TheVileOne Rants Like A Mofo About New SE:Director

Movie producer Richard Rubinstein wanted to get a new Dune film off the ground. Since Dino De Laurentiis still owned the movie rights, the television rights were up for shop at the Herbert estate. Rubinstein bought them with the promise of taking the book more seriously. John Harrison (Tales of the Darkside: The Movie) wrote and directed it. Like the book, the movie is divided into three chapters or acts: Dune, Muad’dib, and Prophet. The miniseries aired on three consecutive nights on the Sci-Fi channel in 2000, with one act of Dune per night. Beloved Star Wars fans might be surprised to see how much George Lucas RIPS-OFF (inspired in laymen’s terms) Dune. This is John Harrison’s director’s cut made for DVD.

The year is 10,091. It is the human race over 8,000 years in the future, or at least Frank Herbert’s take of it. The humans are divided into Royal houses ruled over by one house in particular, the imperial Corrinno. Two of the houses, House Atreides and Harkonnen, have been at war for centuries. Space travel is controlled by a Spacing Guild and their navigators. A primary religious sect is that of the Bene Gesserrit, who have mental as well as physical powers, and are current advisors of the Emperor in House Corrinno. The noble Atreides family has inherited the planet Arrakis after eighty years of rule by the dastardly and tyrannical Harkonnen. Arrakis, also known as the planet Dune, is a wasteland. It’s people are scattered and religiously fanatic, the storms and deserts are deadly, and the planet is overrun with dangerous, giant sandworms. However, the planet has one very marketable commodity, in fact THE most marketable commodity of the known universe. That is the spice mélange. It gives the guild’s navigators power to travel in space, the mind expanding powers to the Bene Gesserrit, and it gives an individual strength and long life. However it comes at the cost of a large addiction, and if your body is saturated with it, it makes your eyes glow a very bright blue color.

The story focuses mainly of one Paul Atreides. He is the son of Duke Leto (William Hurt), head of the house Atreides, and the new leader of the planet Arrakis. Paul is a noble, at times naïve young man. He is rather cynical and never gullible. Paul is utterly innocent, and believes in defense not violence or killing. He is despondent over leaving the Atreides home planet of Caladan (Earth in the future? Maybe…), and is confident that going to Arrakis is a trap. Paul’s mother, Lady Jessica (Saskia Reeves), is a former Bene Gesserrit. She is also Leto’s concubine, not wife, with hopes that the house could one day marry into royalty. The main crux of Dune, is the journey and development the character of Paul goes through. He goes from a young prince, to a confident leader and messiah to the Fremen, the people of Arrakis.

Despite all their efforts, it is hopeless for the Atreides. Even the Paddisha Emperor Shaddam (Giancarlo Giannini) means to bring the Atreides down due to his jealousy of their popularity. With help from a traitor in the Atreides rank (we’ll get to that later), the Harkonenn kill Leto, kick out House Atreides, and leave Paul and Jessica for dead in the desert. However, they survive and join with the rebels, the religiously fanatical Fremen. Paul is believed to be the Mahti, messiah, of the Fremen. The Mahti is an off-worlder and only son of a Bene Gesserrit, friend of God, someone who will lead the Fremen to true freedom, and make Arrakis a beautiful, thriving planet like Caladan.

Paul is an interesting character. Even when he loses everything, he doesn’t grieve. But deep down, he is ultimately tortured. He stays utterly patient and distant on the outside because he knows what is needed to be done. Paul tries to avoid talking about his problems and tries to deal with them on his own. His body and mind are going through changes and he thinks himself as a freak, and at first resents his abilities. Most of which are a result of his place in a long Bene Gesserrit breeding program (really inbreeding, just watch it, you’ll understand) and his addiction to the spice mélange. Paul is a very tragic hero.

In this version, Paul is played by Alec Newman. Alec Newman is a Scottish born stage and drama actor. He does exceptional work as Paul. Even little ticks he creates for the character, like the way he puts his two fingers to his head in deep thought, or the way he eats a spice pill, its just very cool. His acting as Paul seems very real and sincere, and believable. And you probably won’t laugh at his creepy nightmare sequences either. Paul falls in love with a young Fremen woman named Chani Kynes (Barbara Kodetova).

