Quote:
Originally Posted by desertgrandma
And here's my all time worst..
DUNE, and all the rest that came with it.....Lord, lighten up already. I thought the movie would help me understand the book better, but by the time I finished it, I was ready to poke my eyes out. So whenever my husband wants to watch me run around the house screaming, he'll call me into the room when its playing.......Yeah, I know, to many its a classic.  |
You mean the David Lynch production?
Back when that came out, people asked my opinion. I said "If you
haven't read the book, you might like the film, but you won't understand it. If you
have read the book, you'll hate the film." It had a lot more to do with David Lynch's particular obsessions than it did anything Herbert wrote. I don't know anyone who considered the film classic anything except bad.
The SciFi channel mini-series was a
lot closer to the mark. I could pick nits, but for the most part they captured the book.
I tend to recommend people read _Dune_, _Dune Messiah_, and _Children of Dune_ as one
long book, since that's about how they were written. After that, if you really liked them, you can look at the others.
Joanna Russ reviewed Dune for F&SF many years ago, and called it "carefully worked up third-rate". I disagreed, but I understood why she thought so. Herbert was not a great stylist, and could write unfortunately clunky prose, bit did tell an interesting story. I had some major quibbles , like "There is a pervasive anti-technology bias, but
somebody builds the mile long heighliners the Spacing Guild uses as interstellar transports. Who and where?" I also found the whole "Arabic feudalism transplanted into space" to be highly unlikely. But if you could swallow those (and I could, mostly) it was a decent read.
______
Dennis