David Lynch’s Dune, from 1984, is a notorious turkey. It was panned by critics, bombed at the box office, and for decades, the director — who went on to become cinema’s greatest surrealist — refused to speak of it in interviews. He even went so far as to have his name removed from the credits of certain extended versions.
Over time, Dune’s reputation evolved from dud to cultish camp classic and even, among some fans, to flawed masterpiece. But a successful adaptation of the monolithic Frank Herbert sci-fi novel it was based on — a book that had already spent over a decade in development by directors as varied as David Lean, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Ridley Scott, by the time Lynch got his hands on it — remained a white whale for the filmmaking community. When Denis Villeneuve released the first part of his acclaimed adaptation in 2021, everyone breathed a sigh of relief; now we could all pretend that Lynch’s one artistic failure never happened.
But the 1984 Dune, like all Lynch’s movies, has an uncanny, linerging potency. It’s as instinctive and dreamlike as Villeneuve’s movies are rational and grandiose, and it accesses uglier and weirder facets of the material than the ever-tasteful Villeneuve, director of the recent Dune and Dune Part 2, can stomach. Here are just a few things that it does better.
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The Spacing Guild of Navigators
Villeneuve noped out of depicting the Spacing Guild of spice-using navigators that has a monopoly on interstellar travel in Herbert’s world, even though it is their need for spice, harvested on the desert planet Arrakis, that drives the plot. Lynch is no such coward. In his movie, the Guild is an ominous force behind the throne, embodied in the nightmarishly mutated Navigator — a kind of wrinkled whale-baby-monster — that strongarms the Emperor from inside the glass coffin of its spice tank.
Lynch even includes an utterly bizarre attempt to visualize the Navigators’ mystical spacefaring process, which in his vision involves floating around inside a lightshow and then — there’s no other way to put this — defecating beams of light from a pulsating rear orifice which then seem to manifest the planets being traveled to. It’s distractingly weird and horrible, but in Lynch’s Dune, there’s no mistaking the fear and awe the Spacing Guild inspires, nor its stranglehold on galactic power.
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Baron Harkonnen
Another area where Dune really benefits from Lynch’s willingness to embrace grotesquerie and horror is in its main villain. In Villeneuve’s movies, Stellan Skarsgård’s Baron is imposing and sinister, at one point rising on a long, snakelike tail. Lynch’s Baron, though, is truly and unforgettably vile. In Kenneth McMillan’s deranged performance, he’s a corpulent, barking lunatic, face covered with hideous pustules, who floats around like a vengeful balloon. He’s ludicrous, but in a way that goes out the other side of silly into the realm of the extremely unnerving.
The scene that introduces the Baron is one of the most disturbing Lynch ever committed to film, which is really saying something. It’s a montage of true nightmare imagery: attendants with their eyes sewn shut, boils being lanced, blood spatter on quivering tulips, and the strangely obscene sight of the Baron’s naked, black-toenailed feet floating just above the floor.
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All-round weirdness
As a Lynch film, Dune’s biggest problem is that it’s so weighed down with world-building and grand plot mechanics that it can muster neither the disarming directness of his storytelling style nor the straight-from-the-subconscious strangeness of his imagery in a sustained way. Nevertheless, it’s plenty weird. Lynch’s surrealism doesn’t help him get the epic span of Herbert’s narrative across, but it does conjure, in the details, the deep, alien strangeness of Dune’s far-future society more effectively than Villeneuve’s monolithic brutalism.
The soundtrack is numbly smothered in the characters’ whispered internal monologues. Harkonnen architecture is punctured with gaping mouths, while Imperial spaceships have docking bays surrounded by baroque picture frames. People use inexplicable machines that make nasal wailing sounds. The Harkonnens threaten a prisoner with having to milk an emaciated cat strapped into a weird apparatus with a rat taped to its side. The Fremen’s blue eyes have an intense, crudely painted glow that’s quite disconcerting. Lynch may not reach the arcane inspiration of Jodorowsky’s vision for Dune — some of which ended up folded into Scott’s Alien, which used some of the same crew, including artist H.R. Giger — but he does successfully escape the sleek futurism and fantasy references of most sci-fi.
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Alia
Aside from one dreamlike cameo, Villeneuve removes Paul Atreides’ similarly godlike sister from the plot of his Dune movies; presumably Anya Taylor Joy’s Alia will show up in 2026’s Dune: Part Three. But this means we don’t get to watch a tiny girl in a black Bene Gesserit habit psychically rip apart the Emperor’s high priestess and then murder the Baron. There’s no way David Lynch was going to pass that opportunity up.
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Getting it done in one
This one is rather counterintuitive, because the main thing wrong with Lynch’s Dune is its attempt to cram the events of the novel into a single movie, which is unavoidably clumsy and incoherent. Lynch himself envisioned breaking it into two films at one point. There’s no question that Villeneuve’s decision to do just that led to much richer, more cohesive storytelling.
And yet… there’s a kind of feverish satisfaction to be had from the way Lynch’s Dune speedruns the ultimate space opera. Condensing Paul Atreides’ messiah-like arc into a garbled two hours rids the character of the listlessness that weighed down Villeneuve’s first film, and condenses his story into something that feels more authentically mythical, if less epic.
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Patrick Stewart charging into battle holding a tiny dog
In Lynch’s film, Patrick Stewart is undeniably miscast as Gurney Halleck, the stout warrior of House Atreides played by Josh Brolin in the Villeneuve movies. (He was a last-minute replacement for Aldo Ray.) But do Villeneuve’s films contain any sight like the great Shakespearean actor unleashing a battle cry and leading the Atreides troops into battle against the Harkonnens while inexplicably clutching a little pug to his chest? They do not.