The love story in the movie is very important and fortunately very well done and acted. Yes at times it does get sappy, but it’s never cheesy, and the chemistry and love you see between the actors feels very real and not artificial. You feel for the couple the most when they go through a very terrible tragedy that’s painfully unexpected.

The main villain of the story is that of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Ian McNiece). The Baron is a very dastardly character, and at times almost charming in the most twisted way. He is a man so fat and revolting, he can no longer walk on his own, and relies on the support of anti-gravity levitators to move. The Baron is someone who is meant to be as disgusting on the outside as he is on the inside, and McNiece plays the part quite well. He gets support from his equally scheming and brutal nephews, Feyd Rautha (Matthew Keeslar) and Rabban (Laszlo I. Kish). Rabban is sent to oversee spice mining on Dune and terrorize it’s people. The Baron hopes to eventually send Feyd there to kill Rabban and become the Fremen savior. With the force of the Fremen behind them, they could have an army that could rival the Emperor’s deadly Sardakaur soldiers, but that ends up to be just wishful speculation on the Harkonnen’s part.

As an adaptation, this movie is great in being faithful to its source material. Everything is here, energy shields, mentats, bug-like ornithopters, Fedaykin, noise thumpers, still-suits, chrys-knives, water discipline, close to the text dialogue, and even Paul’s visions of the impending Jihad. The movie is nearly five hours long as compared to the television cut of about four hours and 25 minutes, so there is plenty of time to keep Herbert’s novel relatively intact. As always liberties are taken. The thought monologues, very famous in Herbert’s Dune, have been rather excised. Rightfully so, because they wouldn’t really work in a movie and would come off as ridiculous. Imagine if Jackson kept Tolkien’s thought monologues from Lord of the Rings in his movies. Princess Irulan (Julie Cox), who was basically the narrator of the novel, remains narrator for the movie but has a much more beefed up role. In the movie she has an initial meeting with Paul on Arrakis that was not in the book, to establish somewhat of a fleeting attraction and interest, as well seeing similarities within each other. The character of Thufir Hawat (Jan Vlasák I), personal mentat to the House Atreides, is set up and appears largely in the first chapter, but disappears quickly. In the novel, he is recruited by the Baron mainly due to Hawat’s belief that Duke Leto was betrayed by Jessica, who he never trusted. The Fremen are the badass desert people and fanatics they were in the books. You can find parallels in Dune with spice and the Fremen, to oil and Islam in the middle-east. However, when Paul joins the Fremen he helps break some of their traditions and modernizes them, training them and changing their more brutal ways.

As a movie, this works pretty damn good. John Harrison wrote and directed the movie, and I think found a great medium. The movie is very faithful to the book, but Harrison wrote and filmed it with a very operatic, sweeping epic, theatrical, and romantic style. It shows even more with Graeme Revell’s great music and the wild colors from director of photography, Vittorio Storaro, who was also the cinematographer on the original Dune film. The movie was entirely shot on sound stages. And most of the time the desert backdrops are very noticeable. However, the film had a budget of roughly 22 million dollars, and there was initial scouting done to film on location in real deserts. However it was decided that they didn’t have enough time or money to deal with the hazards of filming in the desert. The choice to film in sound stages also gave Storaro more free reign to play with the camera, lighting, and colors for the film which look fantastic. Most of the interior sets look very good. The sietches have large sweeping tapestries as described in the books, the Arrakeen and the Harkonnen’s Gedi Prime city palaces remind me a lot of New Brutalism. The Corrinno palace has a very elegant and refined look and feel to it. I think they did a great job with the cast. Most of them are unknowns, or international stage actors. I think most of the cast with characters like Stilgar (Uwe Ochsenknecht) were excellent, and fit their part perfectly. I really enjoyed Saskia Reeves as Jessica, and I’m pissed that she is being replaced by Susan Surandon in the new mini-series.

