Just saw Dune yesterday.
Pros: It's honestly not nearly as woke as the race swapped characters would suggest. The cinematography is great, and I think the cast was well selected (unnecessary race swapping aside). They did a great job of designing the costumes and the spaceships too.
I haven't seen anything in the way of woke pandering and politics thrown in your face, but Zendaya doesn't really do anything in this movie so who knows about the next one.
Cons: It's a bit confusing who/what everyone/everything is if you haven't read the book.
You will have to use the bathroom after watching it.
I think they changed crusade into holy war in the movie itself. Only the trailers seem to mention "crusade".
And they breeze over a lot of the book's lexicon in general, I think in an effort to simplify a very dense story.
The Jihad/Crusade swap is a really wierd choice to me, but I have to accept that as someone who has known of Dune since I was a small child, I am not the average casual movie-going joe public pleb when it comes to this.
Ultimately they probably did it because marketing told them that 20 years post 9/11, Jihad is still a dirty word to many westerners.
It's a fair enough translation in this context, but to me, it's a needless drain on the authenticity of the Fremen.
When Herbert wrote, jihad was a weird word that few of his audience would be familiar with. Authors do this to give an aura of foreign weirdness. It is a fair point that that word is not nearly as foreign today and thus loses some of its intended effect.
Still, I wouldn't have changed it. The Fremen are crypto-future-Muslims. You can't change that without changing the whole story, so why bother changing one word?