![]() ![]() Just a reasonably good-looking failure with a fantastic musical score (guitar-driven spacey rock mostly provided by the band Toto, though the main theme that gives it most of its personality was from ambient music pioneer Brian Eno) and a lot of terribly confused-looking actors plowing through way too much exposition. Not even a glorious mess of a failure, either, as I imagine we'd have gotten if Alejandro Jodorowsky had gotten to make his version of the story (as outlined in the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky's Dune). I merely think it is a good-faith failure at attempting to turn an extremely dense book with a great deal of complicated world-building into a movie of a fairly digestible 137-minute running time (a length decided upon rather late in post-production). I don't dislike it as much as Lynch does, since that seems like it would would be a very difficult level of hate to match for any of us who don't regard Dune as the specific most shameful professional mistake of our careers. ![]() We're under no obligation to agree with Lynch's assessment of his own work - filmmakers have been getting their own films wrong for decades - but in this case, I am sorry to say that I'm much closer to Lynch's position than to the fans who have so carefully worked to restore Dune's reputation over the course of the last 37 years. The wrinkle is that Lynch himself has done nothing at all to encourage this re-evaluation, and in fact has done quite a bit to dismiss it: as late as the very year I write this, 2021, Lynch still refuses to talk about the film, revisit it, or do more to acknowledge it than to express his great regret that he so readily compromised himself as an artist to take the money and play the good studio hack for producers Raffaella and Dino De Laurentiis. This is pretty standard fan behavior, and it is not worthy of note in and of itself. That's probably not the only reason, but surely it's a big one, that a box office failure with a cold critical reception has been taken into the bosom of a fairly vocal cult: looking for the Lynchian qualities in a film we just weren't ready for in '84. ![]() The film was the third feature directed by David Lynch, and the last before he became "David Lynch" as we now understand that phrase with 1986's Blue Velvet. I see more similarities than I expected though of course the difference in visual effects between 1984 and now stands out.The 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's 1965 science fiction novel Dune offers one of the most interesting of all wrinkles to auteur theory, as it is generally understood. It’s interesting to look at the framing, the sets, the costumes, and the color language between the two films. YouTuber Matt Skuta and IMDb both cut together side by side comparisons showing shots from the new trailer for Villeneuve’s Dune with imagery from Lynch’s 1984 film. Matt Skuta/Universal/Warner Bros./Legendary And now that we have the first look at Dune 2020, we can compare it to Dune 1984. It’s a convoluted movie, but hey, the source material is rather convoluted. His 1984 spin on Dune starred Kyle MacLachlan as the young Atreides. Other directors have adapted Dune for the screen, most notably David Lynch. But Chalamet isn’t the first character to play Paul Atreides. Paul and his coming of age during a moment of tragedy for the Atreides is at the heart of the tale. An adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune, the first book in a series set in this world, the movie stars Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides. Wednesday brought the first trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. ![]()
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