“Lynch’s talent is honourably confirmed as a portrayer of remarkable horrors”: Dune reviewed in 1985

Frank Herbert’s blockbuster novel has been a mirage on the film-making horizon for so long now – in the twenty years since it first materialised, it has been contemplated by a range of admirers from Corman to Ridley Scott, and was nearly reached by the unimaginable Jodorowsky – that everything about it seems to shimmer with familiarity. In particular, the Star Wars expeditions have planted a number of tracks across Dune territory, not only in the form of desert settings and tribal communities plus, in Return of the Jedi, a menace closely related to the sandworm, but also in Lucas’ outline of imperialistic interstellar politics and, above all, in his central figure – a youth of steadily expanding self-awareness and ability, guided by ancient wisdoms and unknowingly trained for leadership in a centuries-old struggle. Adding to the anticipations have been De Laurentiis’ own previous productions, reinterpreting pulp mythology in the form of King Kong, Flash Gordon and Conan to illustrate an enduringly Roman (and by inference endearingly personal) interest in barbarism, conquest and the super-human.

But if we come well-rehearsed to the Dune iconography, the film still has a mass of explaining to do. It opens with an earnest lecture by the Princess Irulan (rather prettier, more like Britt Ekland in fact, than Herbert indicated) whose brisk outline of the benefits of melange, said to enable addicts to ‘fold’ space and travel without movement, gets us nicely confused even before the opening credits. And although many millions of readers have dipped into Herbert’s best-seller over the years, few can be expected to recall with any clarity the precise relationship between the Guild, the Landsraad, the CHOAM Corporation and the Imperium, largely because the novel is rather vague about them too.

It’s not easy either, despite a careful diagram, to grasp at speed which planet belongs to which set of faces, or who’s supposed to be living where, particularly as the plot requires its participants to change sides frequently without warning. Instead, rather in the manner of untried Fremen youths (whom Herbert, with precognitive irony, termed Wallies), we flounder from one exchange of information to another throughout the film, hoping we’ve understood what we’ve heard.

Given that David Lynch’s problem was to reduce the complexities of Herbert’s narrative to something with more dramatic substance than a prolonged trailer (his first draft, he says, provided enough for two films), it’s curious that his screenplay found it necessary to invent a Supreme Being. The latter resembles a distended maggot enclosed in a huge tank of preserving fluid, and as might be expected from the director of Eraserhead (1977), Lynch provides plenty of opportunities for close inspection of this admirable monstrosity. It reappears as the Atreides ships, in attractive seed-pod ranks, make their way through space to the planet Dune. And since the special effects are not at their best for this sequence, it is evident that the Being’s sluggish glide across a swirl of oil paints has a ripe, if evasive, significance. While it compensates for the rather featureless sandworms, it represents Lynch’s lasciviously organic bestiary (including the luckless John Merrick) rather than Herbert’s, and invites, like Gurney Halleck’s baliset or the device like a bent shovel by which Paul clambers aboard his first worm (both gadgets given full value by the novel), an explanation there sadly seems no time for the film to offer.

Herbert’s Dune, while well-embroidered with pageantry, offers much of its substance in the wholly non-visual form of two-level communication from the characters, their thoughts as open to the reader as their words. Through this sub-text of signals, memories, and hints of possible futures, the extraordinary insights that enable Paul to understand the implications of his mother’s behaviour and the consequences of his own decisions make him, for all his powers, a relatively human and sympathetic guide. The device is an interesting failure on film, particularly in stereo when off-screen sounds are plentiful; the sudden arbitrary interjection on the soundtrack (“He’s angry!”, “I like this Duke”, etc.), when it doesn’t come across as a dubbing error, proves to say little that a good actor can’t convey just as well in a silent glance.

In this muffled condition, Paul’s rise to messianic status renders him increasingly alien and unappealing; his only purpose, frequently stated, is to control the spice, and through it the universe, like some megalomaniac drug pusher (Herbert, more valuably, has him trying to avoid the holy war being thrust upon him). And if the darkness of the original novel has been spectacularly maintained in the film’s magnificently brooding sets, the haze of processing that ensures blue eyes all round, together with the perpetual overlays of smoke, storm or sand, only add to the shadows and obscurities.

Lynch’s talent is honourably confirmed as a portrayer of remarkable horrors (the wild excesses of the Baron Vladimir are a triumph of depravity), but among the intricate quicksands of Dune an oasis or two of simple story-telling would have provided welcome nourishment.