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Dune

Denis Villeneuve’s surplus of spectacle
Universal Pictures
by
ABR Arts 07 December 2021

Dune

Denis Villeneuve’s surplus of spectacle
Universal Pictures
by
ABR Arts 07 December 2021
Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck, Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto Atreides, and Stephen McKinley Henderson as Thufir Hawat in Dune (Universal Pictures)
Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck, Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto Atreides, and Stephen McKinley Henderson as Thufir Hawat in Dune (Universal Pictures)

For decades, Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel Dune (1965) was generally regarded as unfilmable, a literary work that defied transposition into another artistic medium. Never one to balk at a challenge, David Lynch embarked on his own adaptation of Dune in 1984. With neither the majesty of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) nor the commercial appeal of the Star Wars franchise, Lynch’s version largely faded into obscurity, though it has since become something of a cult film. Before Lynch, experimental Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky had, according to Frank Pavich’s documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), planned a ten- to fourteen-hour production, starring Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, and Mick Jagger, among others. That project was, unsurprisingly, abandoned; we are left to ruminate on what might have been.

Comment (1)

  • Thanks for a marvellous review of Dune, one of the best I have read: fair and nuanced.
    Posted by Paul Allatson
    08 December 2021

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