Thoughts on "Dune" 2021 Movie

 I don't like writing proper reviews; I generally just like to put down my thoughts:

Preamble stuff:

• I'm coming from the perspective of someone who read the books, but a long time ago. I probably read the original Dune twice, once when I was a kid and once again as a young adult. I've seen the David Lynch movie, but not the miniseries that came out in the early 2000s.
• I saw it at home on HBO Max. We have a 65" HD TV and a sound bar, so we can have a relatively cinematic experience at home, but it's not like a theater. This does seem to be something where you want as big a picture and as powerful a sound system as you can have.

Opinions:

• I like it overall. It feels big. It looks beautiful. It aspires to a tradition of grand cinema in a way that a lot of things these days don't even try for.
• The Bene Gesserit are pretty spooky, which is good. The Guild Navigators weren't as creepy: they just looked like people in "Among Us" suits full of orange gas. 
• I like the ornithopters. They really feel insectoid, and just feel physically plausible to me. Of course, I don't know much about actual aviation. But I totally want to fly one.
• The Harkonnens really look like bad guys, which is what they are. Glad they didn't do the "homosexuality as manifestation of Baron Harkonnen's evil" thing that the novel did. 
• I liked the famous "gom jabbar" scene, and how we really feel Jessica's fear for her son. 
• Jason Moma is great as Duncan Idaho. He's so charismatic. 
• Oscar Isaac is charismatic, too. So is Timothée Chalamet. There's a lot of cinematic charisma floating around, which is good, because the characters don't get a lot of "actorly" time. This aint Chekhov. This is a spectacle. So the ability to be compelling without having a lot to do is very useful for the actors. 
• I like the slow pacing. 
• The shots of Caladan just before Paul leaves for Arrakis are a bit cheesy. They stood out because 
• All the issues of imperialism and "white savior" that were present in the novel (and which later parts of the story flip more dramatically) are in the movie. I think we do get some Fremen perspectives, but the parallels between "Fremen" and Middle Eastern folks can't be ignored, and you still get the perspective that the Atreides are "us" and the Fremen are "the other". I think that's pretty "baked in". 
• I was surprised that the movie covered only the first part of the first book: even though I had heard that, I still was surprised. I, of course, want to see more, but it'll be a long time. I don't think it was artificially stretched: Dune is a big book with lots of stuff in it. 
• Sandworms were pretty cool and big. 
• We're watching Succession on HBO Max right now, and I thought it would be really funny if the Emperor put the Roy family in charge of spice production on Dune.  
• I always pictured those hunter-seeker assassin drones bigger than that. 
• Sometimes I had trouble hearing the dialogue because it was 
• The Hans Zimmer soundtrack was very Hans Zimmer, which is mostly a good thing. 
• This is a very Denis Villeneuve movie. If you liked his previous stuff (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049), you'll like this. 
• I've heard some people on Twitter comment that Paul's "visions" are the director saying "Look at all the cool stuff you get to see if I get to make part 2!" It'll be a long time before that comes out, though. 
• I'm not sure the shields add much to the story. They make physical combat a bit hard to understand. Supposedly, fast attacks get blocked, and slower strikes can push through. But in a lot of the combat scenes, things seem to happen pretty fast. I think we want our action scenes to be fast, especially when Duncan Idaho is fighting multiple opponents. But the shields are supposed to change that up. I think the fight choreographers really need to think about what fighting would really look and feel like in a world where shields are ubiquitous. But I think the answer is that fighting would look weird and not fun for the viewer, who has been trained by action movies of various genres about what to expect. So maybe they should just drop shields entirely, or modify shields in whatever way they need to in order to make fighting look cool. 
• They don't talk about mentats very much, though you do see their eyes go white while they think about stuff. You see that both House Atreides and House Harkonen have them. But we don't get much explanation on who they are or what they do or why they exist, or why there aren't computers.