Taken’s Pierre Morel to direct Dune remake

As a David Lynch fan, to the degree I sometimes find myself almost an apologist for some of his more “oblique” work, I have to admit a guilty fondness to his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. True, the special effects have aged worse than Lindsay Lohan under a sunbed, but the film is quite the entertaining production. Yet it would be hard, if not impossible, to deny the source material could be adapted in a much more successful fashion; the mooted Alejandro Jodorowsky version seemed a mouth watering prospect but alas never came to fruition.

Pleasingly then, Empire have announced another director is ready to step up to the plate and take a crack at transferring Herbert’s 1965 tale to the big screen. The man in question is Taken’s Pierre Morel; the director whose new feature From Paris With Love is due out imminently. Whilst Morel’s Liam Neeson starring Taken divided critics, the film did big money at the box office and even if the end product is unlikely to be as philosophically motivated as Jodorowsky’s vision, the latest adaptation of Dune should at least be more coherent than Lynch’s.