You should try to watch the Dune mini-series that came out in 2000.
It was actually pretty good.
Oh, I forgot one thing: William Hurt was in it and he has to be the most over rated actor in history.
Dune is not a subset of anything. It was positively the worst film every made. I too am very familiar with the books and I had not a clue as to what was going on in the movie.
By familiar, I mean that I read it every year for a decade or so. I still can’t figure out how they glued the dinner plates to the fat guy’s (Baron Harkonen?) belt and had him float around.
It probably could be made into a decology of movies but the novels are so dense that it might take two movies per novel to do it justice. FX are so much better now that when it was made that it might just be worth it.
The De Laurentiis version of Dune overly compressed a lengthy and complex story, with bad acting even from good actors. The more fundamental problem was the shifting narrative voices. The novel frequently shifted from third person to first person and made it work. As Dune proved, that rarely works on film because it slows the action and confuses the audience.
Yes. Star Wars was a more entertaining ripoff of Dune
I was a fan of the book. Needless to say, the movie was a huge disappointment. Because of its poor direction, unintelligible storyline, poor acting, lousy special effects, wide departure from the original story and failure to capture the spirit of the novel, I nominate 'Dune' as the worst movie ever made.
The Dino DeLaurentis movie was pretty awful, however, I think that the worst rendition of a book to a movie award goes to "Starship Troopers." Granted, it's a really fun movie that I enjoyed immensely, but other than the title and some character names, the book and movie were pretty much two completely different stories!
Mark
I actually like Dune - I even bought the DVD. But then again, I’ve never read the book, so my perspective may be different.
As for worst movies of all time, I nominate Ishtar, Waterworld, Mad Max and my all-time love/hate movie, Plan Nine From Outer Space.
Got that DVD, too ;)