You thought they spent a lot of money on it? I'd be surprised to find out that it wasn't all done in ONE studio with quick change costumes and scenery.
Bad acting. As was said, nobody knew how to show emotion. Only the Baron Harkonnen was really any good, and I thought he was EXTREMELY good. Very subtly evil, very much sure of his greatness, all that he was in the book (I loved the occasional rhyming). William Hurt was okay as Leto, but a bit stiff (more so than I thought of the Leto character as being).
Accents: why the hell does everybody have to have an accent in Dune movies?! In the original movie, everybody had a non-American accent. In this one, everybody but the Atreides and the Baron had a non-American accent. (No, I'm not being racist or Ameri-centric, but the movie was made for American TV, so the accents become 'foreign' accents.) Most of them were obviously FAKE accents too, being used by people who didn't have those accents, so they were constantly having to enunciate (or they really did have thick accents and were having to enunciate in order to be understandable in English). Too often they would fall OUT of the accents and into non-accented speech too, which just threw it off completely. I was too busy trying to figure out what they were saying to actually pay attention to the dialogue.
Actor selection: poor in all but the Baron's case. The Baron was perfect. Everybody else just was not right. For Paul's character, it's obviously hard to chose the perfect actor. In the book he ages several years during the story, they can't do that in a movie. I detested the actor playing Paul in the original movie.
Stilgar in the book is the strongest of the Fremen, only able to be beaten by Jessica essentially. In this movie, he's a balding, paunchy, middle aged man who looks like he had too much beer and pot in the morning (in fact, Cheech Marin could have been a stand-in for him). He doesn't look like he could have kicked my ass, let alone been the strongest of the Fremen and chosen by combat.
Chani: ugly as sin and a horrible actress to boot. Her accent was the worst of them all.
Everybody else, of course, just not good. Too stiff, no emotion, bored me.
Graphics/scenery: the most horrible stuff I've seen outside of a 60's/70's B movie. The editing of the scenes was horrid, you could obviously see where things were done with a blue screen because the mixing of the images was bad. The physical props were terribly fake looking, and quite obviously inside a sound stage. The outdoor scenes were again obviously inside a sound stage, and either blue screen use was obvious or other scenes just had really obvious painted backdrops. They weren't even good matte paintings with some depth to them, they just looked flat. I was constantly reminded of Barbarella and Flash Gordon, with some original Star Trek thrown in. The costumes for the upper class and royalty were superb though. I kept seeing things that I wanted to have for myself (because I'm into that type of stuff). The Fremen costumes though weren't all that special, and they screwed it up horribly when they kept having the Fremen taking off their stillsuits in caves and stuff where they were still open to the dry air, whereas in the book they only took off stillsuits when the doors to the caves/sietches had been sealed. Too many times in this movie were there people standing around outside the openings in caves with light tunics and pants on. They didn't properly convey the need to preserve water. What good is a stillsuit if you just take it off as soon as you're not in direct sunlight? And that whole thing where they took the water from Paul and Jessica's stillsuits to store while they were in the first cave with the Fremen (Cave of Ridges)? What the hell was that?
They DID manage to stay pretty good with the book's storyline, so I was impressed with that. They obviously had much more time than the original movie to tell more of the story and show more scenes, but some they did manage to rewrite to the point of being annoying, but still managed to keep most of the meaning intact.
Overall, I was unimpressed. During the early parts of the second episode I decided that recording it digitally wasn't worth my time. Then before the 3rd episode started I decided it wasn't even worth my time to record it on VHS or to watch the last episode.
I just expected the sci-fi channel to have done a bit better. I know they may have had a limited budget compared to the original movie, but they could have put a bit more into it. It's not like they had really huge name actors to pay (William Hurt is not THAT big a name). Just doing better with the scenery and backdrops might have saved it in my mind. They all just looked TOO obviously fake.
Oh by the way, I'm on my 3th reading of the entire series I think. I've made it up to Heretics of Dune again, and I've also read the two new books written with/by Herbert's son. I agree that if you see the movie first you might have liked it a bit better, however I then don't think you'd get the full meaning of all the bits and pieces. And once you've read the book, you won't ever like the movie again.
Dune is going to be almost impossible to make a REALLY good adaptation of. There's far too much internal dialogue (and we saw how badly that works in the original movie) which is essential to the story, and it's simply too long a book to make into a movie that will appeal to the masses and still be cheap to make. The most anybody will be able to do is make one of two kinds of movies: one that appeals to mass audiences but doesn't quite gel with the original storyline, uses modifications heavily to make it understandable (lowest common denominator) and exciting; or one that appeals to the hardcore fans that want a version that is faithful to the book, don't care how long it is, as long as it's well adapted, contains all the essential pieces of the story, and doesn't modify them so much that they become different stories.
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