Dune or dune not
As of the year of our Lord 2024, there have been three complete film adaptation of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune, which is a decent number for a book widely regarded as "unfilmable". One of these, the 1984 Dune directed by David Lynch, is almost completely ineffective as a narrative film, but it sort of works as fever dream that captures some (only some!) of the mystic weirdness of the book. Another one, the 2021-2024 dyad of Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two directed by Denis Villeneuve, jettisons basically everything even a tiny bit weird, but at that price buys for itself a pretty comprehensible and satisfying narrative executed with some unbelievably gorgeous physical production and visual effects. People can and do disagree which of those is the preferable approach, but I am glad that we have both of them to choose from, anyways.
As for the third adaptation, that brings us to Frank Herbert's Dune, a three-part television miniseries that was, at the time of its debut in the Christmas season of 2000, the most lavish and costly production ever made to premiere on the Sci-Fi Channel, and boy, doesn't that statement already give us a lot to work with. It's like getting the fanciest meal at McDonald's. It's a big enough world that I'm sure there's somebody willing to go to bat for it, but I am quite stymied in trying to imagine what their argument might be. For 21 years, I guess you could say that it was the only intelligible adaptation of the book, and then for another two years after that, you could say that it was the only intelligible adaptation that told a complete story. Even in the wake of Dune: Part Two, it's still the only intelligible adaptation that tells the story more or less exactly the way Frank Herbert set it down in the first place, with at least some effort at preserving the psychedelic mysticism that Villeneuve completely excised from his two-parter. But at a certain point, you could just go read the book, if that's the only thing you want. And it is pretty close to being the only thing Frank Herbert's Dune has to offer. Disregarding its relationship to the source material and the other audio-visual interpretations thereof, there's still precious little about this that's at all good: my recollection is that by the standards of television in 2000, this looked pretty neat, but also I was 19 years old and I imagine I probably had bad taste. I mean, I must have: I liked this. Anyway, even if it did look pretty neat in 2000, the CGI that could be afforded by a basic cable network at that point in time, even if the network was willing to open its pockets a little bit extra wide, had no prayer of aging with any sort of dignity, and I'd say that out of all the ways one could find fault with Frank Herbert's Dune, the visual effects have to be way near the top of the list. It's not just "TV-quality CGI less than a decade after Jurassic Park looks cheap now" - which it does; I know that's a cheap shot but it's still true - because some of the worst offenses have nothing to do with CGI. Much of the first and third episodes, and a simply deadly majority of the second episode, put the cast against green screens and plug in backdrops that are just mesmerisingly bad. The compositing makes the backgrounds almost glow, separating them cleanly from the actors and exaggerating the planar qualities of the image: it feels like two flat panels riding atop each other. It would look better if the actors were standing in front of honest-to-God painted flats, like in live theater; at least then there would be some kind of argument that it was a deliberate stylistic choice.
But anyway, I concede that it's mean to beat up a turn-of-the-century TV production for having bad visual effects. So let's beat up on it for other reasons. And plenty of reasons present themselves: in blunt point of fact, this production has very little to recommend it on any level. It's not even attractive above and beyond the shabby effects work, despite having done one of the things you would do if you wanted to guarantee that your project was attractive, hiring unmitigated genius Vittorio Storaro to do the cinematography. Unfortunately for Frank Herbert's Dune, this was the particular period when Storaro's genius was manifesting itself primarily in terms of finding new and exciting ways of destroying the medium; this was one of the very first projects he made with his idiosyncratic "Univisium" format, a quixotic attempt to unify all theatrical and home viewing experiences to a standardized 2:1 aspect ratio (nothing wrong with that in principle; the annoying thing is that Storaro attempted to reformat all of his earlier films to that ratio for their subsequent home video releases, though this has thankfully not been respected much in practice). However, to my knowledge, this has never been seen in that ratio: the television debut and, I believe, every home media release has been at the "TV standard" widescreen ratio, 1.78:1. So what we see is, in effect, a slightly cropped and mis-weighted series of images, and while I wouldn't say it ever breaks the compositions - nothing germane ever falls offscreen, nobody is ever split in half by the edge of the frame - after the first time you notice the persistent tendency of shots to bunch up around the sides but leave some dead spots in the middle, it's really hard to un-notice it. Meanwhile, Storaro's lighting techniques in this project seemed to mostly consist of one of two flavors: interiors use very strong key lights that blow out the foreground a little while leaving the backgrounds slightly dark, and exteriors use colored lights that broadcast their artificial qualities a bit too enthusiastically, giving everything a garishly oversaturated, monochromatic look. It is, if nothing else, distinctive: especially the exterior night scenes, which are so vividly, vigorously blue that they look like a tinted silent movie wandered its way up to the edge of the 21st Century. And if that was the strategy, we might even have something pretty incredible, a vivid throwback to Old Hollywood Epic filmmaking tricks. Heck, that might very well have been the rationale for doing this in the first place. In practice, the interiors and exteriors feel like they come from two entirely different movies, and the brazen artifice of the colored lighting does not play nice at all with the overall sense of cheapness that pervades the whole shoot. And, above all else, the lighting really calls attention to the insufficiency of the compositing work.
