DUNE vs STAR WARS: "Why Dune Failed Where Star Wars Succeeeded"

Описание: In this short documentary, made as the final project in a film class at Harvard, I explore why, although many great science fiction (SF) films have had their basis in SF novels, the film adaptation of the best-selling science fiction novel of all time, Frank Herbert’s DUNE is not among them.

In fact, the 1984 film adaptation by David Lynch was called "incomprehensible, ugly, (and) unstructured" by no less an authority than Roger Ebert.

This interested me, as the SF novel shares a common purpose with its cinematic counterpart, and I felt that there had to be some definitive reason why a story that had performed so well in print had failed so badly on the big screen. My goal in this project was to examine David Lynch’s DUNE in comparison to George Lucas’ original STAR WARS trilogy to try to explain why the former failed where the later succeeded, to explain the cultural significance of that failure, and to examine whether the newest visual imagination of the world of Arrakis (set to release in October of 2021) was likely to do any better.

Come along with me as I explain the four main reasons why I think it failed; length, soundtrack, a failure to provide the audience with aspirational heroes for both men and women, and finally, its mixing of the monstrous feminine and religious archetypes.