I’ve genuinely been trying to understand how people like the movie so much. The first time I watched it, I thought it was bad. So I came back to it a little while later and give it a second shot. Maybe I was just in a bad mood that day? Everyone seems to love it. Nope, still bad. Even gave it a third shot a few weeks ago and it felt even worse.

I read the first 3 books a few times, but I always try to put aside the source material when it moves to a new media. And the movie seemed to me like it was just a string of barely connected scenes, tied together solely because they shared characters. It was almost entirely just book references without trying to make a story out of them. It was entirely spectacle, and they still couldn’t really get the scale right, which I think bugs me more than anything. It shows these giant buildings and ships that hint at vast crowds of people, and we only ever see a handful at a time on screen. Even “crowd” scenes are sparse. It feels like they’re trying to make Arrakis feel giant and daunting to show the difference between the expansive dessert dwarfing crowds, then realized they didn’t have the money for crowds so they just zoomed in on 4 people.

And they should have ended the story sooner. End with the climax battle and them getting to safety and save everything after for the next movie. Use that new time to actually get me invested in the characters, or the setting, or the story… anything. Make the first movie about palace intrigue as they know they’re in danger and not sure who they can trust and gaining allies. Instead, all of that got like, one scene each and only makes sense if you’ve read the book. The best thing I can say is they put a tiny bit more effort in to showing Paul using the Voice before it’s relevant to the story. So at least they cared enough about grounding that. Just not about literally anything else.

I desperately want someone to win me over and tell me what makes this a good movie. I feel like I’m missing something.