Do we really want a DUNE film?
Frank Herbert’s Dune was one of the toughest reads of my life. It’s a lot like Tolkien’s Rings books — an impressive exercise in world-building, harnessing a genius of imagination, that’s drowned, stifled and utterly destroyed by a complete and total lack of interesting characters or story. The prose is dry and detached, and the characters, most of whom seem to come and go as they please, are loose and confusing (except, of course, for young protag Paul Atreides and his “Bene Gesserit” mother Jessica [trust me, the weird words and phrases don't stop there], with whom we spend enough time to become intimately bored with by about the halfway mark).
David Lynch’s Dune film from 1985 was a wretched, awful, distended rectum of a film that is singularly ugly to watch or experience, and completely failed to capture any of the few interesting points in the novel, or follow any kind of coherent narrative at all, for that matter. The art design was brown and ugly, the acting was bizarre, and the film was just a miserable thing to endure in general. Patrick Stewart was in it and I still hated it — although Sting was also in it, which doesn’t help. I thought we’d proven once and for all that Dune was unfilmable — I was so put off by Lynch’s attempt that I didn’t even bother with the made-for-telly Dune series. So do we really want another Dune attempt? That’s exactly what’s happening, and relatively new guy Pierre Morel (he directed Taken, which was … actually good) has been hired to film the unfilmable film.
Dune’s plot falls straight into the strict Pocahontas / John Carter of Mars narrative most recently re-employed by Avatar: greedy, despicable humans find a new world, and plan to stripmine it with no regard of the barbaric natives; a bright, promising young human infiltrates the barbarians and fights with them against the fat greedy corporate-minded humans to save the native ecosystem. In Pocahontas the barbarians are Native Americans, in John Carter they’re twelve-foot-tall green people, in Avatar they’re twelve-foot-tall blue people, but in Dune they’re just regular humans with bright blue eyes who spend their entire lives wearing ugly brown body suits — how visually unappealing do you want to be? “Hero” Paul is brilliant and clever and competent and therefore extremely dull. The feudal politics of the book are even more dull and confusing, and the book hardly ever bothers to explain when or where the plot is taking place. By the time you realise this story takes place ten thousand years in the future, a kind of depressing resignation sets in: this is not going to be fun at all.
10,000 years ago humans were busy inventing religions, taming wolves and devising agriculture. If someone from today went back in time to say g’day, the clash of cultures would be of titanic proportions. So when I hear that Morel is hiring futurists and scientists to work out what the mere clothing and technology of the future will look like, my heart sinks. I always figured Frank Herbert deliberately omitted descriptions of things like that to differentiate his political power plays from real sci-fi — Dune feels more than anything else like dull historical fantasy — and cleverly swept things like computers, robotics, video games, and the bulk of technology as we know it under the rug for the sake of his own fantasy la-la land. Which is fine. Invent a future so distant as to be completely unrecognisable — that’s cool. Extend our present into an unforeseeable distance of time, and your film is immediately identified as a “predictions of the future circa 2010″-looking film — that’s not cool. At least Lynch understood that.
This film, in combination with Disney’s John Carter Of Mars franchise kick-off, are going to ride the coat-tails of Avatar all the way to the bank. Identical stories, similar settings (Pandora is green, Mars is red, Arrakis is yellow — all we need is a movie on a blue planet and we’re set), and probably a 3D angle — I’ve never wished more fervently that people would wake up and realise how much Avatar sucks. Give some real sci-fi room to breathe — adapt some Arthur C. Clarke, some Orson Scott Card, hell, adapt some more Michael Crichton, just keep some integrity and originality about your projects, will you?
All this talk of Dune is mostly speculative (the only fact is that Morel is now on board), and it’s unlikely a script will even be finished without a few screenwriters’ heads exploding with the fiddly, emotionless complexity of Frank Herbert’s literary nightmare (fear is the mind-killer), so don’t expect it to hit theatres any time soon.
"This isn't where I parked my Enterprise ..."
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No, we do not need another DUNE movie. The Lynch film was an attempt to smash together a big budget sci-fi epic with Lynch's art-school sensibilities rendering it a bi-polar mess. The steam-punky understones were fun but almost nothing else was. The made for tv movies were merely bland.
You have outlined most of the reasons that the novel is tough to film, one other element is that the political intrigue is represented in the book by giving the reader the inner monologue of the characters.
In the book itself, this looks good – Herbery excels at letting us know the strengths, weaknesses and fears of the characters. Try reproducing this in any way – as Lynch did – and it looks like the worst voice-over in the history of film. Don't pick up on this – which was the made-for-tv strategy and the characters become blanks or cyphers.
Considering the complexities of that first novel – a mini-series given the new BSG treatment might be more order. Or perhaps a two part film – LOTR style.
Good call on the inner monologue point — that was one of the few devices in the novel that I found interesting, as it opened a window into the character's you wouldn't normally get. And you're right, it would be nigh impossible to pull off on a cinema screen (as evidenced by Lynch's attempt).
Thank you. After being surrounded by sci fi scientists who LOVE the book and the film (it's a CLASSIC) it's such a relief to hear some sense. But lets face it, written english is like a second language for scientists anyway….
You're right, a lot of sci-fi authors concentrate more on the sci than the fi, to their detriment. There are some authors that strike the right balance, though, like Clarke and Heinlein, but Herbert really made it hard to read his books. Glad to see there's someone else out there who didn't love the book either!