that.
#STING DUNE MOVIE#
What I’ll attempt instead is a defence of Dune both as a science fiction movie and a valid – if an eccentric – entry in the Lynchian canon. Even in its “official” version, it suffers from curious first act longueurs, clunky exposition and stuffy dialogue without a shred of humour. For one thing, there are at least three different versions of the film, one of which is so awful it was credited to the infamous Hollywood nom-de-shame, “Alan Smithee”. With its Tolstoy-level cast of characters, complex world-building and smorgasbord of themes, many thought Herbert’s novel was unfilmable, and many continued to feel that way long after Lynch’s adaptation was released.īefore I discuss the film itself, I should make one thing clear: I am not about to tell you that David Lynch’s Dune is a masterpiece. Perhaps inevitably, the production collapsed before filming could even begin.
Giger, music by Pink Floyd, and starring Salvador Dali as the Emperor of the Known Universe. The avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky famously tried adapting it in the mid-1970s, with production designs by H.R. There are mutant navigators, a psychic sisterhood, desert people with glowing blue eyes and – in the corpulent form of Baron Harkonnen – a flying, morbidly obese paederast. The source material is a space epic like no other the story of a feudal, intergalactic human empire in which the Padishah Emperor, noble Atreides and barbaric Harkonnen scheme and battle for control of a space-bending spice called Melange.
Perhaps a similar thought process lay behind the decision, by Dino and his daughter and protégé Rafaella, to pick an even more outré filmmaker, David Lynch, for their big-screen adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. In his husky Italian accent, Laurentiis replied, “Because I like your face.” The director Mike Hodges (of getting Carter fame ) tells the story of how, on first meeting producer Dino De Laurentiis, he asked why he – a director of thrillers – had been chosen for the camp sci-fi extravaganza Flash Gordon.
#STING DUNE SERIES#
In the latest in our series of essays defending the indefensible novelist David Llewellyn pens a love letter to David Lynch’s much-maligned movie adaptation of Frank Herbert’s iconic fantasy novel, Dune.