David Lynch’s Dune 2 Script Found And It’s Wild
Right now, sci-fi fans everywhere are gearing up for Dune: Part Two from visionary director Denis Villeneuve, whose first movie gave this legendary novel the operatic scope and stylistic flourishes it deserves. However, all the hoopla over these new films has caused fans to go back and rewatch David Lynch’s failed but fun 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert’s first novel. If that movie hadn’t crashed and burned, Lynch was going to direct Dune 2, and now that Herbert scholar Max Evry found Lynch’s half-completed script, we can confirm that this movie would have been even more bonkers than the first.
What would David Lynch’s Dune 2 have been like? For starters, the first 10 minutes were going to focus on Baron Harkonnen’s doctor bringing Duncan Idaho back to life. In the first film, many fans thought that the Doctor (played by Leonardo Cimino) was simply an original character created by Lynch for his movie. The sequel script confirms that this character was secretly a shapeshifter, Scytale, who plays a significant part in Dune Messiah, the Frank Herbert novel that Dune 2 was going to be based on.
This extended opening helps emphasize that Scytale will be the main Big Bad of the sequel, which departs from the book’s focus on multiple antagonists. Duncan Idaho is resurrected on the planet Tleilax, which Herbert never really described in the book.
Lynch decided to put his signature weird style into his description of the planet, writing in the script that it is “a dark metal world with canals of steaming chemicals and acids,” adding with creepy emphasis that those canals are populated by “dead pink small test tube animals.”
The first 10 minutes were going to focus on Baron Harkonnen’s doctor bringing Duncan Idaho back to life.
In Lynch’s Dune 2, Scytale’s partners in crime were going to be the Bene Tleilaxu, and in one wild scene, the villain entertains them by singing a weird song via the mouths of 18 different heads that are strung together. This scene would also have had an exploding dog, shrinking characters, and lots of creepy, high-pitched laughter. In short, it would have taken all the surreal sliminess of the Baron Harkonnen scenes from the first film and brought the freakout factor to the next level.
Speaking of bad guys, another interesting deviation from the book is that Lynch’s Dune 2 would have featured the Baron’s weird brother (Abulurd Harkonnen II) giving Scytale orders to steal a sandworm from now-Emperor Paul Atreides.
What we loved most about Lynch’s unused Dune 2 script are the gloriously over-the-top moments, including Alia (who he wanted to be played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) having a naked swordfight with a robot.
That brother doesn’t play a role in the Dune franchise’s literary narrative and only pops up in the appendices. Nonetheless, Lynch apparently loved the Harkonnens so much that he felt that they should still have a presence in Dune 2.
Once Scytale starts plotting with Princess Irulan and Mother Mohiam to take on the Emperor, the unfinished script for Dune 2 starts looking like a more straightforward adaptation of Dune Messiah. However, there are still strange Lynch-style choices throughout, including the return of those inner monologues the fandom hates so passionately.
The script also hand waves the weird choice of having Paul make it rain on the desert planet of Arrakis at the end of the first Dune by having Irulan ask him if he will ever make it rain again.
What we loved most about Lynch’s unused Dune 2 script are the gloriously over-the-top moments, including Alia (who he wanted to be played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) having a naked swordfight with a robot. And in a real “I’d love to see this on film,” Lynch describes Paul’s throne room as “the largest room in the universe, with an approach passageway in solid gold ten miles long, with 800-foot ceilings.”
Sadly, the script remains incomplete, with Lynch having stopped writing right after Paul learns from a disguised Scytale (whose disguise he sees through) that he must travel to Farok to unravel a Fremen conspiracy against him.
In Lynch’s Dune 2, Scytale’s partners in crime were going to be the Bene Tleilaxu, and in one wild scene, the villain entertains them by singing a weird song via the mouths of 18 different heads that are strung together.
In some ways, Lynch’s Dune 2 script was weirder for what it left out rather than what it added. For example, Lynch seemingly removed most of the novel’s indications that Paul ever had any hesitations or second thoughts about the holy war that he started.
The director also removed a key scene from the book where Paul comments on the fact that he has now killed more people than Adolf Hitler ever did. Some fans think this is an indicator of Lynch being so apolitical, but it may also showcase that he is simply fonder of Paul than Frank Herbert was.
We can’t exactly look you in the eye and say that Lynch’s Dune was a good movie, but it was a fascinating one because it took one creative risk after another, and the director created some of the most iconic scenes in blockbuster history (certainly better than the CGI slurry we get in modern Marvel movies). Given that, we’d love to have seen his Dune 2, particularly since that would mean seeing more of Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides.
Now, we’ll have to settle for watching him bring that actor back in Twin Peaks: The Return and asking ourselves the same question that critics and audiences asked when Lynch’s Dune first came out: “what the heck did we just watch?”
Source: Wired
