Dune remake takes Morel direction

Dune has been like a comely yet duplicitous lover to Hollywood over the last forty-odd years; luring the latter in with its sparkling filmic potential, before delivering a cruel scolding via the fires of development hell and box-office blow-out. But still! Another movie version of the science fiction opus is gearing up on the horizon, with From Paris With Love director Pierre Morel apparently set to helm.

Frank Herbert's 1965 novel has been subject of myriad attempted adaptations over the years, with Ridley Scott and El Topo director Alejandro Jodorowsky both trying and failing to drag it before the cameras during the 1970s. It was of course also filmed to mediocre effect by David Lynch in 1984; a production of which the Blue Velvet maestro recently remarked “I died the death.” The critical and financial failure of Lynch's Dune served to cool interest in any further cinematic takes on Herbert's writing, before interest began to swell again in recent years as sci-fi/fantasy has increasingly dominated the blockbuster release schedules.

A new adaptation of Herbert's space opera was penned for Paramount by Josh Zetumer, who has since authored one of the screenplays for the now-stalled Bourne 4, and Hancock film-maker Peter Berg was attached to direct. And although Berg bailed out back in October, in order to take the wheel of Universal's bonkers-sounding Battleship board game adaptation, Entertainment Weekly reports that Paramount are still determined to push ahead with Dune, with Pierre Morel supposedly set to take charge. The Frenchman looks to have been given this shot at the event movie big time thanks to the huge profitability of his Liam Neeson-starring thriller Taken, which proved one of the surprise hits of last year - its $226m worldwide box-office take being nearly ten times its reported budget.

Morel's next film operates in similar territory to Taken, being another Eurozone kinetic actioner with scripting contribution from Luc Besson. Entitled From Paris With Love, it stars John Travolta as FBI tough guy Charlie Wax, alongside Jonathan Rhys Meyers as his weedy comic foil, and a new trailer for it has just been released. In it we find the erstwhile Tony Manero looking a bit like former wrestler and governor of Minnesota Jesse “The Body” Ventura, or Tiger-Man from the Buck Rogers TV show, as well as people delivering lines like “There's a suicide bomber inside the embassy”, and “We've got you working with our top operative, Charlie Wax”, plus not forgetting “Wax's methods aren't exactly regulation”. I bet they aren't! Health and safety pencil-pushers beware when Wax is on the scene!

Travolta's most recent action role was as chief evil dude in last year's The Taking of Pelham 123 remake, a movie which was approximately as exciting as a cat sat on a mat (and – SPOILER ALERT, IF ANYONE CARES – wouldn't the robbers have arranged getaway cars, rather than relying on grabbing a yellow cab in which to abscond with their loot?). However this is not a view shared by Stephen King, who has named the Tony Scott-directed action flick as one of his top ten movies of 2009. And the horror novelist reserves special praise for Travolta's performance, noting that 'the real pleasure here is watching John Travolta's balls-to-the-wall star turn as the villainous Ryder'. Hmmm, if you liked that Stephen, then you should really give the traditional British Xmas pantomime a whirl. It. Will. Blow. Your. Mind. The happily individual, albeit somewhat eccentric, King Top Ten appears in Entertainment Weekly, along with extended comments from the writer, but a sample of his musings are listed below:

10. 2012 - 'No filmgoing diet is complete without some cheese'

9. Fantastic Mr. Fox - 'A screwball comedy that just happens to be animated' 

8. The Taking of Pelham 123 - 'Tony Scott's most lucid and suspenseful movie'

7. Law-Abiding Citizen - 'Script is wound tight and clever enough to draw blood'

6. District 9 - 'What really struck me about it was how the special effects served the story, rather than the other way around'

5. The Reader - 'It would be criminal to leave out this wrenching exploration of guilt and atonement'

4. Disgrace - 'The story - sorrowful but never sentimental – is hypnotic'

3. The Road - 'At my screening I actually heard the projectionist sobbing as the film neared its end' (Indie Movies actually had a very similar experience at a screening of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel)

2. The Last House on the Left - 'Easily the most brilliant remake of the decade, and not just because the 1972 original was such a crapfest'

1. The Hurt Locker - 'Perfectly honed drama that speaks to the addictive attractions of risk and violence'

Surprisingly the Big Mac of literature was not the only febrile mind to pick out Pelham 123 as one of last year's best, with Columbia University brainbox Hamid Dabashi heaping praise upon the film in Sight and Sound magazine: 'This was – for New Yorkers – something more than a splendid thriller: it gave them back their subway, purged of its post-9/11 anxiety and replenished with the might and magic of the magnificent subterranean metropolis.' Lovely alliteration at the end there, but makes you think that Mr. Dabashi might just be the last person you would want to be stuck next to during a genuine subway siege. By the time he had moved from using Foucaultian epistemology to explain Where's Wally? to deploying Derridian deconstructionism in an analysis of The Hair Bear Bunch, you would be most likely pleading for the nefarious John Travolta to show a little mercy and plant a bullet through your skull.