So that's one strike against the visuals: another is that this has some extremely ungainly design, which like the lighting seems to involve at least a couple unrelated productions getting mashed together. Some of it is pure space opera boilerplate, especially in the first episode (the only one to spend any considerable amount of time away from the desert planet Arrakis, AKA Dune), where it feels like the standing sets from some shot-in-Canada Star Trek knock-off had been hastily redressed into the most generic shiny white spaceship imaginable. A lot of it is the dullest possible "fake cave" sets that do not at all enjoy the amount of light that has been thrown on them. Some of it is silly as all hell, such as the weird insistence on giving as many female characters as possible giant hats that have been assemble from huge circles, two feet or so across, that make them look kind of like sci-fi anime versions of Catholic bishops. Which is, for the record, another one of those things that feels so much like an artistically defensible choice in adapting Dune that the problem is less that it has happened, and more that it has happened more persistently and aggressively. And, to be fair, some of the design choices are actually perfectly fine: the palace that the Atreides family at the center of the story occupies for most of the first episode looks perfectly fine for a vaguely luxurious series of big airy rooms on a planet where even vague luxury can't really exist, and costume designer Theodor Pistek has provided an entirely satisfying interpretation of the single most important costume for this story, the water-recycling stillsuits that are virtually all that the main cast wears for the second and third episodes.
The result of all the above is that this a strange affect, simultaneously low-rent and showy, like a dinner theater production that got a Broadway budget. It's Dune in the mode of the reedy made-for-TV sci-fi that proliferated in the U.S. and Canada in the wake of Star Trek's great success re-establishing itself in the 1990s, with the same unmistakably cheesy quality that attends to basically all of it. Not necessarily bad, but it feels more hollow when applied to something with the pretensions to solemnity that this somewhat esoteric, heavily political material has. And that's not good, because writer-director John Harrison's script needs all the help it can get to feel in any way lively or watchable. As I've said, this is basically the "accurate" adaptation of Dune, though the main effect of this is showcasing the limitations of that approach. There's a strong sense, especially omnipresent in the opening episode, of simply checking off all the scenes that need to be there, but not trying to wrangle all of the density of the book into engaging drama when "having people recite exposition" is there as a fallback strategy. Dune is not a book with a terribly significant emphasis on imagery (I mean, no book without illustrations has an emphasis on imagery, but Dune doesn't even really have a ton of vivid descriptions), and the "straighter" the adaptation, the more it becomes scene upon scene of people talking. And in fact, Harrison takes this even further; just about the only significant alteration he makes to the source material is to introduce Princess Irulan (Julie Cox) "in the flesh" a great deal earlier than her eleventh-hour appearance in the novel; this is presumably some attempt to capture how present she feels in the book thanks to her name being attached to the historical anecdotes and aphorisms that appear at the start of every chapter, but it really just introduces another person to explain space politics to us. It also has a curious negative impact on the human drama, since it means that we get lots of early evidence of her chemistry with Alec Newman, playing the more-or-less lead role of Paul Atreides, which makes his later romance with Barbora Kodetová's Chani feel way less persuasive. In a transparently budget-conscious cast full of far more Czech people than I ever visualised during any of my trips through the book, Kodetová is the one whose presence has the worst negative impact on the story, and having the revised script inadvertently tell us that Paul has a much better romantic partner right there does nothing at all for the very limited amount of human interest that Frank Herbert's Dune is ever able to gin up.
