Dune is one of those great scifi epics that is perfect to adapt into a full blown film franchise. David lynch made the first film back in 1984 which was a slight departure from Frank Herbert’s novel. SyFy Channel (then named SciFi Channel) released a much better screen interpretation of the novel, at least in my opinion, with the 2000 miniseries titled Frank Herbert’s Dune. Now Peter Berg is working on yet another version witch will again be a feature film.

In an interview with MTV he recently spoke about how he intends the film to have a “hard PG-13 rating” and hopes that it will spawn a new film franchise.

There’s definitely a franchise potential.

Josh Zetumer’s has been brought on to write a script for the film. Berg is confident that the over 200 page script will spark an impressive film and do justice to this “massive epic,” and that it could potentially give life to several other films as well.

The script and story are still being flesh out and it will be quite a task to develop the book into a 2 hour film. David Lynch’s original cut was about 4 hours long and the miniseries was a good 6 hour long event, and both still had pieces missing from the book. Berg and his team will now have to:

figure out how we can beat [the script] into something manageable without offending the purists. Filmmakers have struggled [in the past] because it’s a very complicated book to crack.

I would have to agree. The book is highly detailed and has a complex and rich story. Epic is the right word to describe it. Dune has had many hard core fans over the many years since it was first published in 1965 and they will be hard pressed to do a film that is a worthy adaptation of the story.

When asked if this would be a remake of David Lynch’s 1984 film, Berg went on to say that

My experience with the book was different than David Lynch’s experience or the people behind the Sci Fi Channel’s experience. I found it to be more of an adventure tale, more of a muscular action/adventure story. I think that’s my approach, not as an R-rated film, but as a pretty hard PG-13 film about a young man dealing with issues of vengeance over the death of his father and wanting some payback and having to come to terms with his destiny along the way.

I honestly don’t like the sound of that. I always felt that the events in the book were far grander than what happened to this moody teenager. I personally thought the SyFy Channel series was pretty dead on at getting what the story was about. Yes I admit that the effects weren’t that great and that it had parts missing but I thought it captured the story very very well. Berg’s version sounds a bit too “dumbed down”, if you will pardon the expression. Hopefully I am wrong. I really want this to be a good film. Dune has what it takes to be the next huge Science Fiction epic film series. I guess we will soon see.

What do you think about all of this?