Painful, if fun to watch (Score 2)

I was really looking forward to the first night of the Dune mini-series. I'm a big fan of the books, and I even enjoyed the Lynch film version. I don't consider myself usually very picky about movie translations, but holy -cow- some of the glitches here were pretty scary.

First I must take issue with the costuming.

Why were the emperor's elite soldiers, the Sadurkar (sp?) terror troopers, etc, etc, wearing giant poofy berets? And did anybody else expect Shadam the IV to break out into 'I Will Survive'? The costuming was confusing at best, and outright silly at worst. Irulan's butterflies were really surreal, and having to listen to my husband sing 'Triangle Man' every time Feyd was shown with the surreal triangle plastered to his back got old. ;)

And then there was the casting...

Now not all of the actors suffered from blandness disease, but a lot of them did. These are very -vibrant- people in the books, and in the Lynch film. And yet so many of them this time seemed to suffer from 'Blah'. They also seemed mis-cast. Stilgar in particular drove me nuts. He's supposed to be this very thin, powerful looking warrior from the deep desert, and instead we get a pudgy generic sort of fellow. I could forgive Gurney having gone to weight, but Stilgar, who must actively fight in an environment of limited water? Couldn't they at least have tried with makeup or something to make him look a -little- less like a stereotype of an accountant? Kudos however, to Baron Harkonen, who managed despite weak writing to manage as best he could with the part. I loved the actor as Potiphar in _Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat_ as well.

Confusion?

Did anybody else have trouble guessing who was who half the time? I don't think a very good job was done with character identification. For me, this hurt the story. It didn't mean much that Yueh was the traitor when we didn't know who he was. (And well, who can beat Dean Stockwell in the Lynch film? Admittedly, it made it harder for me to watch him as Al in Quantum Leap, years later, but it was still a great performance.)

I won't even begin to touch some of the weird stuff, like Irulan showing up way too early, and the apparent switch between nice expensive visuals and really -cheap- sets. There are, after all, limitations to what one can do with a complicated story like Dune. I was a just disappointed, I guess, with the director. He did Earth 2 as well, a series I really enjoyed. I was expecting a lot more. Still, I'll keep watching it, for scenes like the one with the fountain and the water squeezings, bright moments of redemption in what otherwise manages to be a farce.