I'm not sure one could do better with the story. Yes there are things left out and altered, but no story ever makes it to the screen, large or small, without undergoing some metamorphosis. The complex nature of the story and the large amount of time the characters in it spend in extensive introspection make it a difficult story to translate to film. For a detailed examination of this problem, I highly recommend Harlan Ellison's essays on the original film release of Dune in his collection of film essays `Watching'. It is doubtful that any attempt at filming this novel will satisfy half the people who will see it.
I can hear, for instance, the purists out there lamenting that hardly a word of Frank Herbert's original dialogue survived intact, and to tell the truth, that also bothered me at first. The thing is, though, that Herbert simply didn't write like people talk. That was one of the things that made the first movie of Dune so spectacularly heavy-handed as to be laughable much of the time. Household servants don't go around speaking in oracular verse, and while the mode works with poetic beauty in a novel, it sounds silly in a film. Ray Bradbury's work has much the same problem.
There are some things cut that I miss. I particularly miss Hasimir Fenring, whom I found to be one of the most interesting characters in the original story, but I suppose that even in 6 hours spread over 3 nights, some things had to go. There's plenty more to go into, but on reflection over the evenings of watching, I find most of my problems to be hyper-retentive pecksniffery, and I will keep such to myself unless asked.
So, to keep this short, if you're looking for a line-by-line faithful translation of Dune onto film, look elsewhere. The spirit of the saga, however, is admirably preserved. It begins as Dune begins and ends as Dune ends. I don't think one will find one's time wasted in the experience.
I can hear, for instance, the purists out there lamenting that hardly a word of Frank Herbert's original dialogue survived intact, and to tell the truth, that also bothered me at first. The thing is, though, that Herbert simply didn't write like people talk. That was one of the things that made the first movie of Dune so spectacularly heavy-handed as to be laughable much of the time. Household servants don't go around speaking in oracular verse, and while the mode works with poetic beauty in a novel, it sounds silly in a film. Ray Bradbury's work has much the same problem.
There are some things cut that I miss. I particularly miss Hasimir Fenring, whom I found to be one of the most interesting characters in the original story, but I suppose that even in 6 hours spread over 3 nights, some things had to go. There's plenty more to go into, but on reflection over the evenings of watching, I find most of my problems to be hyper-retentive pecksniffery, and I will keep such to myself unless asked.
So, to keep this short, if you're looking for a line-by-line faithful translation of Dune onto film, look elsewhere. The spirit of the saga, however, is admirably preserved. It begins as Dune begins and ends as Dune ends. I don't think one will find one's time wasted in the experience.