When I was younger, between high school and college, I learned I could type words into a system that would become part of the internet and communicate with people all over the world in real time. Modeled after citizen’s band radios, we didn’t use our real names; we used made-up names we called “handles,” just like they did on CB radio. There was a person named Petals, another named Bunny, and a really funny artist named Pogue Mahone. I chose the name Mongo because that’s what the boys I played football with called me.
I met a woman who chose the name Chani. She said it was because she loved somebody who loved her but was betrothed to another. I thought to myself, “If that’s all you got out of the novel, then you kind of missed the point.” I didn’t tell her that, but that’s what I thought.
They say “Dune” is the most important science fiction novel ever written. I might argue that “Frankenstein” might be more important, as it was the first, but I certainly understood why people would put “Dune” in that kind of category. There were several attempts to film “Dune,” including one as a sort of rock opera. They all fell through.
At the end of the 1970s, Dino De Laurentiis was at the peak of his power in Hollywood, and he set his sights on “Dune.” He had Frank Herbert write a script and was going to hire Ridley Scott to direct it, but no studio would finance it. In 1980, his daughter was so impressed by the David Lynch film, “The Elephant Man,” that she convinced DeLaurentiis to try again.
In 1982, with Raffaella De Laurentiis as executive producer, De Laurentiis thought he could take advantage of a very favorable exchange rate and the lack of unions to shoot the entire film in Mexico for considerably less than he could anywhere else. By 1983, The David Lynch film was in production.
Although the film made money eventually, many fans of the novel, and especially its sequels, thought that the Lynch version missed the point.
Among other things, Frank Herbert didn’t think much of Western imperialism, Western capitalism, and even less of Western religion. Lynch’s version of the film made it seem like the “magic” parts of the story were real, whereas Herbert was trying to make the point that there is no magic; it’s all social manipulation. Religion isn’t real. While Herbert was satisfied with the De Laurentiis effort, David Lynch was not. When Universal tried to release an extended version with over an hour of deleted footage, Lynch demanded they take his name off the film and replace it with Alan Smithee, a pseudonym often used in Hollywood for unhappy directors.
Three years ago, after a television version made many of the same mistakes as the De Laurentiis version, Legendary Pictures acquired the rights to the novel and a distribution deal with Warner Brothers. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, this version was determined to get it right where the others didn’t. Realizing there was too much in the first novel to compress into one film, he split it up into two parts, a tactic you see fairly often these days as it’s a sneaky way to sell twice as many tickets if it’s successful.
Villeneuve thought he could use the characters of Chani, played by Zendaya, and Princess Irulan, played by Florence Pugh, to express a more critical view of the novel while the other characters carry on as if they believe the prophecy.
Critics have generally been very favorable of the Villeneuve films. Legendary is said to be in talks to produce “Dune Messiah” and “Dune Prophesy” for an unnamed streaming service.
I doubt if this is the end to adaptations of “Dune.” It’s the type of work where there are as many different opinions as there are people who read it.