DUNE (1984)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, metaphysical, psychological, sociological*                                                                                                                                                                                Since my original theatrical viewing of David Lynch's DUNE, I doubt that I re-watched it in full since I did so to rewrite this review. I mention this because when I viewed the first part of Dennis Villeneuve's more recent adaptation, I found myself frequently thinking, "Lynch did this scene so much better-- and this one-- and that one..." Lynch's directorial skills, in other words, were so far above those of Villeneuve that even an extremely flawed movie-adaptation by Lynch remains much more memorable than one that never comes close to encompassing the conceptual breadth of Frank Herbert's novel.                                                                                               

I recorded some of my analyses of the Herbert novel here so as to avoid reflecting in this review on the source material for DUNE '84. In that essay, I identified the master trope of the novel as "good colonists fighting bad colonists for the control of tribal resources." Whereas Villeneuve elides a lot of interpersonal drama concerning the two colonial families fighting over the precious spice of the dune-planet Arrakis, Lynch arguably does the opposite. Roughly the first hour of his movie's 137 minutes is devoted to ticking off not only the main hero, Paul of the noble Atreides family, but almost a dozen others in his retinue, both literal family members and royal retainers. (By contrast, the viewer needs to concern himself only with about four representatives of the villainous Harkonnens.) I've read no histories of DUNE's filming, so I don't know if Lynch really believed he needed to include every single Herbert character, even those who played no real role in the film. But other Lynch projects have indicated the director's liking for working with ensemble-casts whose members display a lot of, shall we say, idiosyncrasies. I think that's likely to have been Lynch's real creative motive for the overstuffed first half of DUNE, not pure fidelity to the novel.                                   

The strongest element of DUNE '84's first half is the portrait of Paul Atreides (Kyle Maclachlan). At times Paul seems somewhat full of himself, being that he's the only child, at least that we know of, of Duke Leto (Jurgen Prochnow) and Lady Jessica (Francesca Annis). Yet Lynch quickly establishes the heroic nature of Paul. Though I don't suppose Lynch had that much interest in the space-opera hero-fantasies of George Lucas-- which almost certainly got DUNE '84 greenlighted by Hollywood producers-- I appreciated that this version of Paul has as much on the ball as Herbert's original. He, like his father, is the epitome of the "good colonist," and it's only the dark plots of the Atreides' enemies-- including the Emperor of Known Space-- that propel Paul into the very different destiny of a foreign-born messiah who liberates the tribal people who adopt him. The scene of the "gom jabbar," in which Paul's mettle is tested to the utmost, foregrounds some of that destiny.                                                                                                     

  Once the long setup is done, the Harkonnens make their move. Paul's father is assassinated and the hero is thrown into the hostile wastes of Arrakis with his mother Jessica. Their special mental skills, which get only cursory explication, allow them to survive long enough to enter the company of the desert tribes known as Fremen (as in "Free Men," get it?) As Lynch moves to the film's second half, he rushes through many of the novel's important scenes, not least Paul's romance with the Fremen female Chani. The scenes with the Sandworms dominate the latter half, but the visionary segments, in which Paul taps into his special destiny as the savior of Arrakis, are just fair-to-middling. The revelation that Jessica harbors her lord's last child in her womb, their daughter Alia, is terribly underplayed, and Paul doesn't even have any reaction to the fact that his sister is born "a child of the Spice," so to speak.                                                   

  Many of these problems were not Lynch's fault. It was folly to attempt reducing the pageantry of Herbert's mammoth work to a movie a little longer than two hours. Maybe Lynch would have been able to pull off a substantial adaptation of DUNE had he been able to do two films, like Villeneuve. At least Lynch, unlike Villeneuve, seems to have understood the deep mythic waters into which Herbert had delved. One of the earliest scenes-- following a draggy "Future History lesson" delivered at the outset-- involves the aforementioned Emperor plotting with a member of the Spacing Guild to get total control of the Spice resources on Arrakis by favoring the Harkonnens and undermining the Atreides family, since Duke Leto's popularity threatens the Emperor. This scene is not in Herbert, but it's a masterful bit of cinema, using the physical repulsiveness of the Spacer (who resembles a titanic flatworm in a water-tank) to make a talking-heads scene intriguing. DUNE '84 is not a classic of SF-cinema as is its proximate inspiration STAR WARS. But DUNE '84 at least is on the same mythopoeic page as George Lucas, unlike Villeneuve and his proximate inspiration, the Peter Jackson version of THE LORD OF THE RINGS.