Let me just begin by acknowledging that Dune: Part One is an amazing movie. It's a spectacular feat of cinema and I'm not trying to take away from that at all. There's just one thing about the movie--it's a story thing, naturally--that doesn't quite satisfy me in the way that literally every other aspect of the film does.
So, let's talk about the climax of Dune: Part One.
Splitting the story of Dune into two movies was the right choice. The novel is simply too dense to work as one movie, and giving all the story elements time to breathe and build is important when dealing with such density of ideas. Choosing where to split the story was also an easy choice, I'd imagine, as there's a slight time-skip right in the middle of the novel.
Unfortunately, this left the filmmakers with the short end of the stick when it came to ending Part One. How to build a satisfying climax when Paul essentially spends most of the movie on the backfoot? Rightly, I think, the filmmakers chose Paul's duel with Jamis as the climax of the movie. It's the final step Paul must take before joining the Fremen and an alliance with the group is what his father had wanted from the beginning.
There were a few hurdles that the climax struggled to jump, though. The filmmakers did attempt to set this fight up earlier in the movie by giving Paul repeated visions about someone giving him a knife, but I don't think it was enough to make the duel feel like much of a payoff to anything. Nor was Paul's reluctance to kill another man something that was set up earlier, making his decision to do so fall a little flat. They showed him being a formidable duellist from the very beginning too, so Paul overcoming Jamis didn't really represent any change on Paul's part.
It's important to note that the duel wasn't supposed to be a payoff or a climax in the novel--it's just another step along the Atreides alliance with the Fremen--and I think the climax works well as a bridge to Part Two. I also have no idea what the filmmakers could've done to remedy this. They wanted to make Part Two from the beginning which means they couldn't really mess with the structure of the larger Dune story too much. The most obvious thing to do would be to put Paul in a situation earlier in the movie where he should've taken a life but couldn't, which would give the climax a bit more power, but I can't think of a single place to put a scene like that that doesn't mess with the structure of things. It would also be a huge deviation from the book and given how loyal Part One is to the source material, I don't think such a scene was ever on the table. The movie is also two and half hours long, so it's not like they had the space to squeeze in more set up.
Overall, I can't really criticise the filmmakers for their choice. There wasn't a perfect way to handle this problem, but as a writer myself, I think there's an important lesson here about what kinds of payoffs a story should typically have in its climax and how those payoffs are typically set up.
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