Planet Dune (2021)

Cringe: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Enjoyment: ⭐⭐

A crew on a mission to rescue a marooned base on a desert planet turns deadly when the crew finds themselves hunted and attacked by the planet’s apex predators: giant sand worms.

Introduction

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Planet Dune is a 2021 English-language film directed by Tammy Klein and Glenn Campbell. If you check the Director’s profiles you will discover they are both VFX professionals, but have apparently teamed up to make Planet Dune and Shark Side of the Moon (2022) together. The cast is composed of people which will all look familiar if you watch films from The Asylum often.

If you’re not familiar, The Asylum is an American production company which is known for making direct-to-video knock-offs of popular films, as well as other low-budget crap. Oh, and they are responsible for Sharknado (2013). Yes, the Sharknado, which ignited public interest in these intentionally awful films and spawned a massive array of knock-offs. Asylum, itself, produces at least several films per year with no signs of stopping, meaning they have a massive catalogue by now.

Why is this important, dear reader? Well, when that logo pops up on screen you can’t help but have expectations about what’s going to transpire on screen. Most recent (let’s say last 10 years) work from them has these characteristics:

1. Good production values.
2. Acting which is middling to bad, but not horrible.
3. A moderate budget.
4. A paper thin plot.

Returning to Planet Dune, this is obviously a rip-off of the famous Dune franchise, with the release date lining up very close to Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 film, Dune: Part 1. As a huge fan of the book Dune, written by Frank Herbert in 1965, my expectations were perhaps a bit high going into this. David Lynch showed us in 1984 that there is plenty of room in the Dune universe for weirdness, and I was hoping The Asylum would take advantage of this. We already know from the synposis that a crew will find themselves marooned on the planet and trying to survive, but what if Fremen start popping out of everywhere and teach them ride Sand Worms. Or maybe everyone gets addicted to Spice and goes on a vision quest to calm the spirit of the planet, and thus the Worms? I guess we’ll see!

Plot

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Planet Dune opens with a quick scene where a Sand Worm attacks what we can presume is a spice harvesting rig and their crew. It’s a promising start, possibly meaning the writer’s were able to base this on franchise lore. Alas, we cut away to a place known as the “Space Force Interstellar Operations Base”, something I don’t remember Frank Herbert writing about.

At this Space Force base, we’re introduced to our heroine, Astrid, played by Emily Killian. We find out that Astrid is an ace pilot, but has authority problems, clearly setting her up for a hero redemption arc. Great.

Anyway, Astrid hears a distress call during some flying exercise and goes to help, against her Commander’s (Chase’s) wishes. As it turns out, the distress call is from a Russian! This is when the problems with Planet Dune become apparent… You’re seriously telling me they couldn’t come up with anything more inventive than Americans and Russians in space? Where is the Emperor, the Houses, Navigators, or anything else that makes Dune, well Dune.

Astrid ends up saving the Russian, and is disciplined for it. Her punishment? To fly to Dune with a bunch of former convicts to rescue the crew of the destroyed mining operation. You can kind of see where this is going from here. They get marooned on the planet and must survive together, yada yada. It is basically an action-adventure set in the desert, and there’s no real point in going over any of this further. At this point I’m just hate-watching Dune.

Review

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Planet Dune is a massive disappointment. What could have an awesome low-budget space opera is instead reduced to an Amerocentric, generic, sci-fi action. I’m not sure what went wrong here. Was Asylum just playing safe and avoiding any potential IP infringement, or was the production team just not interested in making something cool?

The film’s one saving grace is Astrid, the primary protagonist. She has a solid, believable character arc, and Emily Killian is really charming in the role. Sean Young, as Commander Chase, does a good job as well, allowing for plenty of back and forth between the two. However, everything else about the film is painful, tinged with the disappointment of someone who wanted more.

As is the case with recent films from The Asylum, the SFX and production are pretty good. Planet Dune wouldn’t be out of place as a late night movie on the Sci-Fi channel, suitable for your Dad while channel-surfing for something to fall asleep too. But it doesn’t lend itself intentional viewing, for the reasons mentioned above.

Dune earns itself 4/5 cringe stars. It is extremely disappointing, the plot is stupid as hell, and there is no real reason for it to exist, aside from lining the pockets of the production company capitalizing on the hype around Villeneuve’s Dune: Part 1. As for enjoyment, the films earns itself 2/5 stars, with Astrid saving it from the lowest possible rating.

Should you watch Planet Dune? Probably not. There are a whole lot of more enjoyable, bad films, even from The Asylum itself. They have like five films about a meteor or the Moon crashing into Earth, so maybe one of those? Or consider the Sharknado series, if you haven’t seen them already.