Dune

This review is bravely sponsored by

BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Science Fiction	Theatrical Trailer(s)	None
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	None
Year Released	1984	Commentary Tracks	None
Running Time	131 minutes	Other Extras	Production Notes Cast & Crew Biographies
RSDL/Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Movie
Region	4	Director	David Lynch
Distributor	Force Video	Starring	Kyle MacLachlan Sting Max von Sydow Patrick Stewart Linda Hunt
RRP	$34.95	Music	Toto

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	Pan & Scan	MPEG	None
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	None	Dolby Digital	2.0
16x9 Enhancement	None	Soundtrack Languages	English (Dolby Digital 2.0 )
Theatrical Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
Macrovision	?
Subtitles	None

    Monarchic familial houses rule the known universe. Dune concerns the fight between House Atreides and House Harkonnen, and in particular the story of Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan). Fremen legend has it that a man with remarkable powers will arise and rescue them from their plight. That man is Paul Atreides.

    Dune is a movie by David Lynch which means that you will either love it or hate it. He has a very bizarre and idiosyncratic style, one which is ideally suited to the futuristic, quasi-religious setting of Dune. There are plenty of lavish sets and lots of stylish cinematography to enjoy, but you will have to concentrate since if you blink you will miss important aspects of the movie, especially if you haven't read the book.

    I personally think Dune is a masterpiece of filmmaking with very little wrong with it, though you may disagree. It is a film that you can easily watch again and again and progressively discover more and more about it.

    In a nutshell, this is a great movie presented on an appallingly bad disc.

Video

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, i.e. Pan & Scan. This movie suffers badly from the Pan & Scan treatment, especially given its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio. This is one movie that was shot with a widescreen aspect ratio in mind. A nasty artefact is present at 36:22.

    The transfer was extremely blurry and indistinct. There was very poor contrast and blacks were grey. Low level noise was all over this transfer in the darker areas of the transfer to an extent that I have never seen before on DVD. The transfer has been taken from a print source rather than an interpositive, and a bad-looking print at that. Indeed, I am told that the DVD was created from a Betacam source tape of this movie. Put simply, this may be acceptable for broadcast, but it is far from acceptable as source material for DVD unless no other source material exists. In this case, much better source material exists.

    The colour saturation was all over the place. Some scenes were not too bad, but others were virtually black and white or black and green. The worst offenders in this area were the worm-riding scenes. You could be forgiven for thinking you were looking at a 50-year old black-and-white movie during these scenes, they looked so bad.

    MPEG artefacts were surprisingly absent given the enormous amount of noise in the transfer, but there was certainly some blockiness at times to be seen.

    The major film-to-video artefact was severe telecine wobble throughout the transfer. This transfer wobbled dreadfully all over the place throughout its entire length.

    Finally, massive amounts of dirt, scratches, and generally ugly looking blotches made their way into this transfer.

Audio

    If you thought the video was bad, wait until you hear the audio. It is even worse.

    The entire soundtrack was muffled, indistinct and occasionally distorted. It was severely frequency limited. This made dialogue quite hard to make out most of the time and I really had to concentrate on the dialogue, and even sometimes back up to understand what was being said.

    The music is by Toto. I love Toto, and enjoyed the music, or at least the music that I could hear distinctly. I felt that it fit perfectly with the look and feel of this movie.

     The surround channel was used frequently for music and for some sound effects. As with the centre channel, the frequency response was severely limited and it was hard to make out anything distinct in the surrounds. However, the track did have some signs of being quite enveloping if the frequency response was better.

    The .1 channel was not specifically used, however my surround sound processor sent a reasonable amount of signal to the subwoofer, comprising music and lots of low bass sound effects. Once again, because of the frequency limiting and distortion, this was often an indistinct rumble rather than an augmentation of what was present in the rest of the soundtrack.

    If the audio track did not have the severe high frequency limiting that is present on this disc, it would probably be quite a good mix. As it is, it is a terrible soundtrack.

Menu

Production Notes

Cast & Crew Biographies

    The video quality is of dreadful quality, exhibiting pretty much every problem I ever look for, and showing them all in copious abundance. If you want to see what artefacts look like, this is the DVD to look at!

    The audio quality is also of dreadful quality.

    The extras are limited.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Michael Demtschyna
10th January 1999