Much of the success of Frank Herbert’s Dune was down to Harrison’s skilful truncating of the book’s complex tale of the rise of Paul Atreides to the quasi-religious status of Muad’Dib in the first miniseries, fleshing out the role of Princess Irulan and turning the internal monologues that had made Lynch’s film so awkward into dialogue. Read more: David Lynch is turning into cinema’s biggest lockdown hero.As visually beautiful as that movie was and all of the great things that were in it, I didn’t feel it was a true adaptation of Frank Herbert’s story and my intention was to do exactly that, to honour the material as closely as I possibly could while still making dramatic television.” First of all, as much as I respect David Lynch as a director and love his work – and I don’t think David was particularly happy with the way it ended up either – I don’t think it was a very great adaptation of the book for a variety of reasons.

That was not an intention of any of ours. “When I took this on,” says the series’ writer John Harrison, “I said to Richard Rubinstein that I was not going to in any way try to remake David Lynch’s movie. Susan Sarandon as Princess Wensicia Corrino in ‘Children Of Dune’. Its special effects, though still impressive, aren’t going to drop as many jaws as they did in 2003BBG (before Battlestar Galactica), its political leaders might seem unfeasibly attractive and you might wonder at times if Arrakis is so hot that it prevents some of the more wooden cast members from both speaking and acting at the same time, but it’s a great opportunity to leap into one of science fiction’s most mind-mulching cults. Though that series still loiters on the studio shelves, its three-part sequel Frank Herbert’s Children Of Dune – another huge, award-winning hit three years later – comes to Amazon Prime Video in the UK this month, boasting appearances from Susan Sarandon, Steven Berkoff and a young James McAvoy. To date, the most successful screen take on the book is the 2000 TV miniseries Frank Herbert’s Dune, which delivered the tale over three instalments and six hours, and doubled the Sci Fi Channel’s record viewing figures. Read more: Dune: release date, plot details, cast and everything we know so far.David Lynch struggled to cram the book’s complex plot into his two-hour 1984 film adaptation, and a new version by Denis Villeneuve is expected to take two movies to get to grips with the entire story. Take Dune, Frank Herbert’s 1965 epic about the politics and power struggles between interplanetary factions over control of the desert planet of Arrakis, where ‘spice’, the most valuable commodity in the universe, is mined and gigantic monster worms attack anything that wanders onto the sands. Most of the books deemed ‘unfilmable’ are the more experimental classics of modern literature, but in the realms of fantasy and sci-fi, such tomes merely pose a greater challenge.

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