Back when the SyFy Channel was named “The Science Fiction Channel”, they threw a ton of money (for tv at the time) into this project which revived the Dune franchise for two mini series, Children of Dune came out a few years after this. I remember watching it on tv at the time, or at least downloading and watching it in my college dorm, and being impressed with it. After seeing the 2021 version, I had a hunger for more Dune, my wife had never seen the SF version, so here we are.
My first surprise was how well done this was considering it had about 10% of the budget of the 2021 movie. It’s from over 20 years ago, so the CGI is fairly rough, but for every rough CGI scene there’s one that’s impressive. One cool thing is how they did the blue eyes, which aren’t even CGI, they’re just contacts that react with black lights that are just off camera, and they work really well when the light hits them correctly, but sometimes the light either isn’t on or they’re hitting the wrong way.
My second surprise is that the version I found on a streaming site is definitely not the (shorter) version that I saw back in 2000, they’re nudity in several scenes that give a fair bit more story.
At the end of the day, this three episode mini series had a lower budget than 2021, but more content, it had 90’s tv quality acting, but more actors. It’s great for what it is and there was never a point that I felt like anyone wasn’t giving their best performance.
