The "hate" for 1984 Dune has come in waves. Agree it's not common right now for people to say that in part because the new movie is great and shares so much with it, but right after it was released and after the popular Jodorowsky's Dune documentary I think it was more likely for critic types to put it in with a lot of these objectively horrible movies people are mentioning. How many other movies in the thread have an award winning documentary slamming them as one of the worst movies of all time? My own take on the documentary is that I sympathize with it as a working artist/designer/creative myself but it's pretty slanted in how it paints the '84 movie we did get.
I watched
Jodorowsky's Dune, and I don't remember it spending too much time on the Lynch film. I remember it mostly hyping the never-made film into a lost masterpiece and showing us just what a loon (a gifted and creative one, obviously, but nonetheless) Jodorowsky was then and still is now.
I doubt a 70s
Dune by Jodorowsky would have worked. There was undeniably talent involved, but I think many of its ideas ending up in later sci-fi or fantasy films (e.g.,
Star Wars,
Alien, etc.) with less ambition behind them was for the best.
Star Wars designed its sci-fi elements around what the special effects at the bleeding edge of the possible were available in the late 1970s. You don't get to do that with
Dune. You need a way to make a skyscraper-sized worm swimming through sand look convincing. Then you need to have people riding it.
The Lynch movie couldn't pull that off. I don't think Jodorowsky could have a decade earlier.
Plus, Jodorowsky had very little reverence for the source material, and the budget was absurd for its era and the preproduction sounded like it was turning into a mess. I watched and enjoyed
El Topo, which I would describe as an "acid western" or
The Man with No Name but really ******* weird. I just don't know if that surrealist style gels well with the serious themes, worldbuilding, characters, and politics of
Dune.
I think we needed to wait until roughly now for Villeneuve to have the seamless blend of practical and computer effects to make something like
Dune look as full and real as it did on screen.
If we’re talking about bad movies with budgets that aren’t fun in any way then Rise of Skywalker goes right to the top of my list. Just a disaster in every way. The shining example of what happens when you don’t plan out your series.
Jurassic Park Dominion is the same, they had a movie with dinosaurs and made it mostly about bugs. And the reunion aspect of it had a ton of potential but was completely wasted.
I've never seen
The Last Jedi or
Rise of Skywalker. Nor have I any of the "Jurassic" films after
Jurassic World (though really all of them after the original seem to be bad to terrible).
I haven't said anything bad about the ones I haven't seen in this thread because, well, I haven't seen them. But considering the way their predecessors treated me, I don't think I missed much.
