Say what you will about incoherence, this is more sensuous than any Star Wars. In fact, it is the most expensive 'tripping' ever produced in film - though far from the most satisfying.
It helps to know the book and forget it as you watch this. Not being familiar with the book, you're left with a disjointed tapestry of weird costumes and special effects, some of them impressive, but if you are, and don't have to burden yourself with following the constantly clumsy explanation of the multifaceted Dune universe, you can enjoy this as illustration of a few core ideas.
Herbert's novel was the product of strange and powerful times. The US public was experiencing the Civil Rights upheaval, its short-lived infatuation with Islam and meditation, and the same year as the book came out, LSD had spilled out of some top-secret government labs into the streets and youth culture of San Francisco. The first satellite images of Earth had just been published. The Black Panthers had entered the vernacular.
So all the stuff about prescient visions, mentats and mastering mind, (herbally) expanded consciousness as the tool to the navigation and 'folding' of space, Herbert wrote with one eye on the Jordan Belson, Beatles and Maharishi crowd - the generation between film noir and Lucas that for a brief time projected truths into constructed cosmologies.
Herbert was more erudite than most. But he was caught under the same spell - the expectation of a noble jihad of the people and wise lamas from the East coming to teach 'the way'. And you can tell that he was exposed to Eastern thought through Jungians, by his laboriously constructed mythology and (now trite) focus on a Chosen One's journey.
Lynch was a late bloomer in that scene. To my knowledge, he fell in with what was being marketed as 'transcendental meditation' in his AFI years, while filming Eraserhead. I don't know what they practice behind closed doors - my interest lies with the Chinese model and they seem cultish to me. But, there's no doubt to me that he passed on the Lucas gig, thinking he was going to work on a vision of some power.
The film outright fails because the scope of the book is too big (to think that Hobbit is being stretched into a trilogy these days), and because he lacked the right collaborators and probably the predisposition to make an 'action' Dune.
Now Jodorowsky's Dune would have been something to see, probably as cumbersome about spirituality but much more organic. But, it's worth noting a few interesting things about this, in context of how Lynch would expand in later years.
He zeroes in on the transcendental experience of 'awakening the sleeper'. He does so in an obvious manner. Rambaldi's spiceworms as blossoming desert flowers top his visual meditation. And that all of Herbert's pomp and mythological noise work against him submerging the idea.
Keep in mind the Chinese notion - from the Tao Te Ching - that the 'soft beats the hard', stressed twice in the film even though no one actually thinks or fights in the Chinese way. Discard everything that is hard, from the crass Harkonnen to the acting style (mentat Dourif!) to the sophomoric rousing of Fremen rebellion, laser battles and final redemption.
The one part that is soft is at House Atreides, the preparation for Dune. What is there? Familiar dynamics - it's soap opera if you discard the costumes. Premonitions of murder and telepathic wiring with a fabric behind reason. A woman with her box of illusory sensations. A space flight through the doors of perception.
It's heady. None of it really works, because Herbert's synchretic universe is not one of internal martial arts, what we see matters. But does any of it remind you of a David Lynch film you know?
