Critic Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

A most fascinating disaster of genre making.

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.

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.

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.

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]