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From: ecl@ahuta.UUCP (ecl)
Newsgroups: net.movies
Subject: DUNE
Message-ID: <240@ahuta.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 19-Dec-84 08:37:46 EST
Article-I.D.: ahuta.240
Posted: Wed Dec 19 08:37:46 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 20-Dec-84 23:35:43 EST
Organization: AT&T Information Systems Labs, Holmdel NJ
Lines: 102


                                    DUNE
                      A film review by Mark R. Leeper

     In reviewing DUNE, I cannot help but feel a certain sense of deja vu.
Just about a year ago another film came out that made almost all the same
mistakes and had almost all the same strengths.  That film was THE KEEP,
based on the novel by F. Paul Wilson.  Both were films that I enjoyed
greatly, but neither can I recommend.  There are a number of reasons why I
feel that neither film can be recommended.  Each story is told in a moody,
stylized, almost mystical fashion that make the films almost impossible to
follow without being familiar with the story before one enters the theater.
Not that that always helps because each varies somewhat from the plot of its
respective source, but without having read the novel, the viewer would be
left in a twisting maze of bewildering events.  Neither film tells the story
of its novel very well, but each film is visually stunning and serves as a
beautiful set of illustrations for the book.  It is unfortunate that these
two films were made about the same time, since each film could have been a
valuable object lesson to the director of the other had the timing been
different.  THE KEEP hit the boxoffice with a resounding thud and it looks
like DUNE will do the same.

     It has been eleven years since I read DUNE by Frank Herbert.  That is
probably just about the optimal gap between reading the book and seeing the
movie.  It means that I remember the basic plot and some of the language of
the planet Arrakis, but that a lot of the plot subtleties have long since
been forgotten.  The film vaguely follows the plot and in fact has
surprisingly fidelity to the long and complex basic plot, but it simplifies
it a little too much and at important junctures, changes the plot just a bit
too much.  The way the long-awaited Dino De Laurentiis production is able to
get so much of the plot of the novel into DUNE is to simply tell the long
story at a very fast clip.  Whatever you can say negative about David
Lynch's direction and a lot of the silly things added to the script, he was
able to cram all the real essentials of the long novel into the film, and
there are not many screenwriters who could have.  The price is that it is
much harder to digest an important scene before moving on to the next
important scene, making it even harder for someone who has not read the book
to follow what is going on.

     Where Lynch really falls down is that he completely misses what makes a
film a compelling experience.  Herbert's characters had little human
interest, but the book was fascinating because it detailed the background of
the story so well.  Herbert's background work of designing the culture,
ecology, and history of Arrakis gave the book a real feel of authenticity.
It is almost like reading a historical novel with an encyclopedia close at
hand verifying the accuracy of the story.  There is no way a film can give
the same feel of authenticity, so it would have to make the characters more
interesting.  Lynch fails to do that entirely.  The characters are flat and
uninvolving.  The strongest emotion that Lynch makes us feel is revulsion
for the Harkonnens.  The main characters are dull and lifeless, completely
uninvolving.  That means that DUNE will fail to capture the targeted STAR
WARS audience for the same reasons that SPACE: 1999 failed to capture the
STAR TREK audience.  All the stylized mise-en-scene and the moody images
only serve to separate us from involvement in the story.  We are left with
very enigmatic main character and a very dry film (in more ways than one)
that simply seems a sort of Lawrence of Arrakis.

     Visually, DUNE is a mass of contradictions.  It has more than its share
of jaw-dropping spectacles, yet some of its simplest effects are done on the
cheap and really look bad.  We see pictures of a moon of Arrakis
superimposed on a sea of stars, and we see stars right through the moon as
if the scene were a cheap double exposure.  We see a human in the mouth of a
sandworm and the special effects people used two different film stocks to
film the worm and the man, so that the result is totally unconvincing.  On a
forty-million-dollar film one can expect more competence than that.  What
nobody expected were Carlo Rambaldi's sandworms.  Rambaldi was the man who
did such a horrible job of making a mechanical King Kong that a human
stand-in was needed for all but about four seconds of the remake of KING
KONG.  Even after he did E.T., itself a reasonable effect, nobody thought he
could do Herbert's sandworms justice.  Rambaldi has redeemed himself in
spades.  The sandworms have to stand as one of the most awesome yet
believable special effects anyone has ever put on the screen.  From the
first flash we see of a sandworm -- looking somewhat like a scene from MOBY
DICK diving from wave to wave -- to the final massive attack with many of
the worms, they are accurate to John Schoenherr's famous illustrations.

     In DUNE we see and hear echoes of previous films.  All too often, De
Laurentiis seems to assume that the essence of science fiction is overly
ornate and usually oddly structured sets.  Many of the sets from DUNE could
have come from BARBARELLA or FLASH GORDON.  These sets sit there as
background, but add little to the feel of the film.  There are a host of
actors from previous De Laurentiis films.  We have Max won Sydow from FLASH
GORDON and CONAN THE BARBARIAN.  Kenneth McMillan and Brad Dourif are
familiar from RAGTIME.  And, of course, there is a rock score.  De
Laurentiis likes rock scores for fantasy films.  FLASH GORDON had its effect
much damaged by its score.  (Dino wanted to have a rock score for CONAN, THE
BARBARIAN, but John Milius insisted on giving the score to Basil Poledouris,
or at least so Poledouris claimed in an interview.  It was the right choice.
Poledouris's score is just about the best thing about CONAN THE BARBARIAN).

     But even with all the flaws, this film had more than enough to keep me
pleased with what I was seeing.  With this odd mix of virtues and problems,
I find that this is a film that I like, but I cannot recommend.  See it at
your own risk.  You might like it, you might hate it.  It will be a while
before you can forget it.  For the record, I liked it a +2 on the -4 to +4
scale.  But I am of such a mixed mind about this film, it could easily have
been a -2.  It just depends on how much someone weights the bad elements and
how much they weight the good.

					(Evelyn C. Leeper for)
					Mark R. Leeper
					...ihnp4!lznv!mrl