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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

When Frank Herbert published Dune in 1965, it was considered unfilmable for a long time. In 1984, the young and highly talented David Lynch ventured into the film adaptation. The result was a real work of art and also a masterpiece. A flop at the box office, but over time, viewers noticed the ingenuity and high artistry of the movie. A real classic, fantastically made, it convinces with its high artistic standards. It's not for everyone. In my eyes, David Lynch is an underestimated (how can it also be in Hollywood) artistic genius. The Albert Einstein and Salvador Dali of cinematic art. Too bad he couldn't make a sequel. There are still many books by the great Frank Herbert waiting to be made into fantastic movies. BRAVO, BRAVO, BRAVO! AWESOME!

Greetings from Lithuania. "Dune" (1984) is a perfect example of a movie, that tries and fails to adapt an epic story into a 2 h 10 min flick. First time i watched this film only in 2025, after seeing Denis Villeneuve's Part 1 and Part 2 multiple times. This 1984 adaptation has one core issue that sinks the whole movie down - its run time. There is no way in the world that they could have possible adapted this epic story in a any good way within 2 hours film. It's like making Lord Of The Rings adaptation with 1 h 45 min run time. "Dune" (1984) has great costumes, good set design, desert scenes do look impressive. I watched this movie in 4K UHD presentation so i won't tell how many times i saw wires holding the Baron up in the air. Acting was decent enough for this kind of movie. But its writing and storytelling that do not work. It's the bizarre scenes involving milking of cat, or Sting in his underwear that do not work. Nearly all scenes involving Baron are bizarrely weird - not menacing. The overvoices explaining the plot were necessary to make this film even slightly understandable for people who didn't read "Dune". Overall, "Dune" simply isn't an entertaining movie. It is fun movie to look at, but not very much to admire. Story scope wasn't filmable in 2 hours run time, and they failed to make a good movie. But, it is not the worst film even and i did mildly enjoyed it, i can not lie.

Not bad but they shoved way too much content into this movie. This movie needs every second it gets and yet it isn’t enough.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Unfortunately, the film left me disoriented and unsatisfied. Along with great panaromas comes a story so difficuously told that it becomes an inexplicable mud puddle. On a planet that has no mud puddles.