The Dune miniseries opens with a "flashforward" montage of action sequences. The realisation quickly dawns that these are the *best* scenes out of the 265 minute running time, and they're not good. Not good at all. Oh dear. <br /><br />But let us not judge a book by its cover (even though that's exactly what we're being invited to do). Let's give Dune a chance to redeem itself.<br /><br />Well, here's the expected watery opening on Caladan. But who's this petulant, strangely ugly man? Paul Atreides? *This* is Paul Atreides? This generic plastic puppet? And why does he look so old? What's that? The actor's only 25? Well, he doesn't *look* it, and that's way too old anyway.<br /><br />But at least he has charisma, right? Wrong. Alec Newman is a stumbling, mumbling buffoon. I'm picturing him being discovered sitting in the dark in a remedial acting class because nobody liked him enough to tell him the class was over, and he's just too dumb to realise it. When your Paul Atreides has all the screen prescence of soggy toast, and an acting range from "petulant" to "blank" your production of Dune is doomed from the start.<br /><br />The other actors take pity on poor Alec though, and give uniformly insipid and incomprehensible performances so that he doesn't look too bad by comparison. At least, I *assume* that is what they are doing. Because I'm charitable, you see.<br /><br />To be fair, they are clearly being given no direction at all. Random gestures, blank or inconsistent deliveries, missing their marks, it's all here. This is like a master class in how not to do it.<br /><br />And sure, there are more elements of the book in this miniseries than there are in the 1984 movie, but there aren't twice as many, because of all the. Pauses. To fill. Time.<br /><br />But we can forgive all this because of the small budget of $20 million, or only $5 million per hour. Nobody could be expected make quality science fiction on that sort of budget.<br /><br />Except perhaps "Stargate SG-1" which makes do with $1.4 million per 50 minute episode, or "Farscape" at $2 million. And frankly I'd rather watch four episodes of either of those while being punched in the kidneys, than have to sit though the travesty that is Dune the miniseries again.