I would bet real money the De Laurentiis studio basically sized Dune up as "space epic....lots of desert....heroic white male figure the audience can identify with....epic saga" -- seriously, Hollywood can be that cookie cutter. (And to this day you can find thinkpieces on how Star Wars was totes influenced by Lawrence of Arabia.) One thing that's always been very difficult to film is how much Paul is holding back and subverting that bloody Manifest Destiny of him at the head of the avenging armies with the Atreides banner. That story was super influenced by Lawrence, which came out just three years before Herbert's book. You get an echo of it in Return of the Jedi where Luke has to resist the Dark Side &c &c, but not very much. (Herbert was reportedly furious with Star Wars and thought Lucas had ripped off his book in a dumbed-down populist way. I don't think there's a lot of thinkpieces on that, tho.)