I have charitably given this flick a two out of tribute to the novel. You know a movie is going to be bad when it is so incomprehensible that a long narration at the beginning is necessary to place any kind of focus on the issue at hand.   We see these long stories in bad flicks.  Remember JFK and The Da Vinci Code?

It is kind of fun to watch Sting.

The book was good but the movie was gawdawful. I slept through it the first time it came out. What was funny was I bought a pair of tickets with the intent of going to a nightclub, meeting a nice lady, and proposing to take her to see Dune at midnight. Well, having spent a trey of hours at the nightclub, I realized that I would have been the biggest dork in history of Friday Night to approach a woman and say, "Hey hon. Wanna go see Dune?" I ended up eating the extra ticket and falling asleep a quarter-way through. Two days later, my brother and I went to see it. This time, I stayed up. But boy did it stink. One of the corniest lines was the climatic knife fight between Kyle McLachlan and Sting. In the middle of the fight, Sting screams "I will Kill Him!!!" I laughed like a goof when I heard it. To my delight, Mystery Science Theater 3000 used that corny line often. Sometimes I felt MST3K was created solely for me.

Dune isn't very good by the standards of the book or movies in general. Like a handful of science fiction movies, however, it is redeemed by its 'world building' features: the depiction of alien technology, the role of the spice (like a combination of oil, LSD and the elixir of youth), the cultural differences between Atreides, Harkonnen and Imperial courts, the desert survival tech of the Freemen nomads, etc... Much more original and interesting than the never-ending Star Trek/Star Wars franchises in the worlds it created; I quite enjoyed Dune, despite the ham acting.

Sting was awful in this snorefest. I felt bad that a fine actor like Von Sydow was in this film.

Yes, on the whole it isn't very good.. but it has some interesting elements that are fun to watch.