So I just recently rewatched the first part of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, and ended up liking it more the second time. Maybe I’ll watch this one again in three years and like it better, too — but today, my reaction is kinda meh.

The problem with the movie is that there are 1.5 stories it needs to tell, and it wants to take nearly three hours to tell them.

The half story is about Paul being accepted as a Fremen. And you might say, “didn’t the first movie already establish that? Wasn’t that the big climactic scene of the first movie, the Fremen taking him in as one of them?” And conceptually, yep, it was. But instead of just jumping forward to Paul ‘n’ his mom being long-accepted Fremen citizens, or doing this in montage, the movie really wants to play this story out at length, which is a mistake — we know how it goes, you already hit the decisive story beat, this is all just tedious denouement and logistics. Seriously, 5-10 minute montage for this, tops.

And then the full story it wants to tell is about Paul fighting his destiny vs. accepting it. This is actually interesting, but the reality is that he doesn’t have many options, and it ends up being less of a choice and more like the only possible choice. Okay, fine, still plays well — but it’s not a story that takes that long to tell, either.

Honestly, I think David Lynch got this about right in his version of Dune, where this entire second movie was wrapped up in like the last half hour — fair enough if Villeneuve wants to give things more time to breathe, but it means that you should aim for a second movie that’s maybe like 1:45, not 2:45, and you’d still have plenty of time for everything to breathe.

But of course, the other thing that Villeneuve had to do with this movie is set up the third one, because obviously we’re in the franchise era now, and nothing can ever just be a standalone story. So we get a bunch of high-powered actors in small roles; and at the end, Yoda gravely intones, “begun, these clone wars have” and now stay tuned for the next exciting installment of the Duniverse. PAUL MUAD’DIB WILL RETURN.

It’s all fine enough (so far), the movie is reasonably enjoyable. But “too much of a good thing” is probably the besetting problem of the movie industry right now, so it’s hard not to be worried that we’re setting up for the same thing here. If they ever make the “Young Leto” prequel, we’ll know we’re in real trouble.