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.
This section of the story, Paul is supposed to come off as entitled and naive. In that regard he did a fair job. I will wait and see if/when part two comes out if he can pull off the messianic leader if a Jihad.
He's very androgynous.
People can claim that Paul is naive and inexperienced in the first half of the first book. And that's true. He's also the son of nobility in a setting modeling European warrior aristocracy. He regularly trains hand-to-hand combat with expert warriors. He's probably going to look more like a HS football player than Chalamet, who looks like a damp paper towel.
Their form of fighting is portrayed more as dancing, though. I'd say less football player and more soccer player. Unless that's what you meant lol
How it's portrayed is up for interpretation. The movie is going to stylize it in a way that makes the fights more visually dynamic.
I don't think Herbert described the fight choreography in enough detail that you can really say for certain what the fighting looks like. What we do know is that each combatant is armored (via Shield tech) to the point where the only way they can actually hurt the other opponent is by getting in close and delivering slow, precise & deadly strikes. This is similar to European knights whose armor was so effective that they were mostly only vulnerable to stilettos at vulnerable points in the armor joints.
A better example would be a high-school wrestler. If you're fighting with someone hand-to-hand with knives, grappling techniques are essential.
To be fair, Paul Atreides is a tiny guy. I want to hate Chalomet on some sort of principle because I don't like squirrelly looking dudes, and his rise to prominence seems inorganic, but he did a much better job as Paul than I thought he would
"His oval face was like his mother Jessica’s, but he had stronger bones and a browline reminiscent of his maternal grandfather. He had a thin, disdainful nose, long lashes concealing lime-toned, directly staring green eyes, and a hardness in the expression like the old Duke, his paternal grandfather."
You're quite literally introduced to him with the Reverend Mother asking "Isn't he small for his age?" And not that much time passes between the Gom Jabbar on Caladan and the Arrakis arc