My wife happened to be looking up during one of Sting’s early screen appearances. She said (a little astonished), “Is that Sting?”
The costuming in the production was really over the top: I’ve never figured out what Sting’s costume was about. The homophobia was more in-your-face than I recalled, too. (This was the first time I watched it since its initial theatrical release in 1984.) Baron Harkonnen is an unsympathetic character in any telling, but was it necessary to put him in that sort of hideous skin-disease makeup at the height of the AIDS epidemic?
Lynch also skipped a couple of important sequences in the theatrical cut. One of them is the first knife-fight between Paul and Jamis (?) immediately after Paul and Jessica are found by the Fremen. That’s important because it foreshadows the climactic knife fight between Paul and Sting’s character (was that Feyd Rautha?). Alia is almost totally glossed until the final scenes when she is magically appears almost as a deus ex machina oracle.
Villaneuve did a much better job with his Part 1. I haven’t decided about Part 2, yet. I’ll probably go if HBO starts airing his Part 1 so I can get up to speed again on his telling. I wonder if HBO was airing Lynch’s Dune just to remind people how awful it was? It’s up there with Priscilla: Queen of the Desert and Ishtar on the stinker list.
It’s actually kind of a big week or so for remakes: the Shogun remake starts showing this week, and Villaneuve’s Dune Part 2 is out in broad release a week from Thursday.