David Lynch’s film maudit—anambitious adaptation of Frank Herbert’s gargantuan sci-fi masterpiece about the interplanetary struggle of the Atreides to control the valuable spice mélange on the desert planet Arrakis and the young man (MacLachlan) proclaimed to be a messiah by its inhabitants—was a box-office disaster on its release, but can now be appreciated as an almost avant-visionary mind-fuck, replete with “imagery as disturbing as anything in Eraserhead” (Dave Kehr).