In the year 10,191, Princess Irulan explains that the most important substance in the Universe is Spice, which can enable travel through space, but can only be found on the desert planet Arrakis, called Dune. The Space Guilds sends a Navigator to the Emperor who explains him that he plans to destroy the increasingly popular House Atreides. When the Atreides and their servants come to Dune, the evil Vladimir from the House of Harkonnen kills Duke Leto, while his son Paul and his mother Jessica are able to escape an hide in the desert. They join the Fremen tribe. Paul marries Chani and teaches them his special fighting techniques, adopting the name Muad'Dib. With the help of giant sand worms, they start a rebellion, kill Vladimir and place Paul as the new Emperor. Then it starts to rain.
Upon its release, even though it was one of the most expensive movies of its time with a budget of 40 million $, and even though it came during the "science-fiction wave" of the late 70s and 80s, David Lynch's film adaption of "Dune" was met with hostility and rejected by both the critics and the audiences alike. 28 years later, a certain fan under the nickname Spicediver assembled and released a fanedit of the film, adjoining it with deleted scenes and thereby extending its running time from two to three hours. The result: "Dune: The Alternative Edition Reduxe" is an improvement to the official cut, since it gave more room for the characters in the complex, dense storyline, explaining their motivations and reasons for acting. People unfamiliar with Frank Herbert's excellent novel "Dune" were utterly startled and confused by a completely foreign world set in the far future, with no relation to our time, and thus did not understand it back in 1984, yet after "Game of Thrones" and several other stories set in entirely fictional worlds, "Dune" became less cryptic if more patience was invested into it: it is a classic tale of several power clans fighting over dominance and rule, where the spice is an allegory for a valuable resource, possible oil, and therefore its possession enables more power, whereas Muad'Dib is an allegory of Muhammad, who organized various desert tribes into independence in order to take over the control of their own land over foreign imperial struggle. However, Herbert's novel was even more philosophical than that, since spice could also be used as a drug that expands consciousness, thereby changing the perception: there is no center of the world anymore after it, because that center is anywhere in someone's mind. Even with these improvements, this edition is also flawed: the last third is rushed one way or the other, hasting Paul's rise from an outsider to a leader of the Fremen tribe, and failing to dwell more on some philosophical concepts, instead focusing on an action finale involving Paul riding a giant worm that attacks the city capital on Arrakis. The movie should have been four hours long, and included more intimate scenes from the novel, yet it is better in this edition, especially in some crumbs of wisdom, such as when Paul listens to his father's words that people should not fear change ("But a person needs new experiences. They draw something deep inside. A longing to grow. Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken").
Grade:++
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