This is my low effort reply to a video about how amazing Dune part 2 is. Got too big to post as a comment, I’m not rewriting it.
Did you read the books? I feel like the lion's share of your awe here is with the narrative not the film. I feel like the story (mutilated though it is there) hooked you nice and deep and now you're pouring over the film looking for justification after the fact, and of course finding it.
This might be the best movie in some obscure auteur sense, I'm no film expert, but as a viewing experience it doesn't rise to something like LOTR. And the adaptation is just bad. I say that as someone who has read all of Herbert and son's Dune work, and some others of his as well. (Along with about a 200+ other novels.) It's a wonderful movie, but it could have been worlds better. It's very much a product of its time.
For instance, what Dune 1 did to Leto is inexcusable. They made him a simpering unsure shadow of a man who virtually no one felt comfortable calling lord. Both movies are clearly terrified of presenting feudalism as a real working political system. You can tell the director has no relevant sociological understanding.
This on screen presence is not one given by a species that was nearly driven to extinction by thinking machines. The implication that Leto commands a planet is absurd given his exaggerated interpersonal weakness. His subjects barely accept his rank let alone respect it. He's the bumbling sitcom dad too seemingly insecure to order a pizza. He was objectively cringe when he meekly asked the emperor's messenger if the process was done and kept looking over at his concubine during arguably THE most important state function he’s ever presided over.
And they did the same to Jessica. In the books she's a galactic scale threat second only to the leader of the order. A shining wonderful horrifying example of bene gesserit power, which itself comes from precision and iron self control. Poise dialed up to a weapon’s grade 11. But in this movie she breaks down in tears like five times and has to be carried through everything by Paul far too early in his development. And it doesn't make any sense. She trained him. He's a bad ass expressly because he received illicit top tier bene gesserit instruction.
Granted he’s the Kwisatz Haderach, but that’s more of a potentiality than a reality during these films.
The old movie captured Leto and Jessica FAR better than this one did, along with Paul's apotheosis. And the reason is obvious: Contemporary hollywood politics. Versailles, any randomly selected episode, captures competent feudal rule and the scale of a society better than either of these movies did. Walken's emperor is completely phoned in. His reasons are nonsensically shallow in this interpretation. That's what you get from essentially amputating the guild from the story with all the grace of Leatherface.
Indeed the Baron is the only figure here to even remotely sell me on actually ruling a planet.
Basically this movie is the dismembered corpse in a suitcase version of Dune. The Sci-Fi channel did a better job in some ways if only because they had time to make an attempt. This movie utterly fails to capture the societal scales involved beyond the technical set piece shots.
It’s so bad you can almost pick out the scenes lifted from the original movie without having seen it. The modernization is that stark. Part two is worlds better than part one. But that’s not saying as much as people seem to think.
It’s a wonderful set of movies, certainly among the best of this repulsive era, but it falls miles short of what I would call a faithful adaptation. That’s just not possible across this time investment. Dune is begging for an art form we don’t have yet. American Anime. Yes we have animation but not the kind of evolved animation Anime is. Anime is totally unique expressly because of its age.
American Anime will take the form of Sora. Bypassing the centuries of human refinement with virtual machine years. Only in that way could we properly capture a visualization of a story spanning dozens of millennia and thousands of clones. Trying to do this with human actors that can’t age in reverse was a doomed effort from the start.
I’m glad this effort will end as a trilogy. I’m sure the third installment will be wonderful, but it will also be pureed and poured into a jello mold of time constraint.