TW: Children of Dune - review

Okay, so yesterday I watched Children of Dune , the SyFy Original Production. Admittedly it was mostly because I wanted to see James McAvoy sans shirt (he spends a huge proportion of his screen time with very little on :)) and it was very entertaining. 

The special effects were great and the acting was superb (did I mention semi-naked James McAvoy?), but I can't help feeling it was a little muddled.

I've read several of the Dune books and I think they tried to get a little too much into the mini-series. You can't do everything on screen you can do in words and I think it might have been better if they'd simplified it a little bit more than they did. The mini series of Dune worked really well and the first ep of Children of Dune worked as well, but after that there seemed to be one too many bad guys.

The whole 'cast out' bunch didn't make much sense. They were there, they were supposedly helping Atreides enemies, but there wasn't quite enough about them to give them substance. There was civil war and there were fremen against empire and this 'cast out' lot were in there somewhere, but I never quite got why suddenly they were interested.

Then there was Farad'n who deserved a lot more screen time and build up and didn't get it.

A bit more around Leto's decision and what he actually did might have been good too :). What they had was great, but it didn't seem to be as deep as everything with Paul becoming Muad'Dib.

I would recommend it to any sci-fi fans, it's a good mini-series, brilliantly made (let me just mention one more time for those of a like mind - James McAvoy with half his kit off), but I think, maybe, they had one too many threads that weren't very neatly tied off at the end.