Dune: Part Two is now in theaters; you should see it. But Denis Villeneuve’s two-parter is not the first time Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi epic has reached the big screen. In 1984, David Lynch, fresh off The Elephant Man, passed on directing Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi and chose to adapt Dune instead. Reviewing A Masterpiece In Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune — An Oral History by Max Evry for the Telegraph, Ed Power revisits Lynch’s Dune, coming away somewhat sympathetic.
Evry’s account of Dune‘s production depicts some of the chaos that undermined the movie. A drunk actor required replacement; Tom Cruise auditioned (poorly) for Paul Atreides (ultimately played by Kyle MacLachlan); Lynch, typically “avuncular” on set, lashed out. But Evry also argues that the movie had promise. Power ends up echoing his view. “The 1984 movie is no longer perceived as a disaster for the ages,” he writes. “Many have a sneaking fondness for it, blemishes and all.” The ranks of revisionists include MacLachlan, who sees the movie as “a flawed gem” that “is stunning in so many ways.”
Their ranks do not include the director himself. Lynch told Evry, “For me personally, Dune is a failure,” because he lacked final-cut privilege, depriving him of “creative freedom.” Lynch has also said that he considers Dune “a huge gigantic sadness” in his life.
Count me closer to the Lynch side of things. His version is not without its charms. Power identifies one: “Its sheer weirdness — its sheer weirdness — never before or since has so strange a sci-fi blockbuster reached the screen.” There’s truth to this; as I have written, it “does capture some of the essential weirdness of Frank Herbert’s vision.” But a ruthless compression of the story — it tells in one two-hour film what Villeneuve took five hours to cover — makes it rushed and barely comprehensible. And it deviates from the source material so severely as to alter fundamentally the substance of the book:
Yes, Paul fulfilled Fremen prophecy . . . because he and his mother, a member of the all-female Bene Gessert religious order of civilization-manipulating psychics, had taken advantage of prophecies “planted” on Arrakis at some prior time. As for bringing peace and love where there was war and hatred . . . immediately after Dune ends, Paul leads the Fremen on a jihad that, by the time of Dune Messiah, the first Dune sequel Frank Herbert authored, has “killed sixty-one billion, sterilized ninety planets, completely demoralized five hundred others.”
And as for changing the face of Arrakis: This large-scale ecological transformation is something hinted at in Dune, but not meaningfully achieved on the desert world until the reign of his son Leto II, the God Emperor of Dune. And it’s a good thing, too: The sandworms of Dune, whose life cycle produces the spice (drug) mélange on which civilization depends, are fatally allergic to water. But Lynch’s Dune ends with Paul having magically produced rain on Arrakis. This is not in the original text. If it were, all the sandworms would be killed; off-screen in Lynch’s Dune, if it were being semi-faithful and insisted on keeping the rain but insisted on showing the results, you would hear the behemoth moans of the sandworms as they expired.
These faults make it hard not to agree with Lynch that the movie was misbegotten, even if he was not wholly responsible for its failure. Revisiting his Dune should make us grateful that Villeneuve has now given us a satisfactory adaptation.