Dune (1984)

This post was commissioned by Ashley Watts, who clearly hates me.

Well, that was a thing. David Lynch movies are always things, but Dune stands out among Lynch movies for an aspect which the others usually lack: complete incompetence. Lynch is given the near-impossible brief of adapting one of the most influential novels of the late Twentieth century and drops the ball about as spectacularly as one could. The results are many things. "Boring" is not one of them.

It's worth looking at just what Dune fails at. There are obvious answers to this question: it's spectacularly ill-judged in every regard, with a screenplay that jumps from moment to moment without any thought for basic coherence, a production which has aged about as badly as any SF movie of the Eighties, and a general sense that everybody involved failed to think twice about what they were doing (the cubic fights are the highlight of the movie in how they're both embarrassing and absolutely wonderful). Moments such as major character deaths lack any weight, as characterization is absolutely null. The pacing is shot to hell as things happen with no rhyme or reason. Uncharacteristically for Lynch, the plot skyrockets rather than unfolding as a series of inexplicable images. Rather than things unfolding without explanation, Dune is a a sequence of poorly explained events.

Dune is uniquely untailored to Lynch's strengths. Lynch's work is made up of ethereal whooshing and things not happening (which made Twin Peaks: The Return outright therapeutic for me sometimes).  This is... not an obvious choice for adapting Frank Herbert's Dune. Dune is an overly intricate SF epic from the Sixties about an interplanetary war fought over hard drugs. Lynch is ostenatiously uninterested in the bureaucracies and threads of the book (which is probably a good thing - reading the plot summaries of Herbert's six Dune books shows they're the story of a man slowly losing his fucking mind).  This sort of "epic" storytelling just isn't up Lynch's alley. With maximum uncharitability to Dune, one might argue he's too interesting for it. He has no idea how to execute material this straightforward and organic. Paired with executive interference, this project was always doomed.

So why is it such a compellingly bad watch? Perhaps it's how every decision made is so bad it goes all the way around and becomes good again. There are tons of memorable images in the movie - as previously stated, the cubic fighting is extraordinary in all the wrong ways, and the sandworms are nailed. The film's worst dialogue is terribly quotable - Harkonnen's non-sequitur of "I'm alive!!!" delivered as he floats into the air is hard to forget (as is every other Harkonnen scene in the movie). Aesthetically, Lynch falls back onto the permanent backdrop of all his work, the Fifties. Lynch's universe exists with the facade of the Fifties, which is slowly drilled through and revealed to contain the universe's most unknowable horrors (again, see Twin Peaks: The Return, where the atomic bomb unleashes all that is evil in the world, or Blue Velvet, where the cosmopolitan is a cover for violent misogyny).  In Dune, Lynch falls back on the Fifties for his version of science fiction, lifting its spire-dominated cities and desert planets for the movie's planets. And it makes for a striking look: it's like Flash Gordon crossed with Alien. There's something fundamentally wrong with how this looks. And that's key to the compelling failure of Dune: with so much going against it, its catastrophic missteps couldn't possibly be boring.