This
is NOT a film.
I
know what you're thinking - oh cool, great, a 3 hour version
of Dune, perhaps it will make sense and be the masterpiece
it was supposed to be.
Er,
no it's not that at all. For a start it's NOT in Widescreen
and the picture quality is dire! This is a full screen TV
version of the film made for TV from the film and additional
footage left lying around from the 8 hours that Lynch allegedly
filmed. The voiceover from Virginia Madsen is replaced by
the typical "cinema trailer man" type which, while explaining
the background to the story (so you actually get what's going
on for a change) loses the atmosphere of the original.
Other examples of why this doesn't stand up to the original
are the laughable prologue tacked onto the start of the film
featuring a photo of the book! and cartoonish graphics to
explain some of the background.
If they were going to do this they should have at least spent
the money on some decent computer graphics a la Babylon 5
or Deep Space Nine to make it, well, professional looking.
The voiceover continues throughout the TV movie (which fades
to black for the adverts) where it really only needed to be
there at the beginning and starts to grate rather than inform.
The music is continually looped to support the extra scenes
and detracts from many key scenes.
So Dune is reduced from "stunning looking and sounding, bizarre,
spooky and unintelligible sci fi film" to "understandable,
reasonable looking full screen TV movie with the violent scenes
removed"
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