Der Wüstenplanet

I've read the Dune books about a dozen times and I have also watched the 1984 movie a few times, and, while it had good ideas, it didn't thrill me. So I decided to give this mini series a try.

The first time I watched it I switched off after hearing Lady Jessica use the Voice for the first time. I disliked the 'spatializer' effects in the movie, and I didn't like them in the series. Months later I decided to give it another try.

I was quite astonished. The series has lots of very strong points.

The Fremen sietches have a very arabian feel to them, just the way they were intended in the books. Having lots of foreign actors added to the overall feel of a universe populated by a race that has split out into different planets. Of course, everyone would speak Galach with their own accent.

The passage to Arrakis is very unique in its approach to the navigators and their skills and I really liked the idea.

Unfortunately it had a few downright flops.

Paul should have been replaced. He is too old, he is too plain and he is way too 2 dimensional. The dream sequences are too unconvincing.

The Voice. It hardly appears in the series, and it's badly done. Trying to copy from the movie as a poor idea. I would have preferred a normal tone of voice, maybe some underlying sound effects and extremely voice trained actors who can snap out harsh commands unexpectedly and at will. The complete denaturalisation the spatializer gives the voice just makes me cringe.

What spoilt it even more was knowing the movie and then watching the series. You find yourself longing for the original Gurney, Leto, Feyd and Paul. Fortunately, you also adore the new Dr Kynes, Chani and Baron Harkonnen.

Finally, as was expected in any adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel that is shorter than 12 hours, I found myself explaining parts of what was going on to my friend, who hadn't read the book.

Overall, it is an excellent series, one to watch and one to buy. It is not perfect, but it is almost there.

Hints for future producers: Skip the spatializer, exploit the arabian and islamic Fremen theme, less technology, Harkonnens are evil, 6 hours are not enough.

I admitt, for me it is the bbest adaptation of the novels. Without the baroc air, proposing beautiful performances, wise options in technical level, preserving, in faithful manner, the soul of series of Frank Herbert, it is more than impressive but correct in profound sense. Sure, first for actors, second , for the desire to be the fair, honest answer to the viewers expectations.

This miniseries devotes more time than the David Lynch version (but at 4.5 hrs will be less than the two new Denis Villeneuve films). The big success here is that it manages to unpack much more of Frank Herbert's novel, expand the role of characters who were either truncated or missing from the Lynch film. It also gains more depth by including a few more scenes as well e.g. The banquet scene, the interactions with Duncan and Keynes after the death of Duke Leto.

There is one particularly large change from the novel and this is to expand the role of the Princess Irulan who now takes on an investigation role and is used as a way of helping the audience understand the story. This makes perfect sense given that viewers of the Lynch version were largely left baffled.

Where it lets itself down is in production values. Acting is variable in quality and at times below professional levels, some actors seem to be struggling to act in English and are emphasising parts of sentences in all the wrong places. Even oscar winner William Hurt seems dead behind the eyes on this just quietly reading out his lines with little passion. PH Moriarti is often incomprehensible Only Ian Mcneice really shines delivering a pantomime like performance and occasionally breaking the fourth wall.

VFX is generally acceptable though also reused a bit in places. Some really obvious backdrops lets this down badly though in places - not sure why they didn't use green-screen but you can clearly see where paintings have been stuck together in places.

The costume design is another dodgy part of this. It feels like the designers thought making a sci-fi film was a license to treat everything like an avant garde Paris fashion show. Some very silly costumes and ridiculous hats make it hard to take some scenes seriously.

The problem with adapting books to the movie screen, especially huge epics like Dune, is that a certain interpretation of the original is necessary. Making a 2-3 hour movie out of this novel simply requires a lot of interpretation along with picking and choosing of the source material. So, I know a lot of people who read the book Dune and really hated the movie adaptation for all the same predictable reasons -- "Why did they change that?", "How could they leave that part out?", and "Where did they come up with that?".

I have a unique perspective on Dune -- I watched the 1984 movie first and absolutely loved it, I watched the 2000 mini-series adaptation and thoroughly enjoyed all the familiar scenes/words but with the added depth, and then I read the book. The book, of course, still was different from the 2000 mini-series and I still wanted to know why so many things were different in the mini-series than in the book -- my interpretation of the book would have been different. So, even the mini-series falls far short of the depth of the book and anyone who reads books knows they can be better than any movie.

The 2000 mini-series conveyed a much better story than the 1984 movie did, but the 1984 movie was simply a much better movie -- much better performances, much better visual effects for the most part (and 16 years earlier), and much more *excitement*. No matter how good the 2000 mini-series is, it can never be described as being as exciting as the 1984 movie. In short, the 1984 movie is worth buying and the 2000 mini-series is only worth renting unless you have no intention of ever reading or buying the book. If you're a book reader, just buy the book and skip this mini-series.

I could only give this mini-series a 6 out of 10 stars (barely above average).

I know that everyone has problems with David Lynch's 1984 version of Dune, but after seeing the television version that adds some scenes, it's grown on me. I never understood why until I saw the new SciFi Channel miniseries. It was the acting. They had little to work with, but they were fascinating. The new miniseries gives the book a much more proper story treatment, but the acting falls short. My best example is the Paul-Feyd contrast. Although, Kyle McLachlan seemed too old to me, he and Sting made excellent opposites in the Lynch version. The two actors cast in the miniseries looked so much alike and were both so wooden to me that it took me half the movie to be able to easily tell when Feyd appeared. As has been mentioned in other comments, the rest of the cast is good, but the 1984 version just had such a great cast that the acting is tough to beat.

I wish that the 1984 cast had the miniseries treatment to work with and it would have been grand. Perhaps after several viewings the acting in the miniseries will grow on me. All in all, it's nice to see more of the book's depth filmed.