If I’m going to start a blog about the things I love, it may as well start with Dune, because it’s one of my favourite books and nothing else was really in the running for the first post. So the first thing up on Zone Six is a Dune 1984 review, David Lynch’s version with Kyle MacLachlan in the stillsuit, and I’ll get the obvious bit out of the way before anything else. It’s a bit camp. Sometimes it’s a lot more than a bit, and I really enjoyed it anyway, which is exactly why it’s the one I wanted to open with. A film can have Patrick Stewart charge into a battle with a pug tucked under his arm and still take a massive swing at a story this big, and this one manages both inside the same ten minutes.
What got me watching it is how much of book one is actually in there. The move from Caladan to Arrakis, the Harkonnen betrayal, the Duke’s death, Paul and Jessica running for the deep desert, Stilgar and the Fremen, the spice, the worms, Paul going from exiled heir to the man leading all of them, it’s all on the screen. It just comes at you in a slightly different manner than I was expecting, and that’s the fairest way I can put it. Scenes get shuffled around, a lot of what people are thinking gets whispered over their faces so you always know where everyone stands, and a couple of the big pieces get swapped out for something else entirely. If you’ve read it you’ll spend a good chunk of the film going “oh, so that’s how they did that bit”, and for me that was a big part of the fun.
All of book one, just in a different fashion
The biggest swap is the weirding way. In the book it’s the Bene Gesserit way of fighting, the reason Jessica and Paul are so dangerous once the Fremen take them in, and it’s mostly about how they move and how fast they are. Here it turns into the weirding modules, a little handheld gadget you speak into with the sound doing the damage, so the scenes of Paul training the Fremen become Paul teaching a cave full of fighters how to use them. That’s not a scene I’d ever pictured while reading it, and it’s probably the clearest example of what I mean by the film doing book one in its own fashion, because the story beat is exactly where it should be and the thing on screen looks nothing like the thing that was in my head.
The ending’s the other one anybody who’s read it will spot straight away. Paul beats Feyd, takes the throne out from under the Emperor, and then it starts to rain on Arrakis, which is a very big thing to have happen at the end of a film called Dune and not how the book finishes at all. The Guild Navigator gets moved right up front too, this huge floating thing in a tank of spice gas that you meet in the opening minutes instead of a mystery you wait the whole story to see. And then there’s the gom jabbar test, with the box and the needle and the Reverend Mother, done almost exactly the way it’s written, which is part of why the changes stand out as much as they do. None of that stopped me enjoying it. Working out how each piece had been carried across from the page, and what it had turned into on the way, kept me hooked right to the end.
Gurney, Paul and the Baron
The cast is where it really does it for me, and three of them in particular. Patrick Stewart is exceptional as Gurney Halleck, the Atreides weapons master who trains Paul, and it’s a real kick seeing the man most of us know as Picard (before he actually was Picard) play somebody this rough around the edges. He’s got the baliset, he’s got the scowl, and yes he’s got the pug, carried into the Harkonnen attack like it’s standard issue, which is about the campiest image in a film full of them. He’s still exceptional, pug and all, and he’s Gurney as I know him from the book.
Kyle MacLachlan is Paul Atreides and he’s exceptional too. He has to carry the whole thing, from the nervous duke’s son with his hand in the box for the gom jabbar to the man riding a worm at the head of an army. He looks young enough at the start that the Reverend Mother testing him feels like something being done to a kid, and by the end he’s the one the whole desert is shouting for, so the jump the book asks for is all there in one performance. It’s a lot for one actor, and he makes it look easy.
And then there’s the Baron. Kenneth McMillan plays Baron Harkonnen floating around his halls on suspensors with his face covered in sores, and he’s exceptional in exactly the way that part needs. He’s the campiest thing in the whole film by a distance, and I mean that as praise, because he’s also properly nasty, the kind of villain who pulls the heart plug out of a servant just to make a point. Sting turns up as his nephew Feyd, in not much more than a winged pair of underpants, and between the two of them the Harkonnen scenes are where the film’s camp really lives.
A 1984 film that looks like the 60s
It suits the filmmaking of its time, and I say that as a good thing. The worms are big physical models thrashing through real sand, the ships are models, the Harkonnen homeworld is all smoke and pipes and furnaces, and the Emperor’s palace is gold and heavy dark wood everywhere you look. Even the stillsuits look like they came out of a workshop, all ribbed and heavy and a bit rubbery. There’s nothing about it that feels like a computer made it, and when a worm comes up out of the ground it’s a proper object with weight to it rather than something drawn in afterwards. For a film trying to put a whole alien planet on screen in the early 80s, that’s a lot of stuff somebody had to physically build.
The funny part is that for a film made in 1984, it looks like something from the 60s. The costumes, the big stiff uniforms with the high collars, the hair, the way people stand around in enormous rooms delivering lines to each other, it all feels a lot less like the far future than an older idea of what the future was supposed to look like. That’s the one part of it that dates it for me, more than any of the effects, and it’s also where a lot of the camp comes from. Some of it’s a bit much, the Baron’s scenes especially, and there are moments where the costumes got more of my attention than whatever was being said. The Emperor’s court alone could keep you busy for a whole viewing.