Dune Review

The failure is structural and visible from the first minute, when a character appears against a starfield to explain the political situation because the film has no other way to convey it. From there the exposition never stops: whispered internal monologues tell the audience what characters are thinking during scenes that should be dramatizing it, and entire relationships are asserted rather than played. Herbert's ecology, economics and religion are reduced to captions.

What Lynch does bring is body horror of real conviction. The Guild Navigator in its tank, the Baron's suppurating boils and heart plugs, the Harkonnen industrial squalor: these are genuinely his, and Freddie Francis photographs them with a clammy, over-lit ugliness that suits them. Toto's score, with Brian Eno's contribution, is stranger than the film deserves. But Kyle MacLachlan is given no arc to play, the weirding modules replace the novel's central idea with a gadget, and the closing rain contradicts everything the story establishes about Arrakis.