‘published in

Ad - Wednesday, January 16, 1985 - North Shore News

Satisfied with sci-fic

Rings and maybe Isaac Asimov's Foundation

Bees FOR TOLKIEN'S The Lord of the

Trilogy, Frank Herbert’s Dune quartet is my
all-time favorite fantasy series.

Placed some 12,000 years
in the future, the story
follows the transformations
of Paul Atreides, heir to a
planetary dukedom, forced
into a political and military
trap on the sand-covered
planet Arrakis, known as
Dune, where he eventually
meets his destiny as
Muad’Dib, a _ rebellious
messiah, mutant product of
thousands of years of
painstaking cross-breeding.

“Dune is an epic,
and bringing

an epic to life is
much more of an
an achievement.’’

It’s hard to believe that the
first volume was actually
1965, long
before anyone had heard of
an ayatollah or a jihad or
become aware that on our
own planet such great
creatures as the whales faced
the threat of extinction.

Yet these. three mesmeriz-
ing themes — messiah-hood,

holy wars and ecology in ex- -

tremis — form the bedrock

of Herbert’s dazzling tale.
His descriptions of Arrakis -

and its eco-system, with its
ultimate life-form, the
1,000-foot-long Sand Worm
and the spice that gives Star-

ship navigators the power to
jump across time and space,
is so richly embroidered in
Byzantine detail that it is one
of the joys of modern
literature.

By the time you have
finished reading all four
volumes, you have ‘‘been"’ to
the planet called Dune. Lived
there. Died there a thousand
times,

Accordingly, it was with a
certain amount of ner-
vousness that I followed the
various news stories over the
fast few years about the
$50-million effort to film
Herbert’s classic. 1 mean,
there was an awful lot of
telepathic stuff going on in
the books. The plot-lines
unravelled in every direction,
with sub-plots piled on sub-
sub-plots rather like the great
Russian novels of Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky.

| was pretty sure the pro-
ducers would blow it, and if
you've read most of the
reviews of Dune, the movie,
you'd think they had.
However, after having seen it
twice, 1 am happy to report
that they got the essence of it,

- the special effects department

rose to the quite daunting
challenge, and even though
some 20 hours of the film had

‘to be left on the cutting room

floor, |. came away with a
big, satisfied grin on my face.
The Sand Worms! The

Sand Worms lived! When the
first big ‘‘maker'’, as they're

called, came up through the
desert floor to swallow a
spice-harvesting machine, |
was there with Duke Leto,
the ecologist Kynes and the
young Paul Atreides, hover-
ing in their *thopter directly

Kombi -

reg.. *35

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above, feeling vertigo and ex-
citement and awe.

1 am very tempted to say
that with this movie, science
fiction on the screen has
come of age. Devotees of the
genre will probably reply that

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the breakthrough was Stanley
Kubrick’s version of Arthur
C, Clarke's Space Odyssey,
or at least the Star Wars or
Star Trek flicks, with maybe
a half a dozen little master-
pieces thrown in there like
Blade Runner, Alien, Out-
post, and, most recently, The
Last Starfighter.

The difference, I say, is
that Dune is an epic, and
bringing an epic to life is
much more of an achieve-
ment than simply minting a
cinematic version of a short
story, which is all Space
Odyssey was based on, or
making a ‘‘B” movie with a
multi-million-detar budget,
as in Alien, or, for that mat-
ter, taking 1920s’ pulp sci-fi
and converting it into Star

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Wars, Fun, but juvenile,

Actually, Blade Runner,
based on a short Philip K.
Dick masterpiece, was a very
good movie. But not a
sprawling, galaxy-spanning,
empire-shattering Wagnerian
bomb burst of visual
delights, like Dune.

One of course wishes
they'd release the 22-hour un-
cut original, if for no other
reason than to be able to do
away with all the voice-over
splicing that was necessary to
keep up the thread of con-
tinuity. Maybe someday.

In the meantime, all power
to the Kwisatz Haderach!
Down with the House of
Harkonnen! Up the Bene
Gesserit! And, above all, let’s
have the sequel.

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