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The long-forgotten TV series that got Dune right

The Sci-Fi Channel’s take on Frank Herbert’s books captured their uncanny atmosphere better than any adaptation before – or since

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Inspired by the success of Denis Villeneuve’s two Dune movies – combined global box office: $1 billion and counting – HBO and Sky Atlantic are rolling out a lavish spin-off prequel, Dune: Prophecy. It’s an exciting return to the Dune universe, downsized to the small screen, while retaining the essence of Frank Herbert’s fantastical vision of a far future populated by giant worms, back-stabbing royals and the addictive hallucinogenic “spice”.
Starring Emily Watson and Olivia Williams as a devious duo of sibling space nuns, the show looks set to be a major hit. It has certainly gone down well with critics. The consensus is that 40 years after David Lynch’s much-derided original Dune film, Hollywood is at long last doing justice to Herbert’s cult saga.
It’s no surprise that Lynch struggled with Dune. Herbert’s original book and its five sequels are a dense and often hallucinatory chronicling of a Game of Thrones-style battle for supremacy beginning in the year 10,191.
This is a universe ruled by Great Houses, who jostle for control while trying to win the favour of the Emperor who has overall dominion – think of it as the Holy Roman Empire in space. But there is more to this familiar-yet-strange setting than meets the eye. In the shadows, a sisterhood of psychic nuns – the Bene Gesserit – plan to breed a holy leader who will unite the galaxy. They are doing so by subtly shaping the blood lines of the nobility through arranged marriages. In the first Dune book, their plans come to fruition in the shape of the teenage Paul Atreides – though not quite in the way the sisters predicted.
Published in the mid-1960s, Dune became a bestseller and was soon regarded as a science fiction touchstone. Next to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, it was one of the most influential works of speculation fiction of the mid-20th century. The depths of its world building was mind-blowing – the planet of Arrakis felt alive in a way few fictional places did, influencing subsequent franchises, from Star Wars to Star Trek.
Yet after Lynch’s mega-flop, it is commonly believed that the Dune franchise had entered suspended animation. That is not the case, however. The idea that nothing at all happened in the Dune universe between Lynch’s overstuffed and incomprehensible (to non-book readers) movie and Villeneuve’s triumphant tale of Timothée Chalamet’s messiah-like Paul Atreides is simply incorrect. Beneath the sands, much was afoot.
In 1992, there came the excellent Dune video game from Westwood Studios (for complicated reasons, it was called Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis, despite not being a sequel), where the player took charge of one of the Great Houses mining for the precious spice on Arrakis. There was also a stonking Dune board game where you could play as the noble Atreides, the foul Harkonnen or those sneaky space nuns, the Bene Gesserit (the Bene Gesserit player claimed first place if they predicted on which turn another player “won” the game).
Less positively, Herbert’s son, Brian, teamed up with author Kevin J Anderson to churn out novels set in the Dune universe (a bloated 15 volumes, compared to Herbert’s original six). These are not highly regarded by Dune diehards, who see them as a dumbing down of Herbert’s original vision – though HBO was impressed enough to (very loosely) use 2012’s Sisterhood of Dune as the basis for Dune: Prophecy.
The most intriguing chapter in the hidden history of Dune, however, is the tilt at the franchise taken by the Sci-Fi Channel (today Syfy) at the turn of the millennium with the mini-series, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and a 2003 follow-up, Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune. Taken together, they adapt the first three of Herbert’s six original Dune novels, wisely ending just as the saga started turning bonkers. (For reasons best known to himself, Herbert kept bringing loyal Atreides bodyguard Duncan Idaho back from the dead over and over; and the penultimate volume, Heretics of Dune, descends into soft-porn at one point).
Sci-Fi was founded in 1992 and mainly broadcast reruns of older shows such as Star Trek and Doctor Who for its first eight years. However, in the late 1990s, Sci-Fi’s new owner, Universal Pictures, decided to focus on original content. Dune and Children of Dune were part of this ambitious new strategy, alongside the Steven Spielberg-produced UFO thriller Taken and a grim remake of the cheesy Star Wars rip-off Battlestar Galactica.
The Herbert adaptations were spearheaded by veteran producer Richard Rubinstein, who had previously brought Stephen King’s The Stand and Langoliers to television, and believed the miniseries was the perfect format for transferring a much-loved literary property to the screen.
“I have found there’s a wonderful marriage to be had between long, complicated books and the television miniseries,” he said in 2003. “There are some books that just can’t be squeezed into a two-hour movie.”