The visual effects are a mixed bag. While they look good for the most part, especially considering their budget, other times they look like they could have been a bit more polished. The Shai-Hulud and CGI enhanced desert shots are good in particular. The space ships and battles have a very Bablyon 5-esque look to them. The new look for the shields is very cool and looks good. So the effects in the movie are a little unbalanced. While at times they are good, others they are borderline bad, but the rest of it is so well done you probably won’t care or even notice much.

The Extra Scratch

Well, for the few who probably bought the initial 2-disc set for this movie for the same price, I feel very sorry for you.

The only problem I have with this set, is that I have to get up and switch discs on at the end of each section of the story (something similar fans will have to do for the special extended edition on Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, coming this November). Each disc has its own share of extra features on it. The entire set also has all the features from the original two disc set, including the Lure of the Spice featurette and Vittorio Storaro’s essay on filming Dune.

First, the extra footage. I think it is around 24 minutes total. The over 30 minutes of footage on the label is a tad misleading. Still might be a good idea to bring a coffee pot if you have trouble sitting through long movies, but they are separated in hour and a half sections so you can take a rest. Anyway, the extra footage is completely restored and edited back in. It doesn’t branch out and stick out like a sore thumb in X-men, and the picture doesn’t go from good to crappy bootleg-ish like in Army of Darkness: Director’s Cut. The new cut of Dune is more bloody, violent, and yes even nudity! Fans of Dune will especially appreciate the extra scenes. In particular, you see Jessica being held captive, and the Baron’s former mentat, Piter Devries (Jan Unger), fondling and lusting over Jessica, a subplot which was in the book. We see Paul share a moment in a secret garden room with Liet Pardot Kynes (Karel Dobry). Kynes is a planet ecologist for the Arrakis. He works for the emperor, but secretly leads the Fremen on a quest to terraform the planet. Kynes is also Chani’s father. Another scene depicts the Baron having a nightmare over Paul Atreides and his army. Feyd appears to inform the Baron that Jessica and Paul were last scene riding into a huge sandstorm, that no one survived. The Baron is rather upset that no bodies were found. Another scene shows Paul interrogating a guildsmen, secretly sent to Arrakkis. There’s also a scene where Jessica shares a tender moment with Wellington Yueh (Robert Russell II) adapted from the book. Yueh is upset over the loss of his wife to the Harkonnens, and it helps to reinforce Jessica’s confidence that Yueh would not be a traitor. For those who haven’t seen the original television cut in a while, it might be harder for you to spot the new stuff from the old, it’s all edited in seamlessly. However, the nudity is most noticeable.

There’s also the Lure of the Spice featurette, a holdover from the first DVD edition. This is the typical 25 minute making of special. I personally enjoy watching making-of shows, and here you get to see the likes of the flying, flaming Harkonnen soldiers on their springboard platforms of death. Some of the knife and stunt training for the fight scenes are cool as well. A friend of mine told me that a lot of the Fremen, and Paul’s fighting in particular, most resembles the defensive form of Tai Chi.

There are tons of interview featurettes on here. There’s a 10 minute interview with Willis McNelly (author of The Dune Encyclopedia and friend of Frank Herbert). McNelly discusses the parallels of Dune with the spice being oil and Arrakis being Iraq. He also recounts some of his memories of Frank Herbert, who was quite a wine expert.

There’s a 5 minute interview with Graeme Revell, the composer for the movie, with a medley of his score at the end.

One that’s really funny in particular is “The Color Wheel”, which is a 10 minute interview featurette with the cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro. What’s funny about this one is that Storaro speaks the interview in English the whole time with his heavy Italian accent. However, the producers of the DVD still felt it was necessary to put his words in English subtitles, even though Storaro’s words aren’t very hard to make out at all.

There’s also the “Defining the Messiah” featurette. This is basically just a bunch of scholars of different religions defining what a messiah is. However, there is not much insight about the actual Dune story.

One of the weirder ones is the 30-minute sci-fi roundtable panel that includes director John Harrison, as well as Harlan Ellison, Octavia Butler, Michael Cassutt, and Ray Kurzweil with moderatory duties to Arthur Cover. This was held at UCLA. Most of the time they just debate about ethics of technology and a bunch of new age mumbo-jumbo. You don’t see the audience ask too many questions, and not many cool discussions about sci-fi works. Harrison tries to spice things up with talk about realism in the Matrix, but there’s not much else. However, Ray Kurzweil appears in the panel as a talking head inside a television set.

