Dune, on DVD

David Lynch had an impossible task on his hands when the Dune film landed in his lap.

He was tasked with bringing a classic and honored science fiction masterpiece to the screen, despite earlier failed attempts by others. That his Dune was pilloried when it came out isn't surprising considering that not only does the book have a wide and well-earned cult following, but that its epic sweep would be very difficult to bring to the screen.

In fact, it took a miniseries some fifteen years later to even come close to doing justice to Frank Herbert's novel - some five hours instead of the 137 minutes of the Lynch film.

Despite that, there's a lot to like about this "original" version, even with its warts. In fact, we've often speculated that there's a good four hour movie trying to get out of this shorter one.

It's an ambitious attempt that features terrific production values (though we hated Lynch's designers' vision of the ornithopters) and marvelous sets. The money is definitely on the screen, and that's as it should be.

But the movie is ponderous and pretentious, and there's far too much voice-over work by actors "thinking out loud;" despite that being quite faithful to the book, it would have worked better on film through character interaction than by these endlessly maddening voice-overs.

The first hour of the movie unfolds leisurely, as it should, only covering the first section of the book - where House Atreides leaves its longtime home on Caladan and takes up residence on Arrakis, home of the spice. That leaves some four hundreds pages of book (at a guess) to zip by in about an hour, and this means the last half of the movie whizzes by disjointedly compared with the first.

The story revolves around Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan), heir to House Atreides whose father, Duke Leto (Jurgen Prochnow) has been sent to Arrakis to replace the evil Harkonnens. But the galactic Emperor (Jose Ferrer, in one of his worst performances) is plotting with the Harkonnens to get rid of the popular Duke (who he views as a threat) and has set a trap on Arrakis.

Meanwhile, Paul is being trained as a Bene Gesserit (a kind of powerful psychic), the first male to have that thrust upon him. This is because his mother, Jessica (Francesca Annis) loves his father and he wanted a son (she'd been ordered to "create" only girls). And it looks like Paul is nothing short of remarkable, which leads some to think he might be the superman of legend.

If you put this movie together with the miniseries you might get the definitive version, but even this one can be relatively satisfying if you can follow it.

Besides the relative incoherence of the second hour, director Lynch also had to put some of his trademarked weirdness into the movie and, while it's fairly minor, it's unnecessary and detracts from the overall themes. Still, it can be forgiven.

Also along for the ride are a very young Sting and a very, very young Alicia Witt, along with a pre-Picard Patrick Stewart, and Dean Stockwell, Freddie Jones, Virginia Madsen, Kenneth McCarthy, Brad Dourif, Linda Hunt, Richard Jordan and Max Von Sydow.

The DVD, alas, is as flawed as the film, though hopefully since it isn't a new release there'll be a better version coming down the pike before too long. The picture is widescreen letterboxed, but not anamorphic, and this means owners of 16x9 TV's will have to stretch and/or zoom it to fill the rectangular screen. Other than that the picture quality is fine, but that lack of an anamorphic picture's a big caveat since the zooming/stretching leaves you with a much lower resolution picture than you'd get otherwise.

Still, the colors are great, which helps showcase the fabulous sets and costumers.

Audio is Dolby Digital 5.1, and it's pretty good. There isn't a lot of surround, or even too much stereo, but what there is is adequate.

Extras include some production notes through which you can scroll with your remote control; there's also cast/crew info you navigate the same way. Other than that, there's the theatrical trailer as well.

We hope Universal will give us a remastered anamorphic version of this film - perhaps even a longer "director's cut" that's rumored to exist. Until then, we can live with this version, but it could be so much better.

Dune, from Universal Home Video
137 min. widescreen letterbox (not 16x9 TV compatible), Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
Starring Kyle MacLachlan, Francesca Annis, Jurgen Prochnow, Patrick Stewart, Dean Stockwell, Freddie Jones, Virginia Madsen, Kenneth McCarthy, Brad Dourif, Linda Hunt, Richard Jordan, Sting and Max Von Sydow
Produced by Raffaella De Laurentiis
Written and directed by David Lynch

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