Truly, this world is blessed with riches, because it now has two different cinematic versions of the Dune universe: The 1984 version, directed by David Lynch, and the version from director Denis Villeneuve, which is comprised of two films, 2021’s Dune Part One and the rather expectedly named Dune Part 2, which came out this year, forty years after Lynch’s version. (There is also a TV miniseries version made in 2000, which we will not be considering here, except to say it valiantly did what it could with a relatively paltry pre-“golden age of streaming” budget.)

On its face, the fact that there are two different cinematic versions of the Dune story is not terribly interesting in itself. Hollywood is forever rebooting its favorite properties and was doing so far earlier than most people suspect: The first filmed version of Frankenstein was not James Whale’s celebrated 1931 Universal version, but a 1910 silent-era short from Thomas Edison’s studio. While 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea had a 1907 French short version and a full-length 1916 American version before Disney made the best-known theatrical version in 1954. The Ten Commandments was a cinematic spectacle in 1923 and in 1956, and both times from the same director: Cecil B. DeMille.

What does make the two Dune cinematic experiences interesting is that while both trade in high-budget spectacle with top-of-the-line production values for their respective eras, what “spectacle” means for both productions turns out to be widely different. Movie studios have rebooted and reimagined high-profile properties before (and will do so again), but musicals aside, rarely have two adaptations of the same source material been so emphatically different from each other aesthetically.

Some, but very importantly not all, of that is due to technological changes between 1984 and 2024. Dune ‘84 is an aggressively analog film, and many of the visual choices follow those analog requirements. Even the most “CGI”-looking part of Dune ‘84—the personal shields—were rotoscoped: that’s hand-drawn animation there. The use of matte paintings, optical printing, and practical effects give the film a (literally) painterly look.

It’s not entirely surprising that when confronted with the necessity of this aesthetic, Dune ‘84 aggressively leaned into it. The boxy shields, to go back to them, aren’t just a matter of visual effects limits, but a specific visual choice. Contrast them with the personal shields of Villeneuve’s Dune films, which flicker briefly when they’re turned on and off, and when they’re struck, but are otherwise mostly invisible.

Likewise, other special effects, from spaceships to spice mining vehicles to the sandworms themselves, inhabit a stylistic uncanny valley that is intentional, and not just an artifact of ‘80s effects tech. By the ‘80s there were ways to make your special effects look “realistic”—see 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner—and Dune was doing very few of them. The effects didn’t look cheap or “fake” at the time. They were aiming for the space between realism and surrealism, a heightened state. This is a cinematic space that Lynch had worked in before, notably with The Elephant Man, a very different film but one with clear visual threads connecting it with Dune. Whether the film managed to pull off this heightened liminal cinematic space is a matter of personal taste, but it can’t be faulted for the ambition to work with what it had.

It would be an error to suggest that what Villeneuve is doing in his Dune films is less stylized than what Lynch is doing in his—for example, in his absolutely monochromatic-yet-still-gonzo portrayal of Geidi Prime, home of the Harkonnens—but what is accurate to say is that the current state of cinematic technology lets Villeneuve choose his stylistic battles with more precision, and with a wider set of options. He gets to make his spaceships and spice miners and worms look less obviously stylized, which buys him highly stylized choices elsewhere.

We’re talking directorial choices here, but in the case of Dune ‘84, it would be remiss to ignore that there was another hand heavily on the stylistic scale: producer Dino De Laurentiis, a name that for cinema fans of a certain age pulls up a lot of memories, not all of them terrific. David Lynch has talked about his contentious relationship with the producer, how the two differed on how the material should be adapted, and even how scenes should be shot. Does this matter? It matters a bit, because when it came to science fiction and fantasy material, De Laurentiis had, shall we say, a certain bent. You can see it in 1976’s King Kong, 1980’s Flash Gordon, and 1982’s Conan the Barbarian, all produced by De Laurentiis: a certain overblown cheeseball-ness that 1984’s Dune also shares.

As a “fun” cinematic exercise, do a double feature of Flash Gordon and Dune ‘84 back-to-back: the stylistic choices, from special effects to set and costume design, even the manner in which the actors declaim their dialogue, are unmistakably similar (they even share an actor in Max von Sydow, who shows up as Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon and as Liet Kynes in Dune). This is a personal opinion here, but I feel about the De Laurentiis production aesthetic very much like I feel about airbrushed fantasy scenes on the side of a ‘70s panel van: they have the same effect and the same goals.

Somewhat more charitably, however, I will say that De Laurentiis’s sense of spectacle is one that is rooted in the Golden Age of Hollywood, an age of Technicolor (which Dune was shot in) and overtly sumptuous if questionably accurate costumes, where actors stood on very obvious sound stages and spoke in actorly cadenced sentences that might not actually sound like real people speaking. Hashtag Not All Old Movies, of course, but in De Laurentiis’s case, this was what he liked, and because he was the money, this is often what he got. No wonder David Lynch, who is a moviemaker with specific tics and mannerisms, almost none of which align with DeLaurentiis’s, felt despairingly of the final product.

