credit: Dune (1984)
Dune is quite an old but long movie that made its way into cinemas in 1984 and had a run time of around two hours and seventeen minutes. It was based on the eponymous novel, Dune by Frank Herbert, published in 1965.
The film followed the story of some dynastic houses trying to conquer a certain planet that was rich in a certain resource. That “resource” was called spice in the movie and was a psychedelic drug that had many uses in the personal and space traveling aspects. It was said that it could fold space to facilitate easier, shorter, and safer traveling across the universe.
This certain substance propelled the events of the movie. The dynastic families of the film were trying to monopolize the production and the supply of the spice for themselves and, of course, for profit. Meanwhile, those already living on the planet where it was produced were trying to protect it.
The movie was considered to be a flop, with Wikipedia even using the term “box-office bomb” as its revenue from its box office did not even surpass the budget the film used in its making. Why was it so? That’s what we will analyze below as we review this movie.
credit: Dune (1984)
The plot is too complicated
The story will be too hard to understand if the movie starts with a character narrating the premise. I do not have anything against narration in the beginning, but if you need a human being to do it, or worse, a character in the movie itself, it just goes to show that the audience needs to be spoonfed to that degree because they won’t be able to comprehend it by themselves.
Narration could work, but it should be done in a way that the audience could interact with it. A great example of this technique is used by the original trilogy of Star Wars, which was released in the same decade as this movie. Although some audience might claim they hated reading the opening rolls, those were enough to make the audience understand the premise of what they were about to watch. It was also short because the viewers don’t like reading a lot. But hey! That audience involvement was what made the premise stuck in their minds.
Also, the plot was your ordinary “war for resources,” and people might have already been tired of that type of trope. If they want to see people fighting for resources, they don’t need to go to the cinema to see this movie. There will always be a cheaper alternative for them: turning on the TV and watching the news.
Some of the same decade’s movies fared well because they did not deliver such a cliché plot. Some great examples are Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Ghostbusters (1984), and Back to the Future (1985).
credit: Dune (1984)
The movie did not do justice to the book
The movie lacked character development and interaction. The emperor, one day, said, “Hey! We need to take down House Atreides because they are a threat to our drug, I mean, spice production” And then the movie jumped to the Atreides clan preparing Paul for battle or something like that.
It felt bland. It seemed that the Atreides just knew what was about to happen, accepted it, and braced themselves for it. However, this blandness was fixed by the 2021 movie, where the planet where the Atreides reside was even shown more, and more emotions and drama were given to the Atreides. They had more show time in the 2021 movie, giving them a better chance of character development in a way that the viewers will understand.
Because of this lack of character arcs for pretty much a huge part of the movie, the plot remained stale, with just the idea of one dynasty wanting to secure the spice production. Due to this lack, we can summarize the movie with this just one sentence: Drug users waging war with one another so that they will keep all the drugs to themselves.
That sounds weird, but that’s not how we can summarize the 2021 movie.
Overall, this 1984 movie was an injustice to the book, but the 2021 version fixed its mistakes and pulled it closer to the original material.
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