41
Metascore
20 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- While it's hardly a cohesive experience, individual scenes are brought to life with striking power.
- For all its cumbersome scope (realized on a shimmeringly large scale by Lawrence of Arabia cinematographer Freddie Francis), the film remains an intensely personal epic, Lynch's uncommon emphasis on characters rather than effects lending his exposition a rather remarkable lucidity.
- 70Time OutTime OutLynch's third feature may have been a commercial disaster, but it gets under your skin and is marked by unforgettable images and an extraordinary soundtrack.
- 60EmpireIan NathanEmpireIan NathanA most fascinating disaster of genre making.
- 60Dune is a huge, hollow, imaginative and cold sci-fi epic. Visually unique and teeming with incident, David Lynch's film holds the interest due to its abundant surface attractions but won't, of its own accord, create the sort of fanaticism which has made Frank Herbert's 1965 novel one of the all-time favorites in its genre.
- 50TV Guide MagazineTV Guide MagazineDUNE is visually delightful but choppy, confusing, and overloaded with exposition. Moreover, most of the thematic material that made the novel work--subtexts involving incestuous desire, capitalism vs. environmentalism, and Middle East politics--is simply missing.
- 40Washington PostPaul AttanasioWashington PostPaul AttanasioHow maddening Dune is! As you would expect from visionary director David Lynch, it is a movie of often staggering visual power, the most ambitious science fiction film since "2001"; it's also stupefyingly dull and disorderly. Dune doesn't get going till fully two hours have elapsed, so only the most patient will wait for the images to build to their crescendo. Lax in its storytelling, Dune gives us sublimity unmoored.
- 30The New York TimesJanet MaslinThe New York TimesJanet MaslinSEVERAL of the characters in Dune are psychic, which puts them in the unique position of being able to understand what goes on in the movie.
- 25Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertChicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertThis movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time.