In the annals of movie failures, Elaine May's Ishtar (1987) holds an honored place: it took in at the US box office around $35 million dollars less than it cost to make. That doesn't mean that it was a bad film, and since I haven't seen it, I offer no opinion on that. But David Lynch's Dune (1984), which lost a mere $10 million by comparison, certainly is a bad movie, and it seems remarkable to me that seven years after the kinetic and charming original Star Wars anyone could have thought that this exercise in static grandiosity would enchant anyone. In 1980, Dino De Laurentiis had produced Flash Gordon, another kinetic and charming movie, sillier and sexier than Star Wars, and making no pretensions to seriousness. That movie made great use of Max von Sydow, who had a high old time as Ming the Merciless. Four years later, Rafaella De Laurentiis, Dino's daughter, produced Dune, in which von Sydow, in a very minor role, has maybe about ten minutes onscreen . . . Dino himself (who died in 2010 at 91) had originally acquired the rights to Frank Herbert's novel and had tried to interest Ridley Scott in the project. Scott worked on a script, but eventually gave it up to make Blade Runner (1982), a genuinely great and moving sci-fi movie.. The eventual director, David Lynch (who went on to his own distinctive successes) has more or less disowned the movie, admitting that he should never have accepted the project from the start because he knew that he wouldn't have control over the final cut.
So what's wrong with it? That's not too difficult to say. It's bad in the way that Zeffirelli productions can sometimes be bad -- lots of money spent on elaborate sets and not nearly enough happening in front of these sets. The sets are indeed impressive; from the palatial interiors to the desert landscapes, they look good, and the costuming budget must have been considerable. The costumes blend pseudo-medieval ornateness with a sci-fi leather look as needed, and then there are the Bene Gesserit witches, who look like punked-up nuns and who seem to have the power (whether before or after conception I don't know) to determine the sex of their children. But a movie has to do more than appeal to the eye. The plot counts for something, and this one is unnecessarily complicated, requiring an intermittent voice-over narration, by a character who seems to have no part in the plot, to keep us straight. The dialogue is stiffly oracular -- no one speaks like a real person, and it's no defense of this to say that they are not real persons. As for characterization . . . forget it. One remembers that the first Star Trek movie (1979) suffered from the combination of impressive sets and leaden pacing, but at least there the dialogue was plausible. James Kirk talked like the Kirk we knew and loved, and, bad though the movie was, it netted over $90 million at the box office in the US. 1982's Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan was much more fun, though it netted a mere $86 million. It still puzzles me how, in the context of all these other films mentioned above, someone didn't point out that some plausible dialogue and peppier action were needed. Only the evil and over-the-top Baron Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan) seems to be having any fun.
The cast can't be faulted. Kyle MacLachlan, Patrick Stewart, Jurgen Prochnow, Francesca Annis, Sting, von Sydow, Silvana Mangano, Sean Young, Dean Stockwell, and others are all solid professionals, and one can only hope that they weren't counting on a percentage of the profits for their remuneration. The plot is dressed-up standard bad-people-want-to-take-control-of-the-universe stuff, framed as a dynastic struggle, and what has to be done to take control -- which involves getting ones hands on the spice-mining operation on the desert planet Dune -- requires a lot of exposition that really clogs the pacing. The threats to spice-mining are the sand-worms of Dune, which respond to rhythmic stimuli by attacking and which have to be distracted by "thumpers." However, it turns out that drinking the water of life (sorry: "Water of Life") gives one control over the sandworms, and the climactic battle has the good guys (MacLachlan and his troops) riding the sandworms against the enemy. The trouble is that sandworms don't move fast -- they're huge things, each of which can carry a small regiment on its back -- so the whole effect of the climax is like slow-motion water ballet. I have to say that I kind of liked the sandworms . . .
One other aspect of the movie bothered me. There's a kind of pseudo-religious undercurrent to it all that doesn't really make any sense. There seems to be something of a prophecy that a Special One will come -- or maybe has already come, and maybe it's Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan), who seems to seal the deal by drinking the Water of Life without dying as a result. But then, all that happens is that he can control the sandworms. He already has an army -- the enslaved Fremens, the denizens of Dune, who had been forced to work in the spice mines until Paul came along -- and a creepy little sister who, with Gesserit powers even at an early age, does things that suggest she could take care of the whole business without Paul having to lift a finger. Paul, at the end, kills the evil enforcer Feyd-Rautha (Sting, no less! see image above) in single combat, and we're to understand that the long arc of the moral universe has completed its circle. The religious undertones to this are very different from those at the end of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but in neither case do they redeem a pretty lifeless movie
Some readers of this might think that this movie must be so bad that it's good, or that it is a deliberate sending-up of the sci-fi genre. I've actually entertained this idea, but surely a send-up just has to be livelier (and shorter)? Be all that as it may, you can now pick it up pretty cheaply on DVD, so give it a try. But try to see first every other movie (except Ishtar, maybe) mentioned above, and then tell me that I don't have a point. Why couldn't the De Laurentiises just have packed it in after 2001, Star Wars, and Blade Runner showed what could be done with the genre?
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