Hmmmm....Mixed feelings here. One the one hand my perception of Dune was set by the '80's movie. That laid out what Dune was for me. HBO did a remake of Dune that wasnt quite the same even though it was good. I'd just assume leave it alone. On the other hand, in the right director's hands Dune could be very, very cool and outstanding. Make it grittier with cool special effects, it could be out of this world....Or it could be a piece of shit. LOL.
***********************EDIT************************ *********

The Sci-Fi Channel did the remake not HBO

In my opinion the original 1980's film was pretty awful. It took horrible liberties with the story and characters. The music was 'meh' and the emphasis on gore over intellectual/political conflict was disappointing... pandering to a short-attention-span audience.

The miniseries in 2000 was MUCH better. In fact, it was very similar in many ways to the way I imagined the books' aesthetics and characters to be. I'm very happy with stopping there, as it was pretty faithful and respectful of the original material. I'm afraid now that any new attempt will just be disappointing after this competent remake.

So overall, I'd say "no" to another remake. I'm very afraid it won't be any better than the 2000 remake in terms of acting or story clarity, and instead will crutch itself with fancy CGI effects that really aren't necessary to get the point across.

I'm cautiously optimistic about a Dune remake, mainly because the original film was downright awful, so it wouldn't be easy to make something worse. I thoroughly enjoyed the book when I was little, and of course the famous Dune 2 real-time strategy video game that was the first of its kind. I recall renting Dune, the film, shortly after finishing the book and being excited to see the Arrakis in my imagination depicted on screen. Anyone who had a similar experience knows I was vastly disappointed :(

I'm not too familiar with the director, Peter Berg, having skipped the film Hancock (not a big will smith fan). It sounds like he's attached to a variety of nostalgic properties aside from Dune including Hercules (the comic) and Battleship (the board game... wtf?).

His comments in interviews about Dune indicate that he wants to avoid the obvious commodity conflict storyline in favor of one about heroism of the main characters. Although I'm happy to here it won't be completely correlated with something of this world like the energy crisis (or even the drug war), the whole world was sorta structured around the pursuit of spice (melange). Intentional avoidance of this fact might leave the story a little hollow and generic.

Dune could be an amazing saga of films if only it got the right director who understands every nuance of the book, just as Peter Jackson did with Lord of the Rings. If this could be managed and put together into a workable script with a good on screen vision I think this could be an amazing film - hopefully good enough for them to film the other 5.

They could even make a mini-series of 2hr episodes for the books that Frank Herbet's son co-wrote with Kevin J. Anderson