Old school scifi always has issues with weird tech hangups just throwing wrenches into huge foundational aspects of highly advanced civilizations. Thankfully most of them can be handwaved away.

This is something that Dune handles really well precisely because it writes a lot of the tech out of the setting. “Thinking machines” are gone and banned, guns don’t work against shields, lasers are banned because of their (nuclear) interaction with shields. Even communications are largely handled by couriers. The tech is deliberately written to be at a level where it doesn’t take convenience or deux ex machina for certain situations to occur.

Anyone expecting a very internal monologue driven book series to be translated well into the screen is just green though lol.

I thought Denix Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune handled this incredibly well when Paul and Jessica used sign language to communicate while they were tied up. In the book, that entire section is told through their internal monologues and their expectations of what the other would be thinking, so translating that to sign language for the screen was clever. I’m very curious to see how the internal-monologue-heavy second half of the book will fare, though.