The screenplay was the worst part of the new Dune movie
Going to the theaters will help to get part 2 made.
They'll openly greenlight it when theater attendance drops off, after a couple of weeks, and ride the extra publicity.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/26/22739098/dune-part-two-d...
The effects are next-level good. You won't see all the detail at home unless you've got one hell of a set-up. There are good sets and costumes, and the CG isn't muddy, cheap Marvel "just good enough not to ruin it" stuff, but is truly good.
It's also very unlikely you have an audio system at home that can keep up. This is both because there's a lot of really good stuff going on in the audio mix that'll fall flat on anything but a stellar home audio setup, and a lot of bad stuff (mostly Nolanesque "wtf did that actor just say?") that'll be even worse.
Acting's good. Big screen doesn't hurt that any, certainly.
The story's Dune. If you like Dune, this is a Dune. That's its strength, and its weakness.
If you liked Blade Runner 2049, 100% for sure catch this in theaters. If you haven't seen Blade Runner 2049, friggin' watch it. It's an idea that seems bad (a sequel to Blade Runner? Oh no...) but turned out perfect.
However, I'd probably take Imax with very good sound over a normal theater with the best possible sound, for this one. Then again, I've not tried it in the best-sound theaters, so maybe I'm wrong about which is preferable.
I know that, trying to (re-)watch it at home, my normally-plenty-good pieced-together 5.1 system was not up to the task, which is the first time I've felt like that about this set-up of mine—and I watched both Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 on it, so it's been Villeneuve-tested before.
The dialogue isn't fantastic, but it doesn't detract from the experience, IMO. I'd recommend watching it.
I loved the movie and can't wait for the next part. I watched it on HBO but kind of wished I had seen it in a theater for the big sound and huge screen. I thought the movie was beautifully shot.
The original is a dense 200,000 word novel, not the 1984 movie you seem to be referencing, which itself a cut a lot.
Well, its being made into two movies instead of The Hobbit’s three, and the source material is about twice as long as The Hobbit, so I think the risk of that is a lot lower.
3-4 hours film per 100K words is probably reasonable [0], the cureent Dune is still very squeezed where The Hobbit trilogy was...very much not.
[0] E.g., the first season of Game of Thrones, roughly covering the plot of the book A Game of Thrones, and which hewed pretty close to the source but still cut a fair amount, was 9.5 hours for ~300K words of source material.
The first novel is already split into 3 well-defined acts.
I think it would've made sense to make 3 films. It would have given them some breathing room to build up the world and the establish the characters in the first film, and it would have ended with a tremendous climax.
This isn't to defend the movie if people find that this doesn't work for them (it may, indeed, be a failed effort—I don't know, I can't view it as a version of me who hasn't read the book and seen the two previous screen adaptations) but it does have a lot of character-building, much of it's just blink-and-you'll-miss-it or requires the viewer to take an extra step or two in their head to put it together.
I certainly have my nits to pick. But, they are truly nits. Friends have reported non-Dune fans (never read the book or watched other adaptions) can get a bit lost, particularly children. But, my wife and I loved it and hope part 2 gets procured in a timely manner.
As for the missing details, I think what especially hit me was SPOILERS AHEAD the whole Jessica<>Hawat tension is simply not there.
Almost as good of an adaptation as lord of the rings was.
The problem with this newer version is it cuts the internal monologues, so much of the context, history, and character building is gone. But it keeps pretty much every scene. Unfortunately, that also results in a really long movie so you only get the first half of the story, but all the action is in the second half. This is all setup and no resolution.
And I'm not sure how well it would work without having read the book, because I feel you do miss a lot when you don't have the worldbuilding, which is accomplished almost entirely by internal monologues in the book.
It's quite beautiful, though. I expect part II will be a lot better, as Paul's journey with the Fremen is by far the most interesting part of the story, and they barely meet at the end of part I.
Yet, oddly, the reviews I’m reading are saying central scenes of the portion of the book the new film covers that were included in the Lynch film have been omitted from this one.