It aged better in my mind than it did after a rewatch, the version in my mind being conflated with the book and the game. What it gains on the aesthetics it loses on the incoherent plot, which at the same time has too much exposition and leaves too much unexplained.1 Also: Sting?!
You could say that this is a classic example of a long book being better suited to a TV show than a movie, but there was a TV show and it wasn’t much better. Maybe the new movie will be it? Or maybe HBO, Amazon, Netflix or Apple need to pour money into a serialized version, three of the four having a track record for funding good sci-fi.
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Apparently, David Lynch didn’t have the final cut and had an hour of his movie chopped of by the studio. But since he had also ran out of money I doubt much could have been done to make the final battle decent, or the last third of the movie comprehensible. ↩