Yet another is “Walking and Talking with John Harrison.” This is about 10 minutes long, and features John Harrison “WALKING” and “TALKING”. Harrison discusses what it was like righting Dune and the tough choices of shooting it on a soundstage. He comes off as a very well spoken and read guy, and very passionate about the Dune material. The lady who interviews him does ask him if he would’ve done it differently after 9-11. Much to my dismay, Harrison doesn’t retort with, “My god lady, not everything has to fricking be related to 9-11.”

There’s optional audio commentary through the whole movie with writer/director John Harrison, second unit director/visual effects supervisor Ernest Farino, film editor Harry Miller, and visual effects supervisor Tim McHugh. This is a group commentary, so it never really gets very boring and it says pretty insightful. I tend to enjoy DVD commentaries by the filmmakers and production crew the most, and ones by the actors the least. This is a very good commentary track because these are the guys who probably work on the movie the most and bust their asses, but they aren’t negative about it.

Of course there’s also the obligatory photo and concept art galleries and cast and crew profiles, and Vittorio Storaro’s essay about filming the movie. One cool addition is the photo and art galleries of the upcoming mini-series, “Children of Dune” which combines Frank Herbert’s “Dune Messiah” and “Children of Dune,” two of the latter sequels. I’m personally not a very big fan of the Dune sequels. For the most part, I think they are sub-par and rather depressing, especially compared to the first book. BUT, most of all included are the SCENE SELECTION indexes. Something David Lynch actually takes OUT OF movies on DVD…oops…wait, was that a Lynch joke?.…forget I said that…it never happened…you are getting sleepy, very sleepy, this long review is putting you to sleep. When I clap my hands you will remember nothing I have said about David Lynch…..

The Final Talkback

If you love Dune series and really think Star Wars is the most original material ever, I highly recommend it. It’s not too hard on the wallet and Barbara Kodetova’s chest isn’t hard on the eyes either. If you want to check out a good old fashioned sci-fi epic with some cool music, acting, and storytelling, it does that job too. Man, I can’t believe I got through this whole thing, without one joke about you know who. NOT ONE!...really honest.

But in all seriousness, this needs to be said. I really don’t think the 80’s was the right time for Dune. Star Wars was already big by then, and I don’t think anyone without the names Spielberg or Lucas could’ve gotten something with the scope of Dune properly. With all due respect to Lynch, Dune was only his second film, and he hadn’t read any of Dune before he went onto the project. His film, despite what I think of it, was cut apart by the studios, and to add further insult slapped Lynch in the face even more with the 3 hour plus television version, which was for all intents and purposes…shit. Even Lynch thought so, he even took his name off of it. Lynch had a huge budget to work with for the time, about 45 million dollars, which back then was probably the equivalent of about 100 million now for a movie. In fact, it was one of the largest budgets ever for a movie at that time. For fans that hope to see a special edition of David Lynch’s Dune, don’t hold your breath. David Lynch refuses to do so.

So Lynch is Lynch. I’ll be happy with this version, if you don’t like this one, well there are plenty of others, some of which might take a little rummaging to find.

Movie Grade: A

Extra Features Grade: A+

Overall DVD Grade: A

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fears. I will let them pass through me. And when the fear is gone…only I will remain.”

-Paul Muad’dib Atreides

One correction: DUNE was not David Lynch’s second film. He had already made THE GRANDMOTHER, ERASERHEAD, and THE ELEPHANT MAN by that point, and he was fairly in demand. He had a choice to make: direct DUNE or direct RETURN OF THE JEDI. Oh, man, I wish we lived in the alternate universe where he’d picked JEDI, just like I wish we lived in the universe where Cronenberg made TOP GUN or TOTAL RECALL or where DUNE was tackled first by Jodorowsky and Dali.

*sigh*

Anyway... nice work, TheVileOne. Thanks for the report.

"Moriarty" out.