The only movie I've ever enjoyed after reading the book was Jurassic Park. I've never seen the Dune movies or most other book-based movies, but honestly The Martian and Project Hail Mary were tempting. I'll probably surrender to one of those two someday.
The most recent Dune movies pull off the incredible feat of being a better telling of the tale than the book, but only if you already know the tale from the books. They’re not beginner-friendly, but they’re extremely respectful to the book reader, while still make conscious (and in my opinion, positive) changes to the story.
I might disagree with this. To me, the joy of the books was developing a deep understanding of the societies and their norms. This felt almost entirely missing from the movies, which focused more on events. This is fine--they're different mediums, after all, but the second movie in particular left me a little disappointed.
I think this is kind of my point -- there's no way to develop that level of nuance in a movie. The options are to take way more time (see Silo), to do a crappy job (see... almost every 2 - 3 hour movie), or to instead change the goal: Don't have the viewer "develop… a deep understanding", but down-select to those viewers who already respect the work and have that deep understanding, and instead focus on showing them the society and its norms. Do what movies are great at -- make a story come to life -- and make the viewer/reader do the work of knowing the background, knowing what they're seeing, knowing what's important.
