Frank Herbert's classic sci-fi story is faithfully brought to the screen by director David Lynch. In the distant future, two rival interplanetary clans find their ultimate battlefield on the desert planet called Dune, where one young man must face his mystical destiny. Kyle MacLachlan, Francesca Annis, Jurgen Prochnow, Jose Ferrer, Patrick Stewart, Sting and Sean Young star. 137 min. Widescreen; Soundtracks: English; scene access; production notes; biographies; film highlights; theatrical trailer.

Buy Dune on Region 2 DVD at Blackstar (UK)!

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"