DUNE MEH –a Quick Dismissive Review of the HBO Dune series

Image: The Dune altar in my study.

For my entire adult life, I have been immersively devoted to the world of Dune. In the nineties, I even made my own audiobook version (dozens and dozens of cassette tapes) of all the original Frank Herbert books and have written much about Dune. I know Kevin J Anderson, the co-author with Frank Herbert’s son Brian, of all the many highly creditable Dune sequels and prequels they’ve written. They wrote the material this series is supposedly based on, but I’m sure they had little to do with whatever the mediocre committee of dumbasses did with it.

I love many things in the David Lynch Dune movie and the new Villeneuve Dune movies, though both have many failings. I will forever wish I hadn’t seen even the few minutes worth of the Sci-Fi channel’s Dune series I watched, and I also made it only a few minutes into the new HBO series before I realized that it would only degrade my vision of the Dune world.

As soon as we’re introduced to members of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, I felt the needle scratching across the vinyl record as I saw a sucktacular, deal-breaking, godawful misconception. Lynch understood what the Bene Gesserit are like, and Villeneuve did a great job casting Mother Superior Gaius Helen Mohiam, but his choice of Jessica was too lightweight, barely passable. To be honest, as much as I like Timothy Chalumet, he’s also too lightweight and too nice to be an ideal Paul. To be fair, Paul is tough to cast, as he is supposed to be fifteen at the start of Dune, and finding someone close to that age with Paul’s intensity, seriousness, and paranormal radiance would be quite a challenge, but not impossible.

The set designers looked like they had done their job seel, but as soon as I saw the wokecast group of lightweight young women who seemed like a bunch of sorority girls from Barnard, I realized this was sucktacular disaster. There was an obvious total failure to understand the iBene Gesserit Sisterhood and, therefore, a total failure to represent the world of Dune. It would be a massive mistake for anyone to watch such a dumbed-down degradation of Frank Herbert’s creation. Read the books, and film your own series in your imagination.