Having finally seen it myself tonight on our local on-demand channel, I was impressed as heck with the style, cinematography and music, but had serious criticisms of the script as an adaptation. As far as I'm concerned the moment anybody says "Okay," or "Right, yeah, yeah," or banters in any of the 21st-century snarky style so infuriatingly popularized by Joss Whedon (cf. most of Momoa's Duncan Idaho performance), I am drastically kicked out of the mindset of an otherworldly future. Whatever mistakes Lynch's Dune made, at least they didn't do that. The pacing also felt off -- the scenes which weren't in the book just didn't feel like they needed to be there, and felt like they were padding out the first half of the film.
And whatever flaws Kenneth MacMillan had in his 1984 performance as Vladimir Harkonnen, MacMillan's Baron at least felt like a person -- a crazy, addiction-ridden, polymorphously perverted person, but still human in the sense of his ambitions and his pleasures making sense on some kind of level. Stellan Skarsgard's Baron just seemed like he was So Tired of Everybody's Shit, and the rest of the Harkonnens felt so alien and unrecognizable there was no emotional punch to seeing the Atreides fall at their hands; the entire point of the feud between the Atreides and the Harkonnens is that it should feel familiar -- it's exactly the kind of irrational, personal vendetta that has bedeviled human civilization for as long as we've had it. (I freely admit that I've been spoiled by the Starks and the Lannisters for this kind of thing now, but again, Lynch's Dune at least got across that same sense of the Houses being families, of people with long histories with each other bound by strong ties of feeling -- hardly positive, on the Harkonnens' side, but still there.)
It would also have been nice to have some corresponding scene to Lynch's opening conference between the Emperor and the Guild navigator, less for the exposition than for some sense of the culture of the Imperium outside Caladan and Arrakis. The visible decadence of the Emperor's court and Giedi Prime -- even of Caladan, if to a considerably more tasteful degree -- is needed to help make Dune's sheer stark aridity really hit you by contrast, and to give some sense of why the Fremen cosmic jihad is necessary to shake up the stagnating Imperium. It feels like Villeneuve and his crew were so focused on getting the details of Dune itself right that they lost sight of the larger picture of the story.
None of which is to say I won't watch the second half when it comes out. But if disappointment is the primary prerequisite for the Curmudgeon's Club I'm saddened to realize I'm in no danger of getting kicked out yet.