One of my favorite guilty pleasures from the 80's film vaults, David Lynch's bizarre, goofy, visually arresting and nearly incomprehensible DUNE is the cinematic equivalent of "everything but the kitchen sink".
Armed with a huge budget and his own strange style, Lynch wrote the screenplay, cramming Frank Herbert's dense, massive novel into about two hours and twenty minutes.
The film opens with a princess (Virginia Madsen) describing the basic story for about a minute, leaving you more confused then when you started.
In the opening 15 minutes, you meet time travelers that can bend space, but have mutated into 15 foot long giant blobs with heads like that giant brain guy in the original "Star Trek", three different royal houses battling for power and some serious eyebrow grooming problems, thanks to the ever over-acting Freddie Jones.
You can take one of two paths watching Lynch's only science fiction effort.
One, you can try to follow every bit of the story and the multitude of strange characters with difficult names, suspicious alliances and bizarre behavior.
Two, like with many Lynch masterpieces like "Blue Velvet" or "Twin Peaks", just let his style and excellent visuals roll over you and draw you in.
If I tried to explain the plot to you, you and I would both give up after about five minutes and my fingers would hurt from typing. Suffice to say there is a planet that produces 'Spice" that's become the most valuable substance in the universe and there are many planets and groups of people battling for control of the only planet with Spice, which is called Dune.
The cast is huge, from Max Von Sydow and Patrick Stewart to Sting.
It's superb to watch, never less than interesting in its special effects and Lynch's usual montage work.
Those same special effects can be pretty painful to watch now, thirty plus years later. What was "new computer effects cool" in 1984 looks like some horrible floppy disk video game now.
But like "Tron" the film retains some good will for being cutting edge back in the day.
By the time our hero and his warriors are riding giant worms the length of ten football fields through the desert, a baron with bubbling face acne is floating around the air and dripping in blood & oil and Sting is bugging out his eyes and walking around in some metal Speedo looking thing, you're either along for Lynch's ride or have turned off this long exercise in style over coherence.
I remember buying the VHS tape when it came out and it came with a little booklet about 15 pages long with definitions of the terms used in the film and a description of all the battling "houses". If your movie is that complicated, you might have an issue.
Folks that read the book generally hated this movie. People that had not read the book, pretty much hated this movie.
With a $40 million budget thirty years ago and box office of $27 million, this was a big bomb for Universal and Lynch.
Clearly I'm in the minority here, but I revisit this unique Lynch vision every few years and always enjoy its really stupid moments as much as its best passages.
It's one long, slow and strange trip, but one I never mind taking. I'll give it a B.
Do the Worm!!!
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