Villeneuve is undoubtedly a man of cinematic tics and mannerisms himself, and no small amount of confidence—one does not create a sequel to Blade Runner, one of the most influential science fiction films of the ‘80s (and then mostly pull it off), without having belief in one’s skills. What he at least outwardly appears to lack—on the part of Warner Bros and Legendary Films, the studios financing his Dune films, or on the part of the frankly numerous producers and executive producers on the films—is someone who is going to get up in his grill about his aesthetic choices and influences, which range here from Ridley Scott (I mean, obviously) to German Expressionism, and to a more naturalistic version of acting. Villeneuve (again outwardly) appears to have been trusted to do his thing, at least once the budgets were sussed out. That trust pays off in a look and feel to his Dune films that doesn’t give an indication of having been a victim of a creative tug of war.

What in Dune ’84 feels authentically Lynchian? The most obvious thing is the body horror in the film. This is the case specifically with the Harkonnen family, and most notably the Baron Harkonnen, who is given a whole palette of sores and pus-filled boils, bathes in an oil shower, and who keeps his underlings in line with plugs in their hearts, which he can pull out if they displease him or when he wants to get turned on—the book’s less-than-subtle homophobia makes the transition to the screen in this film version, as does the correspondence between evil and obesity. (In a prequel novel by Frank Herbert’s son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson, this is retconned; the obesity and other physical ailments are a curse because the Baron is a horrible person. This is only very questionably a better proposition).

Villeneuve doesn’t dispose of body horror when it comes to the Harkonnens but he does spread it out considerably, populating Harkonnen spaces with androgynous, doe-eyed, sausage-fingered slaves, and spiderhumans in gimp suits. He disposes of the homophobia, replacing it with a generalized sociopathy which his nephews share. For all that, from an aesthetic point of view, the treatment of the Harkonnens in both cinematic versions remains one of the most questionable choices made by the filmmakers. Much is carried over from the text of the novel, to be sure, but much of it is invented by the filmmakers themselves.

A final choice I want to consider here is one that may not generally be lumped into aesthetics, but which I think deserves consideration under that rubric: length. The 1984 Dune clocks in at two hours and seventeen minutes, which is, to put it politely, untenably short for a nearly 200,000-word-long novel with a massive cast of characters chronicling a multi-planetary epic with sociopolitical roots that go back centuries.

This was the choice of Universal, the studio who put out the film, and of De Laurentiis as the producer. They had final cut over director David Lynch, whose first assembly of the movie was four hours long and who ultimately turned in a three-hour director’s cut. The subsequent winnowing of the film to its final length is one reason why moviegoers in 1984 were handed a cheat sheet for the film when coming into the theater: too much had been sliced out that was essential to the story (the film’s choice to verbalize the characters’ thoughts, while arguably useful for context and a substantive part of the novel, mostly came across as off-putting).

Length is an aesthetic choice: What to put in, what to leave out, how to give context or not. And while other aesthetic choices of the 1984 Dune film can be argued as positives or negatives, this particular choice—to cut the movie past the bone and into the marrow of the story—is an inarguable negative. This is spectacle, abridged.

Denis Villeneuve lives in a different era than David Lynch did when he signed on to direct his take on the story. In this world, studios know that, so long as they have a satisfying first installment, audiences will come back for more of the same tale…which means more money coming into the studio at the end of the day. Warner Bros in particular knows this, having pioneered the modern version of the multi-part movie story with its New Line subsidiary putting out The Lord of the Rings trilogy more than twenty years ago.

Villeneuve was given two films and more than five hours of screentime to tell the same story that the 1984 version of Dune tried to compress into two hours and seventeen minutes—and he still had to leave out huge parts of the novel to make it work. But in his case what remained (and, importantly, what was adapted and changed from the originating text) could be crafted into a whole that was satisfying from an aesthetic and storytelling point of view. That’s not the luxury of time, when it comes to spectacle. It’s the criticality of it.

We don’t have to argue which cinematic version of Dune is better—even if the later version has been dramatically more financially (and critically) successful—because ultimately so much of that comes down to personal taste and what one wants out a moviegoing experience. What we can appreciate about both cinematic versions of Dune is how much of-their-time they were. The aesthetic choices of both spring from the creatives involved and the business of filmmaking in the eras they were made.

Both Dunes are spectacular aesthetic time capsules. The look and feel of each wouldn’t have happened before and won’t happen moving forward. And that makes them both worth a look.

© 2024 John Scalzi