Awesomely Bad Movies: 1984 Dune = Disaster

This time I’m going to talk about another movie that I still love to this day. I used to watch the movie over and over for the battle scenes. During my Senior year in high school, We read the book for English and although I knew the movie wasn’t the best quality movie ever I came to realize how terrible it really was. The movie I’m talking about is Dune, and a lot of sci-fi fans like it....hey, I’m one of you, but you have to admit that this movie is disaster, and by disaster, I mean that Carter has made a better script come of out his diaper. Without reading the book, you can probably get through the movie and say “Well, I think I know what that movie was about, but it’s freaking 4 hours and I’m not watching it again.” That is unless you’re a sci-fi geek. If you read the book then you sit there and say “Did I just waste 4 hours of my life on this piece of crap? I want those hours back…..thank you Dune for taking those hours away from me forever.” This was truly a book that didn’t translate well onto the screen at least in this version.


Normally when a book is adapted into movie form, they take things out and then fill in the plot so that you can get a movie that seems to flow through like it was never a book and if you’ve read the book you’re thinking…that was good, but I thought they would show this or I thought this was better in the book/movie. Case in point for missing things completely in the books…..the Harry Potter movies are pretty true to the books, but you can’t have everything in a 700 page book be put into a 2 ½ hour movie, which is why you’ll wonder why they don’t show more quidditch or it seems like Ron and Hermoine’s parts are getting smaller, even though in the books their more vital than ever.


The problem with Dune is that even in a 4 hour movie you could still never fit everything into it….and that’s understandable Frank Herbert’s book is an fully grown sci-fi book, with a lot of subplots, it’s what makes the book one of the best sci-fi books ever written, and why Herbert’s influence along with a few others have really founded our modern Sci-Fi/Fantasy Genre of books. Where you get into trouble is that original movie of Dune just adds a subplot that was in the book without the explanation. It’s like the writer’s are saying…oh wait the audience isn’t going to understand this point in the end if we don’t add a character, but rather than spend the time to develop the character so that you take the information as being important they just plop someone in the movie for 30 seconds and then they leave. Do the characters: Duncan, Liet Kynne, The Emperor, or any of the spacing guild play the roles in the movie like they do in the book. What about some key subplots like: Why do the Harkkonen’s hate the Atreides? Why is the Emperor so concerned that spice production on Arakkis is having problems? What are Sadukar troops and why would that be a big thing if the Emperor is sending them? Then the space guild…..ummm….wtf….they kind of show up in the movie sound like idiots, look like idiots, and then they leave. These guys are more powerful than the emperor…..they’re the ones that run the show….without them the whole empire doesn’t work.


This post is already longer than I wanted so next time I’m going to continue my Dune rant and post some things about the movie that just don’t make sense or in some cases I’ll explain things that I’ve mentioned in this post…because unlike the writers of the screen-play….I’m all about clarity and explanation for this post at least.