If you haven't see the film, the special effects on the restored blu-ray version aren't quite as bad as the YouTube trailer makes them appear. The sandworms are even passable, though a lot of the spaceship shots now look... odd.
The original, despite its many, many flaws, has a lot going for it. It has style. It has more style than you can shake a stick it. From a very creepy Kyle McLachlan to a furious Patrick Stewart charging into battle with a pug (yes, really), or the the baroque stylings of the ships (albeit sometimes on too low a budget) or, best of all, the feckin' awesome soundtrack, to my mind it captures the spirit of the book as well as anyone could ever hope.
"Dun, dun, dun-dun.... Dun, dun, dun-dun...." I mean, that's all the music needs to do, really. The whole thing reeks of mysticism. And it's deliciously dark, if sometimes very silly : e.g. the Sardukar troops wearing actual used body bags. It's not a crowd pleaser, and it damn well shouldn't be.
A friend of my once told me he thought the original has "nothing much" to do with the book. Well, I re-read the book earlier this year, and he's wrong. Most of the movie is a direct scene-by-scene (often word for word) extract of the book. In some ways - dammit - I will even say it makes slight improvements. The dark pantomiminess of the Harkonnens is more evident in the movie than the novel. The exclusion of Count Fenring (an imperial servant who has a long but essentially pointless sequence in the book), Harah (Paul's rather annoying first wife), the invented Guild Navigator sequence (presumably inspired by later novels) and the simplification of Paul and Jessica's escape from the Harkonnens are all well done. As are the frequent voice-overs of the character's thoughts, with so much of the book literally being about what people are thinking rather than what's happening.
One of the major problems of the movie is that it essentially shows all the important set pieces but lacks a consistent linkage to hold them all together. If you haven't read the book, it just doesn't make a lot of sense. It's too weird and unusual a universe to drop on an uninformed viewer and expect them to figure it out for themselves : the novel is complicated. It has subtext and history that's inevitably difficult to capture in a movie; lordly, it even comes with a damn dictionary.
And it does also muck around unnecessarily with the story : instead of developing better soldiers through inspiring fanatical loyalty, the Atreides get the easier option of Bene Gesserit-inspired weaponry; the ending of Paul making it rain is okay but nowhere near as satisfying as the more political version of the novel. Sometimes it's silly and cheap. It's not everyone's cup of tea, no doubt about that. I get why it's unpopular, but to me all of this is washed away by its dark flood of mystical baroque stylings.
"Dun, dun, dun-dun...." sorry, I'll stop now.
What about the latest offering from the director of Blade Runner 2049, which I liked very much ?
It's got potential. It's clearly a very different beast. It definitely doesn't have budget problems or look as though anyone will ever describe it as "cheap" or "silly". It's also appears faithful to the book, even if using "crusade" might be politically more acceptable today than "jihad", which frankly is a bit of a shame. Does it have mysticism ? Ye-es, but it's hard to tell exactly how well that will pan out. Clearly it's no so heavy-handed as the David Lynch film, which might well be an advantage. The music ? Well it's a trailer, and modern trailers have a habit of using different music from the film for some reason, so we probably shouldn't judge it there. The main characters also appear closer in age to the those in the novel (at the start, the novel's Paul even behaves quite childishly - he matures intellectually throughout the book, rather than being a fully-fledged Duke-in-waiting or potential messiah from the word go). And it's got wormsign the like of which even God has never seen, so there's that.
There's not much more than can be inferred from a trailer, so I won't. I shall cling to optimism with the voraciousness of the desperate, but this is 2020 so I expect the ending of the movie will feature a giant pink sandworm playing Scrabble or something. We'll see.
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