"Dune" is a beautiful movie, a real feast for the senses. I don't think you could get the intended effect of gargantuan scale without seeing it in a theater. You need the huge screen towering over you, the bone-shaking sound system, the focus that comes from theater viewing.
It's the best "Dune" by far, although I don't think David Lynch gets enough credit (including from himself, apparently) for what he was able to accomplish. It hurts the new movie a *lot* that it's only half the story and it ends with a cheesy "but wait, there's more" line.
Comparisons with "The Lord of the Rings" are illuminating. "Fellowship of the Ring" is actually a solid three-act story that picked a good place to roll credits. You were hungry for more, but satisfied with what you had - and you knew for a fact Part Two was coming next year.
I don't know if I could have picked a better place to end Dune Part I, but it just can't help feeling sudden and unsatisfying. Part of the problem, I assume, is that key roles for Part 2 are not cast yet, so the characters from the back half of the story could not appear.
As for how it handles the story, there are some odd omissions in the new "Dune" that seem like a few lines of dialogue were needed to briefly, gracefully explain a few key plot points. Nobody wants exposition dumps, but you do need to help the audience understand what's going on.
This is one of those sci-fi movies where people new to the story are going to leave the theater clustered around that one friend who read the books, asking "what was the deal with...?" and "why did ...?" Ideally you find a way to gracefully provide that information in-movie.
It seems odd to make the first half of a five-plus-hour "Dune" movie and never really explain what the Spice is, or why it's so important to space travel, or what a Mentat is. And the scenes where Villeneuve DOES explain stuff are so well done - shields, the Sardaukar, the worms.
"Dune" is so beautiful that it just steamrolls over complaints about undercooked plot points and confusing dream sequences and just crashes over you like a tidal wave. Hopefully enough people buy tickets to get Part 2 made, but I can see why the studio would be nervous.
"Dune" was often called unfilmable because it was too big to fit in one dramatically satisfying movie, and the world was too complex to explain. The latter shouldn't be as much of a problem for modern audiences , but Villeneuve still seemed to shy away from explanations.
A dramatically satisfying structure for "Dune" as a film remains a tough nut to crack, and it makes the shortcuts Lynch took more understandable - from the clever but purist-enraging simplification of "weirding modules" to those groaningly awful voice-overs. /end
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