It's dry and involved, highly detailed and sometimes hard to follow (and that goes double for the later books) but it has great depth, the world makes sense, the motivations and the characters make sense. The world is enthralling, it's technology, economy, and most importantly politics all feel real. It's got tons of intrigue and scheming and death like GoT (except it nails the ending). The whole Bran prescience thing in GoT is basically lifted out of Dune. It covers all the bases robot civil war and prohibition, environmentalism, islam, gay pedophiles, eugenics, terrorism, betrayal, power politics, duals to the death, orgies, terraforming, nukes, giant fucking worms that shit gold, drinking your own piss... It's got everything and not in the way modern movies hamfistedly stuff CG shit into their worlds, it all belongs.
It's to Sci-Fi what LOTR is to fantasy.
Unlike Peter Jacksons LOTR which does the books justice for the most part (cuts Bombadil, cuts the rape of the shire, arwen doesn't belong..) Dune is a real bitch bitch to translate to screen. The latter half of the book has a lot of inner monologue, the beginning needs a ton of setup/political info dumps. In Frenchy's movie part I all the major points are there but they are not explained near as deeply as in the book and key points are easy to overlook. He also made everyone swarthy as shit, race/gender swapped Kyens, dialed back the Baron Harkonnen's degeneracy, spoiled plot twists to have a fight scene with wrestle wrestle man (who can't fucking act) and dumbed down the Fremen and their rituals already. Also all the sets are really big/empty/oversized/Egyptian tomb-like CGI. The ships look fucking cool though. The 80's movie is cheesy and the beginning is pretty faithful but it goes off the rails in the middle (I still like it though, it and the 2 minute intro to the DuneII RTS hooked me as a kid). The Sci-Fi mini series was pretty book accurate but was very slowly paced.
... It's not a work for the screen, just read it.
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