by David Lynch, 1984.
Starring: Francesca Annis, Brad Dourif, José Ferrer, Linda Hunt, Freddie Jones, Richard Jordan, Kyle MacLachlan, Virginia Madsen, Everett McGill, Kenneth McMillan, Jack Nance, Siân Phillips, Jürgen Prochnow, Paul Smith, Patrick Stewart, Sting, Dean Stockwell, Max von Sydow, Alicia Roanne Witt, Sean Young.
Rating: 3.5/10, 5/10.
Gosh. This was a wreck. I mean, I knew it was going to be going into it, but wow.
I know that David Lynch only agreed to direct this movie on the condition that the studio would give him complete freedom to do whatever he wanted with his next movie, and since that next movie was Blue Velvet, I’d say it was worth it. But you’d think, I dunno, that even if he didn’t really want to do this movie, he would have put some effort into not making it terrible. Oh well.
I’m just glad that I’ve read the book, because otherwise not only would I have seen a really awful movie, I would also have been confused out of my wits. If you’ve read the book and can fill in all the gaps, you can make sense of the movie. If you haven’t...well, I’m afraid that it probably wouldn’t be so simple. The movie’s pretty faithful to the book, it just chops out vast sections of it (I know, for time, and Lynch’s original version, which I have less than no interest in seeing, was much longer) that are vital to understanding what the bejesus is going on.
That said, I’ve given it a five—not great, not bad—for how good I thought it was. Why? Well, because there are some good things. Mostly visuals. Baron Harkonnen looks great, for one, and though at first it seemed a bit clunky, I ended up really liking the way the personal sheilds looked. It was interesting. The bit in the Harkonnen palace when some people just walk by a cow that’s being hung upside down and randomly poked at, that’s good, if disgusting. But there’s just not enough of this. And the performances are pretty bad, too, which is surprising. I would have thought that even in a bad movie the likes of MacLachlan, Stewart, and von Sydow, at least, would have been able to turn in good performances, but nope. I mean, it doesn’t help MacLachlan that he is completely miscast (or is that just me being unable to separate him from Dale Cooper and Jeffrey Beaumont?), but the other two should have been able to do better. Oh, again, well.
As for the three and a half for entertainment, well, to be honest, that has more to do with the one brief but very clear glimpse we get of Sting, practically naked*, than with any genuine entertainment that can be got from the movie. Even the badness doesn’t really make it fun. More just kinda tragic.
* It took a lot of willpower on my part not to include that in the great visuals list, so stop whining.