saw "Dune, Part 2" again last night

I rewatched "Dune, Part 2," this time in the comfort of my own apartment, with no COVID-y people about.* A few scattered thoughts:

1. Sound design! The movie should definitely win an Oscar for amazingly evocative sound design that puts you in the world—subtle things like the echo-y sound of Harkonnen troops speaking from inside their helmets to the phatic noise of the lasguns (Frank Herbert's terminology, not mine) to the weird, almost Vaderlike noise of the tubes and other apparatus attached to Baron Harkonnen, still unrecovered from Leto's final, fateful, fatal poison attack.
2. Comedy that won't age well. Stilgar, our main source for humor, has a few scenes that, I think, are going to look cringe-inducing in a few years. Overall, Javier Bardem played the role excellently, so I don't fault him. This is more of a screenwriting issue.
3. Making Lady Jessica into something like a corruptive, or at least slyly manipulative, force on Arrakis is a mistake. In the book, her intentions are purer. If anything, she's been a rebel against the Bene Gesserit project for years. This change to Jessica's character also sets up a very immature dynamic between her and Paul—Paul, who is on his way to becoming a holy leader of the Fremen, is slotted into the role of the surly teen rebelling against his mother's wishes. It's not a dynamic that dominates the plot, but there's more than a whiff of it, almost as if this rewriting of the Jessica-Paul relationship were a sop to modern audiences (cue Critical Drinker echo).
4. Another book-based point about Jessica: like most Bene Gesserit, she's trained in scary forms of armed and unarmed combat—what the spooked and reverent Fremen call the weirding way. She has a general's knowledge of strategy and a queen's knowledge of politics, not to mention a trained psychologist's knowledge of the tiniest ins and outs of human nature. Leader, soldier, psychologist, linguist, and philosopher, a Bene Gesserit witch is one of the mightiest characters in Frank Herbert's galaxy. And yet—the most combat Jessica gets in the movie is when she inelegantly bashes a Harkonnen soldier with a rock. Rebecca Ferguson should have been at least as nimble and powerful as her character Ilsa Faust in the Mission: Impossible movies. She should have been tearing apart Harkonnen troops out in the desert sands.
5. Paul's sandworm ride is, by itself, worth the price of admission. Amazing scene.
6. I'm still trying to decide how I feel about the changes made to both Chani and the Fremen. Separating the Fremen into northern and southern factions—which doesn't happen in the book—is consistent with the novel's contention that not all Fremen were immediately believers in Paul. Making Chani the focus of the doubters was a plausible change to the story, but this change was made at the cost of making her less personally loyal to Paul. She makes clear, in the movie version, that her love of Paul is conditional, telling him she'll love him "as long as you remain true to yourself." The Fremen, in both the book and the movie, aren't initially that concerned with galactic affairs, and Chani's awareness of the struggle and politicking among the Great Houses is dim at best. Her knowledge of Bene Gesserit manipulation, in the movie, is also unexplained, uncanonical, and a bit problematic. I don't think Villeneuve did too much violence to Chani's character: at least she's no longer blindly loyal. But what we see in the movie is a radical departure from the Chani of the books.
7. What of Chani's future? In the next book, Dune Messiah, Chani is back with Paul and initially unable to conceive thanks to the contraceptives that Princess Irulan, Paul's wife, has been slipping into Chani's food and drink. Chani is eventually able to break through this attempt to keep her childless (in the first book, she gave birth to a son who was killed during a battle—another plot point that the movies leave out), and she eventually gives birth to Leto and Ghanima before dying in childbirth. Irulan, who had been part of a conspiracy to overthrow Paul, will renounce the conspiracy, repent of her ways, and promise to be Leto and Ghanima's teacher as Paul, blinded by a stone-burner, disappears into the desert and into legend. It will be interesting to see how Denis Villeneuve handles Chani in the third movie, which will be a Shakespearean tragedy.
8. I failed to note in my review how certain aesthetic elements from HR Giger made it into this version of "Dune," just as they did in David Lynch's version. I'm thinking specifically of certain outdoor scenes on Giedi Prime, the Harkonnen homeworld. Villeneuve's "Dune" was, overall, an immense visual treat.

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*That's my working theory: I caught COVID on the crowded subway rides to and from the cinema. It's hard to see another explanation: this was a major break in my commuting routine, and I think I paid the price for putting myself in the petri dish that is the Seoul metro.