Stars: Francesca Annis, Kyle MacLachlan, Sian Phillips, Max Von Sydow, Jurgen Prochnow, Jose Ferrer, Dean Stockwell, Sean Young, Everett McGill, Kenneth McMillan, Sting

Director: David Lynch

Summary: Young Paul Atreides strugglers to gain control of Dune, an arid planet dominated by giant sandworms, but rich in a priceless life-giving substance. Based on Frank Herbert's best selling science fiction novel, with screenplay written by David Lynch. Features an extra thirty-five minutes of unseen footage and prologue.

David Lynch's baroque rendering of Frank Herbert's detailed, complex, and deliberately paced epic science-fiction novel is a muddled but visually stunning affair. It's 10991, and the desert planet Dune has been taken over by the Harkonnens, oppressive conquerors who desire the precious spice that lies beneath Dune's arid sands. The story concerns the attempts of a young warrior messiah, Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan), to lead the native inhabitants in an uprising against the evil empire--and battle the giant man-eating worms that guard the coveted spice.
Lynch shot much more footage than ended up in the finished film, but executive producer Dino De Laurentiis didn't want a three-hour-plus sci-fi epic on his hands, so he coerced Lynch into trimming it. The result is one of cinema's most infamous cases of personal vision colliding with studio politics. Nonetheless, Lynch still manages to cram in so many visual ideas and captures the tone of the book so well that these production issues can be easily set aside once the story starts rolling. Refusing to further edit the film for television, Lynch took his name off the director and screenwriter credits. As troubling as DUNE might have been for Lynch, the experience greatly inspired 1986's brilliant BLUE VELVET, for which audiences should be thankful.

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Children of Duneis the sequel to the Sci-Fi Channel's Frank Herbert's Dune(2000), and surpasses that earlier mini-series in every way. The screenplay is again by John Harrison, who has combined Herbert's novels Dune Messiahand Children of Duneinto three 84-minute TV movies, and continues the labyrinthine space opera with little concession to the uninitiated. Indeed, this a very rare attempt to put the complexity of printed SF on screen, and if the result is sometimes rather hermetic it is perhaps inevitable when realising Herbert's Byzantine, pseudo-Shakespearean tragedy. The same tableaux-like qualities infuse the new Star Warsfilms and the similarities between Herbert's and Lucas' worlds have never been more obvious than here.

Performances range from excellent--Julie Cox, Alice Krige, Alex Newman (much better here than in the first series) and James McAvoy--to a surprisingly wooden Susan Sarandon. The set-pieces are exceptional, with many individual images sufficiently memorable to stand comparison with the work of Ridley Scott. Production-wise this is surely the most beautiful mini-series ever made, with gorgeous lighting by cinematographer Arthur Reinhart, breathtaking set design from Ondrej Nekvasil and a ravishing score from Brian Tyler. By TV standards the CGI is first-rate and, though rarely looking real, establishes a credible science fictional universe. Even when rather baffling, the production achieves moments of dramatic grandeur and a sense of wonder not experienced in TV SF since Babylon 5.

On the DVD:Children of Duneon DVD has one feature-length episode on each disc. The picture is presented at 1.77:1 anamorphically enhanced for widescreen TVs. Shot in high definition, its clarity and detail is superb with virtually no blemishes to the image at all. Colour has a painterly beauty that is remarkable. However, some shots look inaccurately framed, with what was presumably a 4:3 image being a little too closely cropped for widescreen presentation. It's a minor flaw and really only noticeable in some close-ups. Sound is a richly luxuriant Dolby Digital 5.1, which gives no ground to any modern blockbuster movie. Perfunctory extras are confined to the first disc and consist of an interesting but short look at the special effects (13 minutes), a storyboard comparison for one key scene and a photo gallery. --Gary S Dalkin

Aspect Ratio:	4:3 Full Frame
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Theatrical Trailer, New Liner Notes, Booklet With Production Stills, Reproduction Of Original Film Poster
Year:	1984
Release Date:	September 18, 2000
Runtime:	180 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	C H V 5008
Keywords:	Special, General, Edition, Dune, Fiction, Science, Tv, Horror, Sci, Fi
Genre:	Science Fiction