After the avant garde Eraserhead and the Oscar-nominated drama The Elephant Man, the next logical step for David Lynch was obviously… a space opera?

Lynch was offered the reins of The Return of the Jedi but instead opted to adapt Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune, a famously dense book that previous directors David Lean, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Ridley Scott had failed to get off the ground.

Lynch initially conceived of a story spanning two films but eventually delivered a rough cut of a single film running more than four hours. He planned to pare it down to three, but producer Dino De Laurentiis insisted on a final cut closer to two.

To get there, multiple scenes were dropped, new exposition-heavy scenes were added, and voiceover narration was added throughout. The result was a confusing mess, and a box office bomb in 1984, that Lynch essentially disowned in later years.

To be fair, even the original cut would likely have been lousy. Cheesy effects, stilted dialogue, and campy performances steer this movie into Buck Rogers territory, only stuffed with the dense plotting and dialogue of Herbert’s opus.

There is little here to identify Dune as the work of Lynch, apart from a few scenes depicting the freaky Harkonnen clan and some space worm trippiness. The film plays like what it is — a money job, in the wrong hands.

Watching this Dune made me appreciate Denis Villeneuve’s pair of films so much more. Villeneuve managed to do justice to the convoluted, mythologically dense plot and deliver a rousing, thoughtful action epic.

Having gotten his worst movie out of his system, Lynch returned to form two years later with one of his best, but I’ll save that for tomorrow.