Monday, November 28, 2011

Dune miniseries

I found a used copy of the Dune miniseries, and gave it a look. It manages to make the Lynch version seem like even a bigger masterpiece. What's worse than film CGI? Bad tv CGI! The desert scenes look awful. I know, it's not fair to compare a big budget movie with a tv version made for far less money, but still... I wish they had gone for a no CGI look and given it more of a theatrical feel, that everything clearly is filmed on a stage, like Méliès' silent films. I think that in the end would have been less distracting. The production design is very imaginative, but always less interesting than in the Lynch film. The actors are also less interesting, with a possible exception for William Hurt. I didn't recognize any of the other actors. The accents are all over the place, from Scottish to East European. The cheap look of the series could maybe have been okay if the script was better - they have five hours to tell the story after all - but no, the characters don't feel more developed and the second half, the second disc, really drags. There is no vision, the way the Lynch film, for better or worse, had - it's just bland tv. The one thing that works better is the blue eyes of the fremen, okay, it looks more convincing than in the film.

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