Dune

It is a dark, spellbinding dream, full of murmurs and whispers, byzantine plots and messianic fevers. It finds its iconography of the future deep in the past. It's not always easy to follow, but it's even harder to get out of your system. For better and for worse, it takes more artistic chances than any major American movie around. [10 Dec 1984, p.93]

While it's hardly a cohesive experience, individual scenes are brought to life with striking power. Read full review

For all its cumbersome scope (realized on a shimmeringly large scale by Lawrence of Arabia cinematographer Freddie Francis), the film remains an intensely personal epic, Lynch's uncommon emphasis on characters rather than effects lending his exposition a rather remarkable lucidity. Read full review

Lynch's third feature may have been a commercial disaster, but it gets under your skin and is marked by unforgettable images and an extraordinary soundtrack. Read full review

The entire film seems to be the book’s narrative highlights strung together but rarely spotlights any of the themes or subtext from the book (if there are any). I don’t think this David Lynch film is Lynchian in any way. To me, Dune is a straightforward adventure with very little depth or character motivation outside the genre’s tropes. Read full review

This is a film that doesn’t dramatically harness the vast forces it’s gesturing at, but trundles determinedly along with very little variation of tone or pace. Read full review

A most fascinating disaster of genre making. Read full review

Dune is a huge, hollow, imaginative and cold sci-fi epic. Visually unique and teeming with incident, David Lynch's film holds the interest due to its abundant surface attractions but won't, of its own accord, create the sort of fanaticism which has made Frank Herbert's 1965 novel one of the all-time favorites in its genre. Read full review

DUNE is visually delightful but choppy, confusing, and overloaded with exposition. Moreover, most of the thematic material that made the novel work--subtexts involving incestuous desire, capitalism vs. environmentalism, and Middle East politics--is simply missing. Read full review

One has the sense before Dune is well under way that it is the kind of film that may reveal itself over several viewings -- and certainly, there seems to be $47 million worth of things to look at. But fidelity to the source can be a trap, and Lynch fell into it; his movie is big and splashy and nearly nonsensical. [14 Dec 1984, p.E1]

The only real heroes in this lumbering, over-inflated epic are the army of special effects coordinators and technicians who create a fantastic, otherworldly environment peopled by creatures more weird and threatening than Jabba The Hut. Freddie Francis' photography is constantly impressive. But technical wizardry alone cannot save Dune from a crash landing. [3 Jan 1985]

How maddening Dune is! As you would expect from visionary director David Lynch, it is a movie of often staggering visual power, the most ambitious science fiction film since "2001"; it's also stupefyingly dull and disorderly. Dune doesn't get going till fully two hours have elapsed, so only the most patient will wait for the images to build to their crescendo. Lax in its storytelling, Dune gives us sublimity unmoored. Read full review

The problem is that the imagery—as Sadean as Pasolini's Salo—isn't rooted in any story impulse, and so its power dissipates quickly. The real venue for this film is either a grind house or the Whitney Museum. Read full review

So inward and remote does the movie seem, it might have arrived in a time capsule from one of the four warring planets. Most sci-fi movies offer escape, a holiday from homework, but Dune is as difficult as a final exam. You have to cram for it. Read full review

The movie is heavy on exposition, and the story isn't dramatized - it's merely acted out (and hurried through), in a series of scenes that are like illustrations. And, despite the care that has gone into the sets and costumes and the staging, the editing rhythms are limp and choppy.

Watching Dune is a bit like trying to dig your way out of a sandstorm. Wave after wave of lore and nomenclature pile up around you until you finally succumb, and are buried. At which point you’re best off giving up on the movie as any sort of coherent, compelling piece of science-fiction and simply embrace it as camp. Read full review

SEVERAL of the characters in Dune are psychic, which puts them in the unique position of being able to understand what goes on in the movie. Read full review

This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time. Read full review

When Dune is not inept, confusing, ridiculous or unpleasant, it's boring. [14 Dec 1984]

David Lynch's disastrous film adaptation of Fank Herbert's science-fiction classic turns epic to myopic. [14 Dec 1984, p.31]