The reality is, there are very few performances here that are much good at all, and being from the Czech Republic has nothing to do with it. The worst in show is easily London-born Saskia Reeves, playing the politically wily, sure-footed, and conniving Lady Jessica as the charmingly addled young woman who runs the tea shop in a BBC sitcom. But it's a pretty brutal combination of people with limited talent trying very hard and people with talent trying not at all, such as top-billed William Hurt, playing the intelligent, humane, foolish Duke Leto Atreides in a dreadfully sleepy manner; he dies in the first episode, sparing us more than a few flashbacks and visions where he barely if ever speaks, but watching him hold down the fort as the closest we get to a protagonist in Episode 1 sets Frank Herbert's Dune off on a very weak footing. It strikes me as not probably a coincidence that the third episode, which has the least of either Hurt or Reeves, is also the best one - maybe even the one that's "actually good", though three hours into the story it's hard to have enough rooting interest to still care. At any rate, the miniseries' one major strength is also its one openly good performance, Ian McNeice as the conspiratorial villain Baron Harkonnen; it's the literal only aspect of this adaptation that I'd put above either of the other two, with McNeice approaching the role as a crafty and grossly unpleasant human being, rather than the disgusting cartoon of his predecessor, Kenneth McMillan, or the glowering swamp monster of his successor, Stellan Skarsgård. He's still quite a bit broader and goofier than anybody else onscreen here, playing the role basically as the sci-fi version of the campy Roman villains of a '50s Hollywood bible epic (and this is accompanied by nonstop homoerotic leering at the barely-clothed men in his entourage every time we go to one of his scenes, in the closest Harrison ever comes to demonstrating that he has interpreted the novels rather than just transcribing them), but given the ensemble he's part of, broad and goofy camp is absolutely not something to dismiss out of hand.
Beyond him, the cast is mostly just dull, sometimes dull with reverence towards the source material, often dull because nothing about the script is providing them with any opportunity to demonstrate an inner life. And I don't regret the absence of the unending voiceover from the Lynch Dune, but at least that gave us something other than the costume design to grant the characters any sort of personality. Drama-wise, Frank Herbert's Dune never manages to escape the trap of simply reciting the ideas from the book, trimmed down to the bone to make them simpler and to fit them into 4.5 hours that still feels a little bit rushed in the first and final thirds. Its appeal is almost solely that it presents a faithful reduction of the material that can be grasped with limited effort in a single day, and I don't know, that seems like the least-fun way to interact with the material and concepts of Dune that has thus far been birthed into the world.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
As for the third adaptation, that brings us to Frank Herbert's Dune, a three-part television miniseries that was, at the time of its debut in the Christmas season of 2000, the most lavish and costly production ever made to premiere on the Sci-Fi Channel, and boy, doesn't that statement already give us a lot to work with. It's like getting the fanciest meal at McDonald's. It's a big enough world that I'm sure there's somebody willing to go to bat for it, but I am quite stymied in trying to imagine what their argument might be. For 21 years, I guess you could say that it was the only intelligible adaptation of the book, and then for another two years after that, you could say that it was the only intelligible adaptation that told a complete story. Even in the wake of Dune: Part Two, it's still the only intelligible adaptation that tells the story more or less exactly the way Frank Herbert set it down in the first place, with at least some effort at preserving the psychedelic mysticism that Villeneuve completely excised from his two-parter. But at a certain point, you could just go read the book, if that's the only thing you want. And it is pretty close to being the only thing Frank Herbert's Dune has to offer. Disregarding its relationship to the source material and the other audio-visual interpretations thereof, there's still precious little about this that's at all good: my recollection is that by the standards of television in 2000, this looked pretty neat, but also I was 19 years old and I imagine I probably had bad taste. I mean, I must have: I liked this. Anyway, even if it did look pretty neat in 2000, the CGI that could be afforded by a basic cable network at that point in time, even if the network was willing to open its pockets a little bit extra wide, had no prayer of aging with any sort of dignity, and I'd say that out of all the ways one could find fault with Frank Herbert's Dune, the visual effects have to be way near the top of the list. It's not just "TV-quality CGI less than a decade after Jurassic Park looks cheap now" - which it does; I know that's a cheap shot but it's still true - because some of the worst offenses have nothing to do with CGI. Much of the first and third episodes, and a simply deadly majority of the second episode, put the cast against green screens and plug in backdrops that are just mesmerisingly bad. The compositing makes the backgrounds almost glow, separating them cleanly from the actors and exaggerating the planar qualities of the image: it feels like two flat panels riding atop each other. It would look better if the actors were standing in front of honest-to-God painted flats, like in live theater; at least then there would be some kind of argument that it was a deliberate stylistic choice.
