If you were still waiting to hear back from Paramount about that directing job you applied for, I’ve got bad news for you: Pierre Morel landed it. Also, you left your coat in the lobby after your interview, and a janitor threw it away. Sorry.
Luckily, you won’t be able to cry for too long because instead of spending the next 4 years in the sand up to your eyeballs in budget problems and, well, sand – you’ll be able to sit in the comfort of your own local multimegaplex and bask in the glory of Morel’s version of Dune.
According to EW, the man who brought us both District B13 and Taken will be expanding his horizons a bit with the science fiction epic.
And now a big list of things I shouldn’t have to tell you about “Dune”:
- It’s the Hugo award-winning science fiction masterwork from writer Frank Hebert featuring civil and political unrest in the distant future.
- It was adapted into a film by David Lynch.
- Lynch may or may not have died during the production and may or may not have been replaced by a robot controlled by The Weather Channel.
- Roger Ebert named that adaptation the worst film of 1984.
- It involved Max von Sydow, which creates a logical contradiction in how it could possibly be bad.
- The Sci-Fi Channel put out a mini-series version in 2000, followed by a sequel series in 2003.
- Pierre Morel is directing a new adaptation (which you just read about in this article).
I honestly have no idea whether this is awesome news or not.
You know why? Because Dune is a beast that has been attempted by, abandoned by, and consumed better directors than Morel. He’s a great eye for quick and dirty action, clearly knows what he’s doing on a small budget, but so much rides on the script to this making some sort of sense and the man behind the camera being able to fit it all in that Morel’s filmography doesn’t exactly give a great argument for his being chosen.
But I’m anxious to hear other opinions. Why do we think he’ll make a great adaptation of one of the hardest adaptations in film history?
Did you know that if you misspell his name, it becomes David Lunch? The U and the Y are, like, right next to each other.