Rubinstein entrusted the projects to writer-director John Harrison, whose background was in horror movies. As an actor, he played a zombie in George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) and went on to work as Romero’s assistant director on Day of the Dead (1985). In fact, this is how he met Rubinstein, who in the early 1970s co-founded Romero’s production company, Laurel Entertainment. Rubinstein, it is worth noting, had acquired the screen rights to Dune in 1996 and later sold them to Warner Bros, producer of the Villeneuve adaptations. He and Harrison are listed as executive producers of those films.
Harrison had a clear vision of the story he wanted to tell with Dune and Children of Dune. “A lot of people refer to Dune as science fiction,” he told the New York Times. “I never do. I consider it an epic adventure in the classic storytelling tradition, a story of myth and legend not unlike Le Morte d’Arthur or any messiah story. It just happens to be set in the future.”
Dune and Children of Dune were filmed on a sound stage in Prague rather than in the deep desert (Villeneuve made his movies in Jordan and Abu Dhabi). This was for practical rather than budgetary reasons – a scouting exhibition sent to Morocco reported that 45 mph winds would scupper the project. Still, for all the limitations of a studio-bound production, they are full of atmosphere and arguably do a better job translating Herbert’s vision of a distant future that looks a lot like Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the screen than either of the movies (or the new HBO spin-off).
The first Dune miniseries is especially good at conveying the scheming wickedness of Paul’s mortal enemies, House Harkonnen. In 1984, Lynch arguably went overboard in portraying their leader, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan) as a pervert with bad skin.
He’s a monster with out-of-this-world acne rather than a sophisticated political enemy luring the well-meaning but fatally naive Atreides into his trap. Similarly, Villeneuve imagined the Baron as a nightmarish creature of the dark, with actor Stellan Skarsgård playing him as a swollen, slug-like tyrant, a vision out of a horror movie.
In the book, however, the Baron is a canny operator – a monster but also a clear-eyed ruler. That is how he is depicted in Dune by Ian McNeice (who would go on to star in Doc Martin and play Winston Churchill in Doctor Who).
Meanwhile, Children of Dune from 2003 features a young James McAvoy as Paul’s son, Leto II. He is determined to carry on his father’s work as a saviour while acknowledging his flaws – a tricky part McAvoy plays to perfection.
The rest of the cast are great, too – Saskia Reeves as Paul’s mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson in the new movies), William Hurt as Paul’s naively noble father, Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac in the Villeneuve version), and Scottish actor Alec Newman as the young hero, making for charismatically craggy and grumpy Paul.
The Sci-Fi Dune show also features intriguing production design by Miljen Kljaković, who imagined a distinct look for the noble Atreides, the wicked Harkonnen, and the scheming Empire of the Known Universe (Christopher Walken in the new feature). The Atreides are given a “classical” Greco-Roman vibes, the Harkonnen a “fascistic architectural style,” and the Palace of the Emperor an aesthetic inspired by the Renaissance.
Having decided against shooting on location, the planet Dune was created using photographic backdrops called “Translites,” which were modulated by computers to enhance their eeriness. This gives the show a wonderful “uncanny” valley look – like watching a theatre production filmed on an alien planet.
That ambience is at the core of why the series works. Herbert’s Dune has an eerie quality in that it sketches a world both entirely unrecognisable from our own but which is, at the same time, clearly an extension of 20th century human civilisation. It is a time and place where interstellar-pilots from the mysterious “Spacing Guild” have evolved into huge zero-gravity tadpoles. But this is also a universe where the hero is named “Paul”, one of the leaders of the Bene Gesserit is called “Helen” and Paul’s grandfather died fighting a bull, matador style. Past, present and future collide and, whether it’s due to budget restrictions or the theatre-like way in which it is shot, the mini series gets that essence across powerfully. The only real weakness are the CGI Sandworms, which seem to have been bashed out on a ZX81 under time constraints.
Why, then, have these wonderful contributions to the Dune mythos been forgotten? The major reason is surely they are not available to stream – though you can hunt them down on YouTube without much difficulty.
Visually, neither series will blow your mind (despite a reported $20 million per series budget). But they communicate the eerie nature of Herbert’s sci-fi in a way neither Lynch nor Villeneuve quite nails. The sands of time have obscured these excellent adaptations, but it’s worth digging in the digital dirt and discovering them anew.
Dune: Prophecy is on Sky Atlantic now
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