But anyway, I concede that it's mean to beat up a turn-of-the-century TV production for having bad visual effects. So let's beat up on it for other reasons. And plenty of reasons present themselves: in blunt point of fact, this production has very little to recommend it on any level. It's not even attractive above and beyond the shabby effects work, despite having done one of the things you would do if you wanted to guarantee that your project was attractive, hiring unmitigated genius Vittorio Storaro to do the cinematography. Unfortunately for Frank Herbert's Dune, this was the particular period when Storaro's genius was manifesting itself primarily in terms of finding new and exciting ways of destroying the medium; this was one of the very first projects he made with his idiosyncratic "Univisium" format, a quixotic attempt to unify all theatrical and home viewing experiences to a standardized 2:1 aspect ratio (nothing wrong with that in principle; the annoying thing is that Storaro attempted to reformat all of his earlier films to that ratio for their subsequent home video releases, though this has thankfully not been respected much in practice). However, to my knowledge, this has never been seen in that ratio: the television debut and, I believe, every home media release has been at the "TV standard" widescreen ratio, 1.78:1. So what we see is, in effect, a slightly cropped and mis-weighted series of images, and while I wouldn't say it ever breaks the compositions - nothing germane ever falls offscreen, nobody is ever split in half by the edge of the frame - after the first time you notice the persistent tendency of shots to bunch up around the sides but leave some dead spots in the middle, it's really hard to un-notice it. Meanwhile, Storaro's lighting techniques in this project seemed to mostly consist of one of two flavors: interiors use very strong key lights that blow out the foreground a little while leaving the backgrounds slightly dark, and exteriors use colored lights that broadcast their artificial qualities a bit too enthusiastically, giving everything a garishly oversaturated, monochromatic look. It is, if nothing else, distinctive: especially the exterior night scenes, which are so vividly, vigorously blue that they look like a tinted silent movie wandered its way up to the edge of the 21st Century. And if that was the strategy, we might even have something pretty incredible, a vivid throwback to Old Hollywood Epic filmmaking tricks. Heck, that might very well have been the rationale for doing this in the first place. In practice, the interiors and exteriors feel like they come from two entirely different movies, and the brazen artifice of the colored lighting does not play nice at all with the overall sense of cheapness that pervades the whole shoot. And, above all else, the lighting really calls attention to the insufficiency of the compositing work.
So that's one strike against the visuals: another is that this has some extremely ungainly design, which like the lighting seems to involve at least a couple unrelated productions getting mashed together. Some of it is pure space opera boilerplate, especially in the first episode (the only one to spend any considerable amount of time away from the desert planet Arrakis, AKA Dune), where it feels like the standing sets from some shot-in-Canada Star Trek knock-off had been hastily redressed into the most generic shiny white spaceship imaginable. A lot of it is the dullest possible "fake cave" sets that do not at all enjoy the amount of light that has been thrown on them. Some of it is silly as all hell, such as the weird insistence on giving as many female characters as possible giant hats that have been assemble from huge circles, two feet or so across, that make them look kind of like sci-fi anime versions of Catholic bishops. Which is, for the record, another one of those things that feels so much like an artistically defensible choice in adapting Dune that the problem is less that it has happened, and more that it has happened more persistently and aggressively. And, to be fair, some of the design choices are actually perfectly fine: the palace that the Atreides family at the center of the story occupies for most of the first episode looks perfectly fine for a vaguely luxurious series of big airy rooms on a planet where even vague luxury can't really exist, and costume designer Theodor Pistek has provided an entirely satisfying interpretation of the single most important costume for this story, the water-recycling stillsuits that are virtually all that the main cast wears for the second and third episodes.
