It is the year 10,191. The most important strategic resource is the spice, melange, which is (a) vital to space travel and (b) found only on one planet: Arrakis, also known as Dune. How did space travel to Arrakis happen in order to find the thing that space travel needs? Don't ask awkward questions!
Anyway, the emperor of known space has just ordered that House Atreides take control of Arrakis, replacing their loathsome rivals the Harkonnens. This is a poisoned chalice, however. The emperor fears the growing popularity of the Atreides and is secretly conspiring with the Harkonnens to destroy his potential rival.
In fact, there seem to be an awful lot of people who want the Atreides family - and in particular, the heir to the House title, Paul Atreides - destroyed. Why does Paul in particular evoke such hostility? Because he's just too awesome, basically. Seriously, the guy's just always doing things no-one is supposed to be able to do, and being generally amazing and frankly it's a bit tiresome how Chosen One-y he clearly is.
Dune is a very flawed film. The structure is a mess, with fully 75% of the running time effectively being prologue, and large chunks of what should probably actually be the plot being elided with a montage and some voice over. As an example, Paul's entire romance with his love interest, Chani, consists of: (1) seeing her for a few seconds in a dream, (2) exchanging a couple of sentences with her when they first meet in person, and (3) a narrator telling us they fell in love over an image of them kissing.
The film was also, apparently, quite incomprehensible in its original cut which probably explains why it has so much voice-over narration and "inner voice" segments where we hear what characters are thinking. These do make the film easier to follow, but they're clumsy and clunky and certainly don't help to make it more engaging.
Here's hoping Villeneuve can do a better job in his upcoming adaptation of Dune than Lynch did here.
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