Standing Upon the Shoulders of Giant...Sandworms...

This week's portion of my ongoing "watch every dvd I own" project cracked into the two attempts to bring Frank Herbert's sci-fi masterpiece, Dune, to the screen.

I have two observations.  One obvious and one that may have escaped most people's notice.

First, the 1984 David Lynch movie is a flawed but beautiful near miss.  Trying to put Herbert's magnificent, complicated masterpiece on the screen in just two hours and seventeen minutes was doomed to failure the second the studio put that time limit on it.  Next year we will see a new adaptation of the novel, expected to be broken in to two movies of approximately that length.  Given how much the original novel naturally lends itself to a division of this sort, I'm excited and can only imagine what Lynch might have done with the freedom to do something similar.  The extended for television cut comes in at about three hours and fixes some things and ruins others, being hurt by Lynch's lack of involvement I'd wager.

The 2000 television version and its sequel were given much more latitude for story telling and the nearly 5 hours devoted to the original novel let it breath and give us a much more fleshed out plot.  Sadly the production values and some of the acting simply let the whole thing down.  The sequel takes as long as a short movie to deal with the second book (Dune Messiah) in the series and another 3 hours to tell the story of the third book, the eponymous Children of Dune.  The acting and production are a little smoother but still lack a little punch in the end.

My first observation is the obvious one.  This book, this science fiction classic, needs a movie or better still a series of movies that bring the highest standard of acting and production while not cutting the story down for the sake of time and profit.  Something between Lynch's messy, beautiful fever dream and the more workmanlike version we got from SyFy at the turn of this century.

With luck, that's what's in store for us over the next few years as the third Dune project arrives.

My second observation is a little more subtle.  There are a group of people, many of them Emmy nominees and winners, who owe an awful lot to the SyFy version of Dune.  It's easy to forget that back in 2000 there had rarely been any large scale science fiction or fantasy productions based on "big" genre novels that had achieved any real success.  At the time it aired, Dune proceeded even the first Lord of the Rings movie.  The Dune miniseries still remains at the top of SyFy's all time ratings list for its own productions.  Flawed and raw as it was, Dune showed the world that there was an appetite for adaptations of the great science fiction and fantasy literature that had up to then been deemed too expensive to produce for profit.

All those trophy winners and nominees from Game of Thrones should have thanked this often forgotten production.  Without its moderate success I very much doubt that the HBO folks would have been as ready to open their wallets to adapt the massive tomes of George R.R. Martin.  Dune showed the entertainment industry that convoluted fictional politics married to fantastic creatures in exotic settings had an audience ready and willing to devour it.

Many people credit Iron Man with starting the current dominance of superheroes at the box office but I always point to Blade as the first true comic book superhero success.  Without Blade, there's no X-Men, no Iron Man, no Avengers in my opinion.  Even though it was a minor film with minor success, it was proof of concept.  When it comes to big sci-fi and fantasy on television today, SyFy's Dune really was the proof of concept and without it the television and film landscape of 2019 would look very different indeed.

Both the 1984 and 2000 versions are well worth the time to rewatch if you have the time and the means.  As great as I hope the 2020 version and beyond will be, I'm glad I own copies of what came before.  Great viewing experiences in both cases, for all their various flaws.