So...I Watched David Lynch's "Dune"

As a kid I always remember seeing the VHS cassette for Dune at the video store each Friday when we'd go looking for rentals. Pizza and a movie night, a tradition we're kinda/sorta maintaining with our kids. 

Anyway, I remember thinking it looked so cool, or weird, or serious, as the dude from Twin Peaks was young and had some thingy in his nose. Plus his eyes were blue...like the cornea was blue. I remember hearing that a drug turned eyes blue...or something.

My understanding was suspect, but, as it turns out, not so bad for a kid.

But the movie remained a mystery to me until a few days ago. I watched a Ted Talk episode of "Why You Should Read..." about Frank Herbert's "Dune", and it touches on the many books Herbert wrote about the world he created and built up. It shed more light on it than I understood beforehand. To wit:

One thing I remember about thinking was weird about Star Wars was: Hey, this guy (Han Solo) is from a planet called Corelia, and Princess leia is from Alderaan, and Luke Skywalker has been living in Tatooine. But they all look like they could be from Indianapolis. Or Malibu.

I asked my dad about it and he laughed said something like, "Right?" He went on to explain that at least Star Trek had an episode that spoke to why the dominant types of beings were bi-pedal, nitrogen/oxygen breathing, 1.5 to 2 meter tall beings. Star Wars was more of a mythology class set against a space western.

Which brings us to Dune, or Frank Herbert's main conceit: The reason the beings all look human is because THEY ARE HUMAN. It takes place about eight-thousand years in the future, in year 10,191 (or something). I heard somewhere---NOT in the 1984 movie---that humans and AI had a war, that ultimately lead to humans moving on from computers in general.

A few thousand more years in the future, and humans have colonized three separate planets. One where the emperor lives, one that produces their very important societal commodity, and another where one of the two Houses lives.

Maybe it was a good waiting until I was this-old to watch this movie for the first time, and especially before we watched the new version in both parts.

But...is it surprising that it's basically about money and power? There's the greasy gingers (House Harkonnen), the nominal good guys (House Atreides), and the emperor who's a puppet of two different groups: some magical lady group, and the vagina-mouthed floating slug beings.

The important societal commodity is a dusty spice that's mined on the mostly inhospitable sand planet called Arrakis (AKA Dune). The spice can get you high, but it also powers the space-ships and allows faster-than-light travel. Pretty nifty. While using it will stain corneas blue, just being on the planet long enough will have the same effect, as the saturation level is reached in a few months due to microscopic particles in the air.

Those details were all new to me. Watching it felt like, though, while it was a neat sci-fi conceit, it was basically House Musk vs House Bezos vs Planet-Wide Union Organizer.

SPOILER ALERT: at least the organizers won.

I'm curious to see how the new movies deal with the real/fake messiah storyline, and how they handle the worm-riding, but at least I have a handle now on the characters and plot threads. Also, being as old as I am now meant that I could handle the more incoherent parts...like:

Ehhh...WTF?