That keeps getting said but I dont entirely agree. Some things were excellent - the still suits, the guild navigator, the guild highliner, the personal shields. Loved all that stuff.
The last Dune book (
Chapter House Dune - and I did look that up!) was written after the film, and the descriptions of the navigator in particular was exactly as portrayed in the David Lynch film.
I saw the film in the cinema, but was a little too young to get it, but I loved the whole feel of it. When I saw it on home video a few years later, I thought it was pretty good, if confusing. The problems with the film are the messy story, which is really down to David Lynch - it was he who wrote the screenplay. Ridley Scott had been picked to direct the film, but after his brother’s death felt he couldn’t devote the necessary two years of production to it, so producer Rafaella di Laurentiis persuaded David Lynch to do this film instead of
Return of the Jedi (I am not making that up - Lynch seriously was in contention to direct RoTJ). One of Lynch’s conditions was that he would only film his own script, so he wrote a new story, based only on a synopsis of the novel (which he had never read).
The production-design of this film is what really stands out, and because so much of it was in costume and set-dressing, it still stands up to the test of time - especially the scenes around the Galactic Emperor that looked every inch as stupendously rich as that job title would suggest. (Bob Ringwood, costume designer on
Dune, is probably better known for Tim Burton’s
Batman)
One odd bit of trivia about Dune - those “personal shields” were drawn by a computer, although traditional animators positioned the wireframes, and so by some measures this was the first ever computer-generated 3D representation of a human form on film.
It cost MGM an absolute fortune. Some of the shots have something like 20 overlays. In comparison, when Star Wars came 10 years later, CGI, pioneered by Lucas's ILM, allowed the film to be made at a fraction of 2001's price.
I think there’s only one computer-generated image in
Star Wars: the large tactical projection-screen on the bridge of the Death Star showing its target moon coming into view from behind a wireframe planet. Everything else was done with stop-motion or traditional animation.
Where computers helped Star Wars was in motion control: the ability to re-shoot the exact same camera movements over and over again, allowing a mask (a negative image that leaves the area of the model unexposed when layered with the background) to be accurately filmed separately from the positive image: this allowed the complex spacecraft battle sequences where the models move independently of the others.
The technique was already well known, and had a name: travelling matte* compositing, but the difficulty in matching matte and object shots made it impractical except for black backgrounds or very simple tracking shots that could be done with a dolly. It was the ability of the computers to reliably repeat the more complex, whirling dogfight shots that made Star Wars’s visual effects so impressive.
(* later immortalised by a character “Uncle Travelling Matt” in Jim Henson’s
Fraggle Rock, whose sequences were produced using the same technique)
