TV Series Reviews: Dune (2000) & Children of Dune (2003). SyFy Channel (On Blu-ray DVD).

These were two 3-part SyFy Channel TV mini-series versions of Frank Herbert’s Dune stories, made in the early 2000s. They are available on Amazon in a Blu-ray DVD format, so you may have to buy them to watch these shows. I’ve had little luck finding them on any streaming sites, although they may reappear from time to time.

I saw them when the two mini-series first came out, and decided to see them again recently, since I had remembered they were good, and I had been re-reading the books. I thought after watching them again that they held up well to repeat viewing, even all these years later.

Since the first publication of Dune (as a book) in the 1960s, there have been repeated efforts by various Hollywood producers and studios to turn it into a blockbuster movie, most of which have failed to even reach the production phase. This gave rise to the widespread industry belief that the books are unfilmable.

The only full-length feature version that made it to the big screen (until last year's spectacular Dune, Part 1 production) was released to great fanfare in 1984. It was directed by David Lynch, and starred local UW drama grad Kyle McLachlan.

Unfortunately, it was a notorious bust. I still remember waiting eagerly for the release, then sitting in an overheated downtown Seattle theater and fuming when the projector broke in the middle of the show, which proved to be a lackluster and unexciting event even when they did finally manage to get it running again. What a disappointment! It couldn’t hold a candle to the joy and excitement of a Star Wars movie launch from that era.

However, Lynch’s failure didn’t mean that these stories were really unfilmable. Perhaps only Peter Jackson, with his marvelous Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, has ever taken on a movie-making mega-project based on a widely-loved book series of comparable difficulty and aced it (and it’s interesting to note that the Lord of the Rings trilogy was also for a long time thought to be “unfilmable”, after its own decades-long series of production attempts and failures).

In any event, given the huge sweep of future historical time, the plots and intrigue, strange technologies, vital characters, mysterious organizations, warring cultures and action across the first three Dune books, it was never going to be possible to tell the whole story in one two-hour show. A TV mini-series in retrospect looks like a much more reasonable way to approach a story of this complexity and length.

It’s true that these SyFy channel Dune TV mini-series versions have special effects that are not that impressive by contemporary CGI standards, but the most compelling features of Dune for fans have always been more about the characters and the plots than the visual aspects, at least until the release of the excellent new Dune movie last year, which I previously reviewed. And these SyFy Channel series did do a credible job of presenting the characters and the plots of the first three books, a cinematic feat that has not been matched yet by any other producers or directors.

So while we’re waiting for the big-screen release of Dune, Part 2 in a year or two, these two TV mini-series do convey the essential elements of the first three books (Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune) for enthusiasts who can’t wait, and they do a very respectable job of it if you can find the shows to watch. Recommended.