I love Dune.  The books, not Lynch’s movie.  The recent SciFi mini-series was OK however.

Anyway, there are two series that I consider to be the best SciFi ever written, and they are the Dune books and Dan Simmons’ four Hyperion and Endymion books.

This thread is about Dune.  It is remarkable to me that Dune was published in 1964 or 1965 (don’t have one in front of me).  That and The Children of Dune are the only really good SciFi books from the 60s IMNHO.  Frank Herbert brought that universe alive, and made the characters real in such a way that few authors can.  Mentats, the Guild, the shield and blade fights, Kanli (can’t remember the spelling), the Fremen, Spice, the Harkonnen evil and the Atreides honor…  All of those things are simply incredible.

Even the books being written by his son are good. House Atreides was better than House Harkonnen.  I feel pretty strongly that Brian Herbert got none of his father’s talent, but the co-author is quite good. 

I loved the Sci-Fi miniseries and look forward to their “Children of Dune” interpretation.

I never could sit through Lynch’s movie.

Herbert is a minor god, IMO.

The Lynch movie was not inherently bad - it’s just that no one watched the clock during production.  The first 90 minutes of the movie did, IMHO, a very good job of telling the first half of the book.  About them, someone notice that they REALLY had to get done with the movie, so the last half of the book was compressed (VERY badly) into the remainder of the movie.  That, to me, is the real flaw with the movie: a story that was being well told but was not permitted to take the time needed (probably close to 3-1/2 hours) to properly wind everything up and give us the essential subtleties of the book.  Pity, since I thought the actors, directing, and overall design wer far superior to the SciFi channel’s recent effort (I mean, could they have made poor Chani look any LESS attractive if they had tried!?)

The story I heard was that when filming was complete, Lynch had what was basically a 6 hour movie (or a 9 hour movie, depending on the version of the story you want).  Editing out half of it to make a 3 hour film left nothing but the highlights.  At that point, they added the voice over to try and make it make sense.

I would like to see a director’s cut DVD with the 6 hour (or 9 hour) version.