Critics reviews

[Dune] fuses Herbert’s geopolitical sci-fi world-building with Lynch’s own macabre dreamscapes, resulting in an absorbing blend of B-movie storytelling, oddball Freudian signifiers, and an adventurous visual palette.

[Lynch's Dune is] a profuse film, teeming with sets and costumes as intricate as they [are] overwhelming, making extended and startling use of optical effects, and, in general, displaying an urgent will to turn the fantasy worlds of the story, which is set in the year 10191, into physical and visceral experiences.

There are, admittedly, some moments of expressionist panache and dreamlike strangeness; it sometimes feels like a freewheeling sci-fi production of a lost Shakespeare Roman play... But this is a film that doesn’t dramatically harness the vast forces it’s gesturing at, but trundles determinedly along with very little variation of tone or pace.

[Dune] is a triumph of production design that still looks extraordinary... [But] the convoluted narrative ultimately slips away from Lynch and in that failure lives the suspicion that Frank Herbert’s novel is beyond adaptation.

It is hard to truly punish Dune. As a version of the book it remains hopeless... but as a piece of outrageous sci-fi art, thrilling to its own excess, it is far more of a piece with Lynch’s idiosyncratic career, than he has made out.

[Dune] is a feast of contradicting yet amazing ideas that continues to astound nearly four decades later. Don’t believe the cynicism: Lynch’s great shame remains a great undertaking worth watching.

On the whole, Dune's Lynchian fingerprints are faint. Much has been made of how the large-scale production, and multiple simultaneous shooting crews, removed the director's touch from the picture. Presumably a large chunk of it was sliced off in the editing room following that.

Dune is not the masterpiece its adherents have hoped for — but neither is it the disaster its detractors have claimed... [It] is at once a work of almost visionary beauty and surprisingly conventional adventure.

Dune—which exists in several cuts, none of which Lynch seems all that crazy about—is his most uncontrolled work, as evidenced in the sometimes spotty special effects and the occasionally patchy plotting. But he is the creative force pushing the film in its strangest directions.

[Dune may be] a deeply flawed work that failed as a commercial enterprise, but still managed to capture and distill essential portions of one of science fiction’s densest works... Watching Dune today holds the same joy as flipping through an illustrated version of the novel.

The plot of ''Dune'' is perilously overloaded, as is virtually everything else about it... [The plot] is presented here much too solemnly to leave room for the wit or agility that could have made it fun.

[Dune] is a long, slow, often majestically visualised approximation of Herbert’s magnum corpus, with every effect carefully thought out and brilliantly decorated with endless detail. It’s a pageant you have to admire in retrospect. But at the time one feels vaguely cheated.