OK as a person who has studied communications at the university level (working on a masters) and reads quite a bit of fiction and non-fiction alike, first and fore most I can describe this film as being very rich and beautiful in terms of visual images and ideas. But that said this definitely is not Herbert's Dune. Allowing for constraints of time and money this is a very interesting piece of science fiction on its own, but in this day and age it really shows signs of its age, considering a person with a Mini DV camera and a G5 Mac tower could make a movie like this today. The main problem with this movie is that they try to condense a very large and intricate plot from a over 400 page book (according to my first edition hard cover printing) into a single movie, the problem with this is that much like the Lord of The Rings when a story is that vast a single movie isn't really enough to do it justice. The result of this is that many instances of artistic license are taken (the weirding modules never existed, it was the weirding way) and it becomes different than what it really is. As a fan of Mr. Herbert's work I would suggest you see the mini series for a better interpretation (its the closest a person can hope for to the real Dune), but if you want a Interesting sci-fi film to spend an evening watching this may be worth the rent once. In other words this is a okay movie, but its not really Dune.
