Frank Herbert’s “Dune” is the Mount Everest of science fiction, looming, treacherous, irresistible to climbers. Its reputation has become its curse. With each attempt to bring Herbert’s syncretic, sand-blasted cosmos to the screen, we glimpse the mirage on the horizon, the masterpiece peeking through the haze, while filmmakers crawl toward it, parched, hallucinating grandeur but often finding only the plastic taste of compromise on their tongues.
The 1984 “Dune”: A Lynchian Curio, Trapped in the Company Store
It’s easy now to see David Lynch’s “Dune” as some visionary camp artifact, a Marvel movie by way of moldering MGM back-lot excess, wrapped in latex and self-seriousness. But in 1984, this was heralded (by execs, by desperate critics) as the next “Star Wars”, as if the slow drip of Herbert’s sociopolitical mania could be distilled into light beer. The results were predictably grotesque.
Lynch is a director most alive when dreaming through the subconscious, when the nightmare world spills its strange fluids into suburbia. Here, shackled to Herbert’s encyclopedia of invented nouns, he builds his Arrakis from smoke, matte paintings, and sets that look like the fever vision of an H.R. Giger–addled art director who’s been locked in a Hearst castle bathroom for two weeks. The worm puppets are magnificent; the synapse-zapping force shields, however, resemble a videogame glitch, a bit of “Minecraft” intruding when you wanted Dürer. You laugh, you cringe, you ponder how much cocaine was circulating in the Universal commissary that year.
A movie with such a gnawing surface weirdness, Kyle MacLachlan’s gentle, baffled Paul Atreides staring into the middle distance like a vegan who’s just tasted his first hot dog, the Emperor chewing up every bit of Baroque scenery, should, in theory, be delightful. But the exposition comes fast and drags, a mother lode of voiceovers sedimenting over the actors’ faces, as if Lynch had been forced to summarize Ulysses in blaring, overdetermined subtitles. When the movie is over, you don’t crave spice, you crave Pepto-Bismol. Yet years later, I find myself returning to certain tableaus, certain fumbled attempts at grandeur, with a shock of nostalgia; it’s a failed folly, but there is a hopeless artistry in every embarrassing swerve.
Villeneuve’s “Dune” (2021): The Planet Arrakis Gets Its Weather Report
The new “Dune” arrives like a sandstorm out of the high desert, deliberate, relentless, engineered for spectacle. Denis Villeneuve is surely our most devout neo-classicist director, crafting films as if Cinema, not plot or heart, were the true protagonist. If Lynch’s “Dune” was a fever dream, Villeneuve’s is a waking hallucination, crisp and hushed, as if Stanley Kubrick had suddenly developed a taste for camel hair and the sound of dry wind.
You watch “Dune: Part One” and recognize, instantly, that everything has been built not for pulpy delight but for reverence. Hans Zimmer’s score blows through the theater like a minimalist oratorio for lost civilizations; every aerial shot of Arrakis makes you want to check the humidity in the theater. The cast, finally, are allowed to breathe, to exist as people and not as game pieces nudged down a checklist of plot points (though, to be fair, Rebecca Ferguson’s Lady Jessica is still half-elliptical in her “I have secrets, ask me later” intensity). The pacing is a slow undressing rather than a striptease, Villeneuve lets you contemplate the grains of sand while keeping the boots heavy and ceremonial.
It’s this sense of weight, ironically, that makes Villeneuve’s film breathe, Herbert’s ecological and psychological threads are interwoven with a kind of patient, European craft. For once, Arrakis feels not like a backdrop for toy sales but like a nightmare land people might actually fear. I felt invested in the characters, and the spectacle for once wasn’t muddying the emotion; it was pressing down on it, letting it bloom slowly in the shade. The result is a movie that feels, for all its size, curiously intimate, a science fiction film where the sand in your shoes is a little too real.
Dune: Part Two (2024): War in the Age of Prestige
If “Dune: Part One” was a careful arranging of pieces, then “Part Two” throws them into the wind, and lets the storm rage. Villeneuve, who has always been more a sculptor of atmosphere than of heat, doubles down on the action, as if he’d heard the complaints and responded, “You want catharsis? Watch this.” And you do, helplessly, as the film sweeps you up in its tidal surge of violence and consequence. It’s enough to make you wish the 1984 Lynch had been given three movies just to paint daggers and poison and politics in the margins.
Yet, for all its pageantry, “Part Two” is not simply a generator of spectacle. The story’s black heart, the cost of Paul’s ascension, the carnivorous machinery of prophecy, is on full view. Timothée Chalamet’s Paul becomes something darker, almost monstrous, as the film dares you to question not whether he’ll win but whether the cost is bearable. Zendaya’s Chani is not a captive muse but a partner in the dance, loving and doubting, as the machinery of destiny chews up past and future alike.
There are moments, yes, when the film seems to slow, when the machine threatens to grind itself dumb on grandeur, to become as solemn as a papal funeral. But then a sandworm rises or a duel snaps you out of your reverie, and you remember that the movies are designed not for philosophy but for that electric charge that runs up the spine when you see something monstrous, beautiful, and true.
Legacy: Dunes in the Mind, Dunes on the Screen
Something in “Dune”, in the book, in all its wildly imperfect film incarnations, endures. Lynch’s version is a curiosity cabinet, a palace built on shifting sand, forever on the verge of collapse. Villeneuve’s films are cathedrals, engineered, mathematic, designed to stand forever, even if, like all cathedrals, they sometimes lose sight of what drew the first awe-struck crowd.
In the end, every “Dune” adaptation is a record of longing, of artists chasing Herbert’s vision across a mirage, sometimes stumbling, sometimes finding, almost by accident, a little water in the desert. The spice will flow, and some will taste only the grit, but Villeneuve’s “Dune” makes you hope, for the length of a film, that the mirage is real.
