A Beginning is a Very Delicate Time

Thus the Princess Irulan opened David Lynch's film of Dune, almost thirty years ago now. The movie had many faults, but it was epic in scope, mostly true to Frank Herbert's original story, but suffered much from (a) the medium – which can never do justice to it – and (b) the need to edit it down from around six hours of material to not that much more than two hours.

Here is a version with a decent amount of the cut material included, plus a lot of good work to retain the integrity of the original, now coming in at close to three hours in length. It is fascinating to experience the chunks that have been put back in, such as the Padishah Emperor's conversation with the Reverend Mother just prior to the Guild Navigator's arrival.

Unlike another re-edit I encountered a while back, this one retains Virginia Madsen's monolgue, unaltered, at the opening. It is probably the best-ever to-camera monologue in the history of cinema, and shows just how good the lady could be with the right material – sadly never utilised subsequently in her career, as far as I have been able to ascertain. What a waste of a truly great talent!

This version is presented in a series of 24 short 'chapters', one of which is in two parts, and I have set them to auto-play in sequence (via the 'Play All' button) – so be prepared to spend three hours re-living this evocative, powerful and now less flawed epic...

Dune – The Extended Version

David Lynch's original Dune movie, based on the Frank Herbert novel, came in for a fair amount of criticism when it was released almost thirty years ago.

Some of that was and still is justified, but as made it was a lot better than we got. It was just too long, and those pulling the strings required it to be cut down to what they'd consider to be a manageable length. It ended up with too much missing to make complete sense, even to those of us who knew the original story very well.

Here, though, is a version with many (perhaps all, I do not know) of those cut scenes restored to their rightful places, plus fan-added artwork and narration, and the whole is now quite significantly better than the release version ever could be.

It still has its faults, but this unofficial version, lasting just short of three hours, is a welcome reminder of just how good David Lynch's work was, on the whole, and especially bearing in mind the technical limitations of effects at that time...