You must be joking. The SF channel adaptation was rubbish. The acting was wooden and unconvincing overall (with some exceptions), the characters were wrong (in the opening scene Paul is made out to be petulant- that is simply not how it is in the book) the plot was twisted beyond belief. but the SFX were the worst. They were just krap. The sandworms were made to look like something I find the toilet every day. I nearly fell off my chair laughing when I saw them. CoD was much better, and the score was excellent but overall not good enough. I’m sorry, we true Dune fans are sorely lacking a good Dune film experience.

I recently read the novels again (I don’t think I’d read them since college) and was struck by how well crafted they are. I’ve read the other Sci-Fi masters and none of them can hold a candle to Herbert’s Dune Chronicles. Clark and Asimov look like idiot children who are just learning to tie their shoes when compared with the depth, intricacy, poetry, and thematic beauty that is Dune.

Until someone gets the movie version right, I say keep doing the remakes.

I remember vividly when the Sci-Fi Channel’s version of Dune was released. I was interning in NYC at the time and was living in a house with 40 other students. There was one television. Months prior to the aforementioned movie/show/miniseries airing, I reserved the television. When the day finally arrived and the show began, I was horrified. It was literally painful to watch and I tried to turn it off but was forced to sit through all three segments by the other students. I had reserved the television for months and by gosh they were going to make sure I watched the darn thing.

It was almost as painful for me to sit through the Sci-Fi channel’s version of Dune as it was for me to sit through Biker Zombies from Detroit. There was no redeeming quality that readily comes to mind. In fact, I’ve successfully managed to block most of the experience out and I purchased the set on DVD upon it’s release for the sole purpose of reminding me what NOT to do should I ever get the chance to direct a feature film or miniseries. So far I have yet to open the cellophane.

This is what I remember:

1) The Pain and horror at how my beloved novel had been butchered.
2) How absolutely appalling the casting and subsequent acting were.
3) And finally, how the entire thing looked as though the Director of Photography (Vittorio Storaro) and the production designer (Miljen Kreka Kljakovic) had never met for a face to face discussion of what the computer generated backgrounds were going to look like. It was some of the worst greenscreen work I’ve ever witnessed.

Oh yeah, the costumes sucked to.

I will grant that it followed the novel more faithfully than Lynch’s version. I will also say that I’d rather watch an unruly mob of elementary school children perform a live reading of the unabridged novel in the middle of a blizzard than watch Saskia Reeves attempt to portray the Lady Jessica again.

Damn stupid idea.

Nobody have an original idea any more?

Anybody who’s been paying attention in sci-fi would know that an already superior remake to Dune has been done already. A 6 hour story in 3 parts, excellent acting and supurb special effects. Children of Dune, Herbert’s sequal to Dune, was also done, again a 6 hour story told in 3 parts, with some of the actors from Dune reprising their respective roles so as to keep the two separate stories as a single volume. Those were made for tv and were superior in many ways to most screen plays of sci-fi these days. The original movie with Patrick Stewart as Gurney sucked. It sucked because they tried to cram the whole book into 2 hours, a lot was lost in translation.

A remake for the screen would just be doing the same.

I’ll save you the disapointment. Watch the 2000 remake, it is worth it. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0142032/ and Children of Dune http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0287839/

and if they must make a screen play, choose ANY of the other books as this site illustrates, there is more to the story.

http://www.dunenovels.com/