John L Simion

Many reviewers complain that the people in the movie don't know what's going on. Of COURSE nobody knows what's going on when the internet, TV, satellites and all other communications are down! That was the whole point - it makes you paranoid, which feeds to the three points made at the end about how to manage a coup d'etat: Electronically isolate the people, terrorize them with misinformation and attacks, and then watch them turn on each other. Look at the current divisions in this country and tell me that we wouldn't be at each others' throats if this happened. Was the movie perfect? Far from it - there were many plotholes and ridiculous things like the deer and the unexplained booming noises - but for people actually paying attention to what's going on in this country, the overall theme ought to be a wakeup call.

Summary: This movie is both slow and boring and among the worst movies I've seen since the first Dune movie that I saw in 1984. The continued popularity of Dune, however, led me to read the book about ten years ago. It's a story about a boy and his mother - not the stuff of exciting reading in the first place -- but I did finish the book, finding it absurd and full of contradictions, wondering how it ever got to be popular. In 2022, my son told me that the new Dune movie is really great and I ought to give it another chance. I was skeptical but thought hey, maybe they juiced it up and made it interesting. In the first 30 minutes there is nothing happening, just a bunch of silly costumes, pretentious BS and Paul talking to his mother. And the names! Can you believe they actually named a character "Duncan Idaho" in some far-distant galaxy? Come on! How much LESS creative can you be? I decided to floss, brush my teeth, change clothes and come back to see if anything was happening. It wasn't, so I started fast-forwarding to find something happening. At 41 minutes, there were some helicopter thingies flying over a city with more talk, so I gave up and turned it off. I love sci-fi, I even write sci-fi, but this is not good sci-fi. This isn't sci-fi at all, this is just fantasy, which would be fine if it was actually good, but it's not. Star Wars is GOOD fantasy, with likeable characters and a story with real conflict in which something actually HAPPENS and full of ACTION. Dune the movie is simply BORING, which isn't surprising since nothing happens in the book, either. It's a mystery how this ever got made into a movie in the first place, let alone a re-make, but regardless, I'm not sitting through 2-1/2 hours of this. For a better show, go watch paint dry.

This movie is beautifully shot and completely boring. These people have lots of conflicts, but they're pointless conflicts that never develop into anything interesting. It's like, "I don't like you." "Oh, okay." Zzzzzzzzzzzz.