Here’s my Dune part one and two summary. Correct me where I might be missing something. Spoilers abound.
The Harkonnens have been mining Spice on Arrakis for decades, and have become richer than even the Emperor since Spice is the most critical thing around (and despite its enormous expense and universe-wide demand, nobody can synthesize it elsewhere for some reason, even with nearly infinite resources, why?).
The Emperor, however, is more threatened by the Atreides’ growing influence than he is threatened by the Harkonnens (why?) and so he plots with the Harkonnens to destroy House Atreides. As part of this, he kicks the Harkonnens off of Arrakis and puts the Atreides there, but it’s a trap (cue “it’s a trap” meme).
Visuals and music are amazing, and remain that way throughout the films. The plot starting point is reasonable, but starts with a flaw imo: everyone is miserable already.
In LOTR, we get to start with the happy Shire, which sets a good baseline for a happy world that the characters end up fighting to protect and going through hell for, which lets us understand what they are fighting for. But in Dune, most people are already kind of miserable from the starting point. Harkonnens are all serious and mean and focused on domination and have a shitty world with no sun, Paul and Jessica are all serious and doing life-or-death tests with their Bene Gesserit stuff, all the Bene Gesserits are hyper-serious, the Emperor and his daughter are all stressed out by politics, etc. The only chill people with good vibes are Leto and Duncan.
It's unclear what anyone is fighting for, really. The Bene Gesserits plans are measured in centuries but none of those plans ever lead to
Alright so the Atredies go to Arrakis, aware of the political danger but trying to strengthen their house. Harkonnens and the Emperor’s forces attack them and easily win. For some reason despite all of this advanced technology, at the end of the day a bunch of dudes line up with swords and have a big sword brawl (why?).
Due to the Bene Gesserits’ influence, Paul and Jessica are technically spared, but have to fight to truly survive and escape. They join the Fremen, which are the perpetually repressed people of Arrakis and the only other people in the movie (eg Stilgar) who are sometimes chill and with good vibes. The Bene Gesserit have been purposely spreading the propaganda on Arrakis that Paul is a messiah, which is a result of years of bloodline management. Duncan dies like a champ to keep Paul safe.
Paul as a scrawny kid easily beats the hard desert man Janis in a fight (which seems kind of bullshit to me), which along with the messiah prophecy secures his initial place among the Fremen.
In the second movie, Jessica and Paul further secure their place in Fremen society, and there is growing conflict over the messianic prophecy. Jessica pushes the prophecy narrative and Chani pushes back on it. That’s a good plotline, imo. But in terms of execution, it feels like the fantasy of an angsty teenage edgelord boy. (“My biggest fear is that I have so much goddamn power that I might misuse it and hurt people!”)
Paul leads a series of guerrilla strikes against the Harkonnens. Paul reunites with Gurney, and Gurney reveals where the family nukes are, which is kind of a Deus ex machina plot line. For some convenient reason, Paul’s great great grandfather or whatever hid the family nukes on Arrakis (why and how?)
Paul and Chani fall in love, but Jessia and Paul drink the worm juice which gives them memories of the past including the fact that Jessia and Paul are descended from the leader of the Harkonnens (via the Bene Gesserit bloodline planning scheme). So Paul is quite the Mary Sue at this point, being descended from Atreides and Harkonnens, and trained by both the Bene Gesserits and the Fremen. All parts of the Venn Diagram center around him.
Meanwhile, the Harkonnens replace the jacked nephew played by Bautista with a different scrawny model-looking nephew who is even meaner for some reason. And they amp up this new dude with an arena fight where he ::checks notes:: beats two drugged captives and barely beats one normal captive. So they build him up as a psychopath and a not-so-bad fighter but not exactly anything too badass really.
Paul writes a letter to the emperor to come to Arrakis and he does (why? This seems too easy). The Emperor punishes the leader of the Harkonnens (which the Harkonnens just kind of accepted without pushback, like all of their plans are for shit now suddenly).
Paul launches his plot-convenient nukes at the emperor and sends sandworms at him and easily wins (why is the Emperor of the Known Universe so weak now?) After the battle is won, Paul also beats the Harkonnen nephew dude in a fight, and gets to be the new emperor. So he wins every fight he is in, has the magic voice, can survive all the poisons that others cannot, has all the best noble genes, but also has the kindness instilled in him from his father, one of the only chill dudes in the story.
But the other Houses object, so it’s war time! And Chani leaves because Paul wants to marry the emperor’s daughter for political reasons and thinks the messianic stuff is bullshit.
Everyone is kind of miserable at the end, which is basically where they started to begin with. The few people who started happy were killed off, and the Fremen are generally happier now but that’s foreshadowed by Paul’s visions to eventually end badly for them.
One of my friends that came to see it with me and she summed it up as “five hours of non-stop angst, kind of exhausting really.”
