Roger Parkinson
I saw it a few days ago. Fantastic!
Some spoiler free thoughts:
Early on there are beam weapons used in a battle on the sands around a spice harvester. In the Dune universe these would be lasguns. The big problem with lasguns is they can't be used around shields.
What are shields? Shields produce a force field. High speed projectiles bounce off shields, low speed ones can penetrate but can't do much damage. Shields are the reason they fight with swords and knives rather than bullets. Swords and knives, used the right way, can. So that's what they use. However Fremen don't use shields because they drive sand worms berserk, they also regard shields with contempt and they use projectile weapons they call maular pistols that fire darts propelled by a spring. They don't come up too often though and they are useless against shields. . The Fremen mostly don't understand shields. In the knife fight with Jamis (Dune 1) they think Paul is toying with Jamis when he could kill him quickly. But Paul has been trained against a shielded opponent and slows his knife at the last moment to get past Jamis' (nonexistent) shield.
Why can't lasguns be used with shields? Because if a lasgun hits a shield there's a nuclear explosion at both ends of the beam. We're told it isn't exactly a nuke, but it looks like a fusion bomb went off. To be clear this puts it in the class of H bomb rather than A bomb and 1000 times more powerful than the latter.
The spice harvester and the ornithopters in that early scene in Dune 2 did seem to be protected by shields. They expect worms to show up anyway and they have a plan for that. But strictly speaking no one should be firing lasguns near those shielded vehicles.
However, I give this a pass. The problem with the nuclear explosion thing is it negates the value of the 'family atomics' which play an important role in the story. All great houses such as the Atreides have a nuclear arsenal. Does your family have atomics? No? Then you aren't from a Great House.
But if anyone can grab a lasgun and a shield and use them like a nuke then the family atomics are pointless. Sure there are some logistical difficulties setting the device off without blowing yourself up, especially considering their horror of automation, but Duncan Idaho set a trap for the Harkonnens based on this idea early on in the book, so it's a solved problem.
Where I got to is I think these movies discard the lasgun plus shield equals nuke concept, and this is a good thing because it doesn't quite work.
On a very different note the book spends a lot of time in Paul's head where he worries about unleashing the Fremen Jihad across the galaxy killing billions in his name. The whole reason Frank Herbert wrote these books was to explore the dangers of power so this stuff is important. But unless you have a lot of boring voice overs you can't do this in a movie. The solution Villeneuve uses is to portray it as a disagreement between Paul and Chani. It works well for me, though it is a departure from the book. It gives Chani a bigger role too. Too often science fiction of that period relegates the women to the background.
One of the things to remember about Dune is that it is a very dark story. This gets muddied because when the story was first published in Analog magazine the editor, one John W Campbell (the guy who pointed out Azimov's three laws of Robotics to Azimov himself) wanted the story of a hero. Frank Herbert was writing a different story, but it looks a bit like a hero story if you chop the end off it and leave at a high point. The second book, Dune Messiah, is the rest of the original story and this movie sets that up nicely, better than the first book I think. I hope they make a Dune Messiah movie and follow the story through though I don't expect it to be cheerful. Paul is not the good guy in this story. We might make excuses for him but he is much like any other brutal dictator when it comes down to it.
Even so they made room for just a little humour in the movie. More than the book which has, I think, none at all. Some common humanity too. Young Fremen women look at guys and pass remarks, that sort of thing. Not in the book but works well.
I could have had more of Gurney Halleck singing, but the movie is already long.
And the look of the thing, the sets, the costumes and the acting all work really well and bring a very difficult book to life.
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