The result of all the above is that this a strange affect, simultaneously low-rent and showy, like a dinner theater production that got a Broadway budget. It's Dune in the mode of the reedy made-for-TV sci-fi that proliferated in the U.S. and Canada in the wake of Star Trek's great success re-establishing itself in the 1990s, with the same unmistakably cheesy quality that attends to basically all of it. Not necessarily bad, but it feels more hollow when applied to something with the pretensions to solemnity that this somewhat esoteric, heavily political material has. And that's not good, because writer-director John Harrison's script needs all the help it can get to feel in any way lively or watchable. As I've said, this is basically the "accurate" adaptation of Dune, though the main effect of this is showcasing the limitations of that approach. There's a strong sense, especially omnipresent in the opening episode, of simply checking off all the scenes that need to be there, but not trying to wrangle all of the density of the book into engaging drama when "having people recite exposition" is there as a fallback strategy. Dune is not a book with a terribly significant emphasis on imagery (I mean, no book without illustrations has an emphasis on imagery, but Dune doesn't even really have a ton of vivid descriptions), and the "straighter" the adaptation, the more it becomes scene upon scene of people talking. And in fact, Harrison takes this even further; just about the only significant alteration he makes to the source material is to introduce Princess Irulan (Julie Cox) "in the flesh" a great deal earlier than her eleventh-hour appearance in the novel; this is presumably some attempt to capture how present she feels in the book thanks to her name being attached to the historical anecdotes and aphorisms that appear at the start of every chapter, but it really just introduces another person to explain space politics to us. It also has a curious negative impact on the human drama, since it means that we get lots of early evidence of her chemistry with Alec Newman, playing the more-or-less lead role of Paul Atreides, which makes his later romance with Barbora Kodetová's Chani feel way less persuasive. In a transparently budget-conscious cast full of far more Czech people than I ever visualised during any of my trips through the book, Kodetová is the one whose presence has the worst negative impact on the story, and having the revised script inadvertently tell us that Paul has a much better romantic partner right there does nothing at all for the very limited amount of human interest that Frank Herbert's Dune is ever able to gin up.
The reality is, there are very few performances here that are much good at all, and being from the Czech Republic has nothing to do with it. The worst in show is easily London-born Saskia Reeves, playing the politically wily, sure-footed, and conniving Lady Jessica as the charmingly addled young woman who runs the tea shop in a BBC sitcom. But it's a pretty brutal combination of people with limited talent trying very hard and people with talent trying not at all, such as top-billed William Hurt, playing the intelligent, humane, foolish Duke Leto Atreides in a dreadfully sleepy manner; he dies in the first episode, sparing us more than a few flashbacks and visions where he barely if ever speaks, but watching him hold down the fort as the closest we get to a protagonist in Episode 1 sets Frank Herbert's Dune off on a very weak footing. It strikes me as not probably a coincidence that the third episode, which has the least of either Hurt or Reeves, is also the best one - maybe even the one that's "actually good", though three hours into the story it's hard to have enough rooting interest to still care. At any rate, the miniseries' one major strength is also its one openly good performance, Ian McNeice as the conspiratorial villain Baron Harkonnen; it's the literal only aspect of this adaptation that I'd put above either of the other two, with McNeice approaching the role as a crafty and grossly unpleasant human being, rather than the disgusting cartoon of his predecessor, Kenneth McMillan, or the glowering swamp monster of his successor, Stellan Skarsgård. He's still quite a bit broader and goofier than anybody else onscreen here, playing the role basically as the sci-fi version of the campy Roman villains of a '50s Hollywood bible epic (and this is accompanied by nonstop homoerotic leering at the barely-clothed men in his entourage every time we go to one of his scenes, in the closest Harrison ever comes to demonstrating that he has interpreted the novels rather than just transcribing them), but given the ensemble he's part of, broad and goofy camp is absolutely not something to dismiss out of hand.
Beyond him, the cast is mostly just dull, sometimes dull with reverence towards the source material, often dull because nothing about the script is providing them with any opportunity to demonstrate an inner life. And I don't regret the absence of the unending voiceover from the Lynch Dune, but at least that gave us something other than the costume design to grant the characters any sort of personality. Drama-wise, Frank Herbert's Dune never manages to escape the trap of simply reciting the ideas from the book, trimmed down to the bone to make them simpler and to fit them into 4.5 hours that still feels a little bit rushed in the first and final thirds. Its appeal is almost solely that it presents a faithful reduction of the material that can be grasped with limited effort in a single day, and I don't know, that seems like the least-fun way to interact with the material and concepts of Dune that has thus far been birthed into the world.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
