Ended up making a second outing to the cinema yesterday to see Dune Pt2.
Enjoyed it but it fell into the Lord of the Rings/Marvel trap of essentially being two and a half hours of build-up to the EPIC BATTLE, and it really did drag in places eg Feyd Rautha's birthday party, which felt mostly irrelevant.*
Bizarrely, it also felt very rushed in places, with some scenes seemingly cut short and left unresolved (eg Paul's desert trial) as it suddenly jumps to the next plot episode. For all its flaws, the Lynch version is much more coherent and taut storytelling.
And it's extremely noisy - reminded me of Dunkirk, with the constant barrage of loud music. It's a lazy way to signify THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. It didn't cause me any problems following the dialogue that some have mentioned but it did feel very intrusive at times.
Also, the worm riding scenes left me with one very important unanswered question: how do you get down off a sandworm?**
*
apart from the side plot with Lady Margot which seemed to be mostly about sowing the seeds (literally) for part 3 and beyond - fine, I get why that needed to be included, but it could have been done much more concisely without the ridiculous gladiator nonsense.
**
You don't - you get down off a duck. BOOM! and indeed BOOM!
Another question: why do the Navigators not feature in this version of the story? Talking to my son after the film, he was saying he didn't get why spice was so important, which is a fair question - in the books (and the Lynch version) it's made clear that spice is essential to the Navigators, and therefore essential to interplanetary travel, so it seems like a pretty major omission.