The jedi-mind trick powers came off as goofy....like, how did the mother get captured in the first place if she could just tell people to do whatever the fukk she wants. Isn't that game over for any opposition? Or did I miss something?
The water that Lady Jessica and Paul were given by Yueh was drugged, that's why he was drowsy in bed and woke up already captured. The Duke was supposed to drink it too but didn't do it, that's why he was alert when the attack started and Yueh had to take him out in the hallway. The Harkkonen bound and gagged Lady Jessica [off-screen] while she was still drugged so she couldn't use her powers. That's also why they included a deaf guard with them, just in case something went down and she used the voice somehow.
No one guessed that Paul might have the same powers, no male has ever had Bene Gesserit powers before, so that was a game-changer.
Also, what's the point of the force-field armor that only works sometimes?
The force field armor specially stops anything that moves above a certain speed (otherwise you wouldn't be able to touch anything or interact with ordinary objects nor could you launch your own attacks because nothing could escape your own armor). Thus it stops bullets and shyt and pretty much all projectiles other than very specially designed ones. In hand-to-hand combat it can only be penetrated if a trained fighter uses special technique of slowing down his blow to the correct speed just before he penetrates the armor, which is obviously very difficult because slow down too soon and the opponent dodges the blow, but fail to slow down enough and your blow bounces uselessly off the armor.
In the book this is all explained in a bit of fight training but mostly in internal thoughts by the characters, it's pretty fukking difficult to depict in the movie without just a bunch of talking. There apparently were some training scenes that were left out of the final cut due to runtime.
It did make me want to read the books, though. There's 6 of em, right?
Book 1 is some of the best sci-fi I've ever read and Book 2-3 were very good as well. Book 4-6 are set far after Book 3 and are extremely different, they're decent but you can take them or leave them. After that he died and his son wrote a bunch of sequels claiming to be using his notes, but I've heard negative reviews and a lot of folk think he changed up the story too much.
