Now that said, it's not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination. The original book is the science-fiction equivalent of Lord of the Rings, in that it's all about big ideas and elaborate thought put into the setting more than it is about plot or story or character development. Most of the dialogue is stilted, there are some gaping holes in said plot, and an uncomfortably large chunk of the book is pure exposition. Like, Starfleet Technical Manual level of exposition.
And the movie follows the book, more or less. It's laden with exposition. We actually get multiple mental narrations from different characters, in addition to opening narration and overarching narration at different points. It follows most of the major and even the minor plotpoints - fuck, there's these two kids following Paul around when he's with the Fremen and you don't even know who those fuckers are unless you were reading the book and paying close attention. It also takes massive liberties - the weirding modules, the appearance of the shields (which everybody seems to fucking forget about), the lack of swords, fucking telepathy...but that's okay.
Even by the merits of film, Dune is bizarre. It doesn't fit neatly into any particular category, because "epic sci-fi" wasn't a genre yet. The stilted dialogue and narration and general choppiness actually hearkens back to nature documentaries and historical films from the 1950s. The practical effects and makeup don't always look great, the fight choreography is laughable, the optical effects are hilariously dated, the costuming sort of hilariously half-assed - the Saudakar look like they're wearing hazmat suits for god's sake, and don't get me started on the Harkonnen haircuts or Sting's mighty winged underwear.
Sting tax.
So what makes this movie great? In a word, pageantry. It's not just the amazing soundtrack (by fucking Toto!) or that the worms look appropriate bad-ass. Every fucking shot, just about, is scenery porn. Tremendous work went into just about ever shot and prop. It makes the Lord of the Rings look a bit weak by comparison, t'be honest, because this - and remember, this was the watered-down version of Dune, not the one where Giger and Jodowrosky would have been collaborating in a haze of cocaine - is insane. They totally embraced the insanity. The result is gorgeous. Usually laughable, but gorgeous. And they got really great actors! Like serious character actors. Patrick fucking Stewart is in here, with a giant wooden record-player guitar-thing (bassinet); Baron Harkonnen is a literal Captain Planet villain; everybody right down to the bit players that appear once and die for no significant reason is giving it their all. This is a film that could have been an 18-hour Ken Burns documentary - and almost was, when the Sci Fi channel tried their hand at it.
It's hard to describe why the parts of it that shouldn't work...work. Like the stilsuits. Very obviously just some latex molded outfits. But they look great and setting appropriate. They look better than anything anybody would come up with today; if they filmed Dune today, the stilsuits would look like full-body camelbaks with company logos on them and desert camou prints. All the technology is bizarre and antiquate and vaguely steampunkish...but that's appropriate, because it's a future with space dukes where people settle wars with a knife-fight and there's an entire planet of soulless gingers ruled over by a floating obese homosexual predator that forces people to milk cats.
No cats were harmed in the making of this film. No idea why the rat is taped to it, though.
It's a wonderfully insane movie, and a lot of the best parts are both totally random and look like they were incredibly cheap. Like at one point, there's a cow that's hanging upside down in bondage gear, and Rabban comes along and tears its tongue off. Why? Who knows! The cocaine Spice must flow!
And maybe it's just me, but sometimes I like it when some of the props or effects look a little low-budget. Not cheap, but low-budget like "Okay, this lightsaber is going to be a flashlight with some random shit glued to it." Because that kind of thing has a tendency to look authentic in a way that a lot of higher-end props...don't. And they have a realism to them that has staying power way beyond the limits of CGI. In Dune, nobody ever tried to brush in a digital wind or something. They turned on the goddamn wind machine, and Kyle Machlachlan had to choke his fucking lines out while getting a mouthful of dirt, and it was glorious.
It gives it a bit of a timeless quality. So no, Dune isn't a great movie. But it's a great one in many ways. It has a sweeping score and great actors and you can tell they put so much time and attention into the sets and things, even the really insane moments that don't make much sense. It's a movie that almost demands you read the book so you know what the fuck is going on. And that's something that you often find lacking in modern movies. I mean, when you bitch about Chronicles of Riddick or something, it probably has fewer plot holes and a more cohesive setting than Dune...but Dune is an epic while Chronicles isn't. The action sequences in Dune are, in general, so weakly choreographed, and so sidereal to the actual plot of the movie, that they stand out. In Chronicles, half the movie feels like an action sequence, with a beat every page. It's almost boring. And Chronicles all takes place over what, a couple days? Dune nominally takes place over two years, cut down to fit in a three-hour movie. Nobody does that these days, unless they feel the need to stick a goddamn first-hour origin story into the goddamn thing like Batman Begins or the Star Trek reboot.
And it's a hard thing to emulate. In fact, I think writers of today probably couldn't emulate Dune if they wanted to. It's aggressively non-commercial. It's clunky. If released today, it would look completely different and be written completely differently and would probably flop. But I love it.
