It's always easy to make fun of other people's efforts, and the huge amount of work that went into this production deserves to be acknowledged. The sets are beautiful, the costuming is lavish, and...well, at least it's so much better than David Lynch's effort.
That said, some of that money and effort would have been better spent on casting, writing and direction. One striking aspect of Frank Herbert's characters is that they are all so intelligent. It's painful to listen to the movie's Paul Atreides, who supposedly speaks many languages fluently, woodenly mispronounce his lines ("ek cetera, ek cetera"), or the equally "intelligent" Princess Alia stumble over hers with echoes of a decidedly non-royal accent ("Who's gunna tell me...Who's gunna...gunna, gunna, gunna"). The actors themselves seem not to have read the books or understood them, and they often seem not to have a sense for what's taking place. So much for the tightly-controlled characters and "plots within plots" of the books; the emotions of these actors are painted in loud obnoxious colors all over their dumbstruck faces, and the paint's still wet from acting school. Some have English accents, some have American accents, some have stage accents; no one knows why.
In this strange and wonderous universe, the 9-year-old twins are constantly referred to as "the children" even though, strangely enough, they have the bodies of 20-year-olds. No dark skins here; these lean, desert-dwelling people are very well-fed and strikingly white. In fact, none of the characters seem to have had a day of sun in their lives. And you'd better not mention the Fremen expression "water fat". Stilgar and Gurney, both lean and battle-hardened men, have decidedly unhardened potbellies, and Irulan, a woman trained in the disciplined ways of the Bene Gesserit...well, we'll just say that she's put her problems behind her. Susan Sarandon does a creditable job as Wensicia, although whiny and truculent. Alice Krige, at least, is well-cast as Lady Jessica and she does an excellent job.
Many of these problems might have been helped by good direction and scripting, but both are absent. The whole cast, even the minor one-liners, delivers their lines slowly and with lots of non-sequitur hand gestures. One trick often used to convey a sense of intelligent characters is dense dialogue, but there's no danger of that in this series. Dialogue comes slowly, with generous pauses. The actors unwittingly attempt to speak volumes with their faces, but given that these characters, always scheming, are known for hiding their thoughts, their faces speak more of money poorly-spent.
Again, clever writing might have helped. But the writer, too, seems not to have spent much time understanding what made the books so good. Where context might have served, the writer instead relies heavily on expository explanations to explain what's happening. The twins, closely intertwined, sharp and complex, and struggling to contain thousands of years of human memories, are instead portrayed as distant, confused and simple. As an example, in the book, the twins deduce the assassination plot and cunningly use it to move their own schemes ahead. They pick the time and the place and even guess that there will be large predatory animals. Contrast that with our large movie twins, who happen to be out wandering the sand one day and suddenly stop, dumbfounded, when they hear the loud snarl of a hunting cat who, inexplicably, wants to warn its prey. "That's not a worm!" says Ghanima, her eyes perfectly round.
The overall effect is one akin to watching community theatre. People wander the stage, scream their lines, drip emotion, and wave their arms around. The lines make no sense, the actors earnestly try to impress, and at the end of the day...well, it's only been a few minutes. A long journey, this series, and hours to go before they sleep.
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