FILMMAKERS KEEP IT REAL
Virtual reality on the big screen
Frank Herbert’s epic science-fiction classic Dune has long been viewed as unadaptable, but not for lack of trying. The 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune recalls Chilean-French director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s failed attempt in the 1970s, though it remains influential for its vision (and designer H.R. Giger would become a force behind the Academy Award-winning visual effects of Alien).
David Lynch’s Toto-soundtracked version was widely panned in 1984, though it comforts with several of Lynch’s consistent casting choices such as Kyle MacLachlan and Everett McGill — not to mention Patrick Stewart, Alicia Witt and, of course, a wonderfully overblown Sting. Somewhat rescued as a cult classic, Lynch’s Dune suffered from development in the blockbuster era, but with special effects still too underdeveloped for the material.
Now, hot off the success of Arrival (based on another difficult-to-adapt source, Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life), Quebec’s Denis Villeneuve is the latest director tapped to bring Dune to the screen, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The news comes a month after Variety reported that the rights to Herbert’s saga were acquired by Legendary Pictures, a studio with a track record for rebooting franchises such as The Dark Knight.
Villeneuve himself is rebooting Blade Runner with an upcoming sequel, Blade Runner 2049, so it may be a good match for a potential series: the Dune canon features five sequels by Herbert himself, as well as two additional sequels and three prequel trilogies by son Brian Herbert and well-known tie-in writer Kevin J. Anderson.
If Villeneuve’s Dune is a success on par with recent franchises, we may be set up for an Avengerses-que schedule in the coming years, which, with the right continuity control, could smooth over some of the uneven storytelling in the books. “The prequels aren’t as good as Dune,” musician and sci-fi geek Moby told National Post earlier this year, “but then again, (in) Frank Herbert’s sequels, by the time you get to Chapterhouse: Dune, you don’t even know what’s going on.”
Moby is right. A cinematic version of the end of the original Dune series as written would require not only an Imax theatre but possibly an additional dimension. Though, in its way, this is a testament to the storytelling potential of the written word. (Side note: Frank Herbert and Tom Robbins were contemporaries in the newsroom at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer while writing their first novels.)
One of the more satisfying adaptations of Herbert’s classic is Julia Yu’s Goodnight Dune, a mash-up with Goodnight Moon that replaces “the quiet old lady whispering ‘hush’” with a Bene Gesserit witch, and the little mouse with Muad’Dib, a desert mouse of the planet Arrakis (Dune), from which Paul Atreides takes his tribal name among the Fremen.