IdiotMachine posted... Harkonnen seems like a macho/strong society. So why would they drug the Atreides prisoners before they have them fight the skinnier nephew?
They want to
appear macho/strong. But they also want to make sure they themselves are not in danger. Feyd-Rautha was actually excited when he realized one of the Atreides prisoners wasn't drugged, and that it was a test from his father the Baron.
IdiotMachine posted... Why did Paul fire nuclear missiles behind the army, instead directly at them? These bombs dont seem to be world-ending powerful, so strategic missiles against the well grouped army seems to have been a better option.
He wasn't trying to destroy the army with the nukes. He used them to blow a hole in the mountain-wall surrounding the city in order to get in with the sand worms.
IdiotMachine posted... How come majority of these soldiers seem to not have any of those shields up, and the fremen are tearing through them so easily? The first movie made it very clear you have to attack in a specific fast-but-slow method to pierce those shields; its very clear the fremen are not fighting like this, nor were there any scenes that showed them being trained to fight like this.
Stylistic choice, I guess. I'm pretty sure the Sardaukar were all using shields in the book. Probably would have been one hell of a CG budget to add shields for every soldier during the fight scenes and likely wouldn't have looked very good. So they just ignored them for practical reasons. The point of the shields basically was just to force hand-to-hand combat, and they didn't really need an excuse for that in the movie.
IdiotMachine posted... Paul releases the fremen to go attack the other houses in the air/space. How do the fremen know how to pilot the emperors spacecrafts?
They don't. The spacecrafts are all piloted by Guild Navigators. Since they are so infused with Spice, they will literally die if they lose their supply or are removed from their Spice-infused water tanks. As such, they follow whoever controls the Spice.
IdiotMachine posted... I didnt understand the significance of walking through the desert in that dancing way. Why walk like that? If its to avoid the worms, how come they dont always walk like that?
Rythmic sounds are what attract the worms. They walk like that on the sand because it obscures the sound of their footsteps, making it sound more like sand being blown by the wind than the footsteps of a creature, so the worms will ignore it. They don't do it
all the time because there are many places where the worms can't reach due to rock near the surface or the sand being too shallow.
IdiotMachine posted... If the worms can be summoned so easily, be driven around like trains and devour everything in their path, are bulletproof, and arent harmed by missiles, why havent the fremens used it as a weapon?
Since there's lots of places the worms can't reach (the capital Arrikeen being the biggest example, hence the nukes to blow a hole in the mountain to let them in), they wouldn't be much help in a proper full-scale war on the planet.
IdiotMachine posted... If the emperor can very easily tell the south has human activity, how did the harkonens miss that?
Why was the emperor so quick to get rid of the harkonens (destroying Barons life support and his spine thingy)?
They didn't miss it, they were lying to the emperor when they told him they didn't know about the activity in the south. They knew about it, they just couldn't do anything because the storms were too extreme for them to get their ornithopters through and they were too arrogant to believe that the Fremen were enough of a threat to be worth the effort.
The Baron had designs on the imperial throne for himself (well, for his son Feyd-Rautha, as his puppet), and the Emperor knew it. His failures on Arrakis were all the excuse the Emperor needed to get rid of him, even if he didn't get the chance to finish it himself before Paul arrived.