@Corpsey trying to start a fight there...
Anyhow, I've seen the film now and that bit about how many times in the first half hour spaceship ramps slid down to disgorge solemn delegations is spot on. In fact arguably you even undercooked the number of times it happened, or maybe it was just cos you mentioned it that I was more conscious of- and sensitive to - it happening again and again... not that I would have been likely to completely miss any of the massive set piece scenes with spaceships, portentous music, dry ice all over the shop - and plot points being explained rather conveniently...
I actually sympathised with the director at that point, all those things did have to happen so in a sense he was in a bind, but surely there was some way to vary it a little.
RREALLY MILD SPOILERS BELOW IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN OR READ THE OTHER VERSIONS
Also, what I said above about plot points being conveniently spelled out for you was only half of the truth, in that, although you got a fair bit of; "We have to give Paul special treatment because, despite your orders to only bear girl children so that our centuries old plan of selectively breeding Bene Gesserit with the aim of creating The One, could come to fruition, you betrayed us in order to keep the Duke happy and also you taught Paul how to do magic tricks like his namesake Daniels and made him into an intergalactic wild card" - many other bits were skated over. There were quite a few bits where things were kinda mentioned but not explained adequately to understand if you didn't know them. I suppose Villeneuve could then claim these things were evidence of his attempts to squeeze in as many of the ideas from the book as possible... but if you couldn't know what these things meant simply from seeing the film, can you truthfully claim theh are in the film?
I went to see it with three people who had not read the book and don't particularly like sci-fi (or me now) and from talking to them afterwards they missed a lot of what (kinda) happened, or at least the motivations for it. And they aren't interested enough to go and read about it so they will never know.
Well that all sounds entirely negative which is unfair, I thought the first half was decent enough apart from the quibbles above. If you have read the book and your mind fills in the missing bits automatically then it seemed as though what was on screen was as it should be.
The second half though, when they are in the desert... well that dragged, it seemed to have a lot of hallucinations, drwam sequences, visions and many other excuses for slow boring montages with Zendaya and really serious music. I was thinking "the film is getting on for three hours long, you don't need to pad it out so much. Or, why not take out a couple of montages and explain why everyone is after the Spice or who the Sardaukar are or whatever.
And speaking of serious music, I'm not sure you needed so much of it. Like when the Harkonen are bombing the shit out the city and the sky is all red, buildings and spaceships are collapsing on an enormous scale, we don't need orchestral music on top of the sensory overload we're already facing to tell us this is a big event and how we should feel about it. And there were lots of scenes where you could have said something similar.
So, yeah, it coulda been better sadly