The most valuable commodity in existence is 'spice' which can only be found on the desert world Arrakis, ruled by House Harkonnen with an iron fist. At the command of the Emperor, House Harkonnen are removed from Arrakis and House Atreides installed in their stead.
Duke Leto Atreides knows he cannot refuse the request and mistrusts the Emperor's motives but looks to make the best of a bad situation by offering a hand of friendship to the local population, previously rebelling and being brutally oppressed, in the hope to make them allies.
Meanwhile the Duke's young son Paul has been dreaming of the desert world and a mysterious woman. His dreams are not just idle fancy, he is part of a generations long eugenics program looking to create a superior human with unique mental and prophetic abilities. He is considered a misstep on the path, but on arriving in Arrakis something in him awakens...
I'll be going against the grain here but I was rather unmoved by this.
It's disingenuous to call it Dune on the poster. It's Dune part I. I knew that going in, some people won't. Be honest FFS.
Even given its enormous running length and the split into two movies they STILL rely on voiceover exposition to explain stuff an awful lot. Then it just ends, without having any sense of being a self-contained movie.
Some iconic novel series aren't well suited to being made into movies and I'm sorry Dune and its many sequels are just in that category in my opinion.
The richness is in the worldbuilding detail and the long term arc across the many sequels not the story of the first one which is just 'chosen one' special hero stuff again. Will we get part II? Probably, given the initial reception. Will we get anything beyond that? Probably not.
This is not helped by me having the opinion that in common with a lot of iconic sci-fi Dune is iconic because Frank Herbert got in early and wrote a lot of stuff in a kind of genre land-grab. However many more taught, more interesting things have been written in the meantime.
Denis Villeneuve has done a masterful adaptation of something that I don't feel made sense to do as a movie. It should have been a TV series, frankly.
6/10 sorry.