Apparently director Peter Berg (Hancock, The Kingdom) has been working on getting a third adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune to the big screen. I'd heard about this new adaptation a while back but wasn't sure it was ever going to move forward — but then I remembered that the mid- to upper echelons of many moviemaking companies are now populated by people who might actually have read and liked the book (e.g., fellow geeks).
I admit, I liked the David Lynch version for its Werner Herzog / Alejandro Jodorowsky style of vision, and the SciFi SyFy TV version for its relative fidelity to the original story and themes (even if the sets looked horribly cardboardy at times). A new version might work if it was handled in a Traffic / Syriana kind of way — we've had enough "training" in this kind of storytelling thanks to non-linear episodic TV and other movies of that ilk, that it probably wouldn't be too tough to put into 3,000 theaters at once.
Someone in the comments on the article above mentioned an animated adaptation, along the lines of the largely-unseen but epic-length Legend of the Galactic Heroes. I liked how director Noburo Ishiguro mentioned that as long as the series made money for the production company (which was as much a function of staying within budget as it was being successful) they were more or less free to do as they wished.
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I rather like the cardboardy sets and fourth-wall soliloquies. I thought it was a conscious production design choice and I liked the theatrical and operatic feel it leant to the production. By contrast, I thought the move away from the theatrical sets for the Children of Dune follow-up series, and towards not-so-high-quality CGI-vastness, was boring and one of the things that left me feeling a bit "meh" about the reprise. (That and the fact that I was not at all keen on the actress they got to play Alia--I can't help but notice that Amavia hasn't had much work in the past six years since doing CoD--and I wasn't keen on the swap-in of Krige playing Jessica, even though I rather like Alice Krige.)
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