Dune (Widescreen)
by David Lynch
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DVD details
Actor: Brad Dourif, Francesca Annis, José Ferrer, Leonardo Cimino, Linda HuntDirector: David Lynch
Brand: UNI DIST CORP. (MCA)
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 137 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1998-03-31
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Universal Studios
DVD Reviews of Dune (Widescreen)
DVD Review: A brief comment & some history
Summary: 4 Stars
I saw this movie when it first came out 20 years ago and thought it was okay but not great. Then only last night I watched it again for the first time, and surprisingly I found I liked it much better. Much of that was due to the fact that the intervening years have given the film a nostalgically retro feel that I found worked better now, what with the popularity of "steam punk." A lot of the scenes had that sort of look and ambience, the advanced technology often having a sort of Victorian retro appearance in terms of the design, such as the Guild Navigator's environmental chamber.
Some of the scenes and special effects were still impressive 20 years later. The sandworms with their gigantic open maws and crystalline teeth are truly awesome and were visualized quite well. But the main characters, though portrayed adequately, lacked development and just didn't have the same charisma and depth as they did in the book.
The Guild navigators, who are appropriately bizarre and creepy as befits their use of the mutating melange spice and their unusual abilities in the Dune universe, were a nice concept. But the only character who's really developed much is Paul and to some extent the Bene Gesserit mother superior and Gurney Halleck. But I also have to give some credit to Brad Douriff here in an early performance as Pieter de Vries. He does a good job with the role despite not having much on-screen time.
Much of this is no doubt due to having to compress a 600+ page very complex novel into three hours, which also limits what you can do in the way of character development, but still, I was expecting a bit more there since Dune is primarily a novel about powerful characters with unique talents and abilities, rather than advanced technology in the sense of most science-fiction novels. The technology does exist in the story of course, but it's not the real focus of the novel.
Lynch also used actual dialog from the book, which, although commendably faithful to the book, limits what the characters can actually say. Sometimes the dialog seems artificial and forced, which isn't a criticism of Herbert so much as the fact that sometimes the characters didn't seem comfortable with the lines and are able to really make them convincing.
I had a brief comment about the development of Herbert's ideas for Dune. In reading the novel, I recalled an interesting earlier short story that shows his interest in human psychology and political intrigue. Written in the 50's, a full ten years before Dune, it shows his fascination with these themes can be traced at least back till then. Entitled "Cease Fire!," it is about a time in the future when weapons based on conventional explosives have become obsolete because of a new invention--the explosives can now be detonated remotely by means of a revolutionary new psi ability.
This basically throws warfare back into the Middle Ages. At the very end of the book, someone hands the main character an old book, saying that this is what warfare will be based on from now on. He looks at the book, and it is Machiavelli's "The Prince."
I found this interesting given the important place of psychological warfare, political intrigue, and human psychology occupy as themes in Dune. "Cease Fire" presages these aspects of Dune, and obviously Herbert had been pondering the implications of such a world for some time before writing the book, in addition to Dune's important and pervasive ecological themes--another idea that echoed the Zeitgeist of the times and the more ecologically conscious and aware 1960s.
There's one other aspect of the book and film that I have to comment about, and that's the two knife fights that occur. The first is with Gurney Halleck, reputed to be the greatest hand-to-hand fighter in the universe, and the second one between Sting and Paul at the very end. The blade is the preferred personal weapon, and is used to settle feuds and "kanly" disputes, which are apparently feuds with specific rules and protocols that must be obeyed between houses such as those of the Atreides and the Harkonnens in the book.
I found this interesting because I am a karate and kung fu instructor who is also certified in the art of Kali-Escrima, a Filipino and Indonesian art that specializes in the knife and short stick. Kali also incorporates Indonesian Pentjak Silat, which is also a bladed art. There are literally hundreds of styles of Escrima, Kali, and Silat, but most people are not familiar with these arts. I've studied three, which are Kali Illustrisimo, Serrada Escrima, and the Ted LucayLucay system of Kali-Escrima under my guru, Chuck Gonzaga. Chuck is an outstanding martial artist with a broad and deep knowledge of several arts in addition to Kali-Escrima, including Jeet Kune Do, San Sou kung fu, Sebekkha (an eclectic combination of several martial arts taught to the Egyptian anti-terrorist forces), and he is also skilled at the healing massage arts. I am proud to be a certified instructor under Chuck and to be carrying on the lineage of his tradition.
I thought the knife fights in the movie were very artful and dramatic, but they weren't really realistic in many ways, and didn't show correct skills or strategy for a knife fight. I'll just point out a few of these.
First, you don't stand straight up in a knife fight, you crouch and hunch down with a rounded shoulder posture in order to reduce the total area exposed. Also hunching hollows out the body giving you more distance to your internal organs from the opponent's knife.
Second, no knife fighter would move his knife hand as far off the center line, or the non-knife hand as well, since the center line must always be guarded. Third, both fighters are closing and going for deadly body shots right off the bat, but the best strategy is to try to cut the opponent's arm or hand first, to disable or slow him down, since trying to go for a killing blow exposes you to such a counter yourself. This is known as the principle of "defanging the snake" in Kali-Escrima. Probably 90 percent of knife fighters don't know this important principle.
However, I thought the knife fight with the personal shields between Paul and Gurney were a nice touch. As described in the book, the shields stop fast moving objects but allow slower objects to penetrate the force field, so special training and technique is required to get just the right speed. In the last fight, the shields aren't used, and the fight is more typical of what you would see if two people were fighting unprotected, except that as I said, there were some problems with that. I would be interested in knowing who was the adviser for the knife fights or if they had one, and how they came to be created.
But all in all, twenty years after I originally saw the movie, a pretty decent flick after all and one that seems to have improved with age in my humble opinion.
Description of Dune (Widescreen)
BASED ON FRANK HERBERT'S CLASSIC, THIS SCI-FI ADVENTURE BOASTSDAZZLING F/X IMAGES, AND POWERFUL PERFORMANCES.Even more than most of David Lynch's deliberately bizarre and idiosyncratic movies, Dune is a "love-it-or-hate-it" affair. An ambitious, epic, utterly mind-boggling--and, let's admit it, all-out weird--adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic science fiction novel, Dune remains one of the most controversial films in the director's exceedingly provocative career. The story (if Dune can be said to have just one story) is complex and convoluted in the epic tradition; it has something to do with political intrigue and a planet that is home to a precious spice and gigantic sand worms. Think Shakespeare's Henry IV with a dash of Tremors, and set in another galaxy. But despite plenty of strangely whispered voice-overs that explain the characters' thoughts (and endlessly detailed exposition), storytelling is not really among the film's strong points. There are, however, a lot of memorably fantastic/grotesque images, an extraordinary cast, and a soundtrack featuring Toto. I told you it was weird. Among the stars are Kyle MacLachlan, José Ferrer, Dean Stockwell, Brad Dourif, Sting, Kenneth McMillan, Patrick Stewart, Sean Young, and Linda Hunt. The DVD contains the original release version; a shorter version cut for television has been disowned by Lynch, who insisted his name be replaced by that famous Hollywood pseudonym "Alan Smithee." --Jim Emerson
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