IFDB Review: Frank Herbert's Dune - The Spence Edit:

When I watched the mini series back in 2000 I didn't think too much of it, but being a big Dune fan I welcomed another addition to the medium and the fact that it transferred more stuff from the book to the screen.Some years ago I caught it again on TV and thought that it was dreadful. The production values were totally cheap, the costumes/props laughably bad and the actors sub-par to say the least. Also all the action scenes were very badly directed and the few good scenes were direct copy-paste from the movie. So yeah, this is a pretty bad show that at times dragged a lot with boring and badly acted dialog.So what spence did with it? First, he improved the image quality. The colors in the original were indeed too kitch and he toned them down. Second, he tweaked the music to fit better. I don't recall the score much in the original and here it's more pronounced and it's a rather good score actually. More importantly, he cut out a huge chunk of the mini series. The result indeed fits the narrative of one movie and as I mentioned before most of those scenes were badly directed and acted... but the result is more or less directly comparable to the 1984 movie and there's no comparison really. Lynch's movie, even in its original theatrical version, is vastly superior.I don't mean to be hard on Spence because this edit indeed improves the overall quality and transforms a low quality mini-series to a mediocre movie. But the thing is that, at least to me, the main attraction of the mini-series is that it transferred much more of the book into the screen. Whatever you do, this is a cheap, badly directed and acted mini-series and there's only so much you can do to improve it.Nevertheless, Spence deserves a lot of praise for improving many aspects of this series and providing seamless edits. I'd say this edit is recommended to every Dune fan who has already watched the mini-series and wants a re-watch that wont bore him too much.

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