My partner never read the books and easily caught the massive religious manipulation angle through the film. The even more massive scale of it all was obviously not revealed because of when it takes place, but it's still present

If you haven't read the books the movie makes no sense. It's nothing but a string of half-ass book references and pretty scenery. Even having read the books the movie was still all over the place. It was a string of individual scenes with barely anything to connect them besides having the same characters.

And since I'm finally venting about it, if they were going to just focus on visuals, they could have at least gotten the scale right. They have these giant buildings and ships alluding to a mass of people keeping it operational. Then we never see more than like, 6 people. And the one scene where they pulled out all of the people at the climax, where it makes sense to show every soldier during an all hands emergency, we see, like, 50 people. They're supposed to have thousands of soldiers. Losing a dozen soldiers in the book would have been acceptable losses. The movie force we see, that would cripple them.

Also, it should have ended just after the attack. Use all that extra time to actual get you invested in House Atreides and Paul. In anything really. That movie was so bad. I've always like Lynch's Dune for it's insanity, but compared to the new one, it's a legitimately good movie. At least there's a story.