Rant warning\ This is just me putting my thoughts onto paper in a bit of a rant. Enjoy!*
I tried.
I started reading Dune once when I was younger and honestly, it just bored me. I got about 1/4-1/3 of the way through and just had no connection to any of the characters and it felt like they just threw around giant foreign sounding names to sound cool, but didn't actually craft much of a compelling story about all these grand mysterious concepts.
Fast forward about 10 years and I figure, I was just too young and didn't understand. The movie is coming out and it's such a famous Sci-Fi series, so I'll probably really like it this time. I've reread several other books and been much more able to understand and enjoy them.
Not Dune. I started again and was greeted with a dozen very flat characters who feel very cold, emotionless, and absolutely unrealistic to how actual humans behave. Their motivations are not based on experiences that the reader goes through with the characters, but instead are often pushed forward in the story with frequent interruptions of plot to discuss large faceless organizations like the Bene Gesserits and historical political machinations that happen completely outside the story told to the audience.
I kept thinking about Star Wars when I was reading and how Dune felt very very much like the prequels minus the cartoony Jar-Jar Binks. They are a bunch of cold, emotionless characters who are acting based on the mysterious "Jedi order" and political drama like on Amidala's planet, which never really is shown on screen.
Exactly like the prequels, Paul, like Anakin, is just the magic perfect boy that just seems to have plot armor and deux ex machina powers. He is the absolute definition of a Mary Sue. We experience one single training session and besides that he just instantly develops magic powers way beyond any other character and can see and understand things no one can for no reason. Throughout the story, this gap simply increases multiplicatively. This is like Anakin who just kind of randomly gets into a ship and presses buttons until he destroys the enemy base.
Jessica is exactly like Qui-Gon Jinn. She is cold, has absolutely 0 personality, but believes in the special magic chosen boy. Because of her magic believing powers Paul becomes magic chosen boy. Afterwards, Jessica is painted as constantly less than her son despite being a far more highly trained and experienced user of their skills. Paul experiences more pain than any woman and is constantly able to do things that flabbergast everyone but he never earns this, just simply becomes this against his will.
I get that this is part of the moral of the story, he is the boy so quickly catapulted into power and position that he can never form true relationships and live a normal life, but… tbh yawn as fuck. Ohhhh you became super rich and powerful at a young age, that must be so hard for you lol. This is rich people BS. It sounds like a monarch feeling sad with their thousands of servants. I pity you, your majesty… I don't connect with this character type as a regular person.
The original Star Wars provide a really good example of a much better told story. Luke starts the story completely inept and a whiny farm boy. He fumbles through the first two movies, being in many ways a very typical teenager. He gets multiple bouts of training and experience to actually make his rise to power sensical and earned. His motivations are directly told in the story from the death of his aunt and uncle, to meeting Leia and slowly developing a connection with her and Han.
I know it was a small part of the story, but the blatant homophobia was also a turn off. He took quite a few opportunities to make sure the audience knew that the main bad guy is evil by having him be a gay paedophile. I read that the homophobia gets more direct and explicit in the next books.
Tbh, I doubt I'll ever bother to read them. With such a dull tired story with characters that are flat as pancakes, it felt more like a teen male version of Twilight level writing rather than a great Sci-Fi epic.
by Elements18