The new movies were questionable for me. On one side they cut off many important scenes and major characters (Piter de Vries was shown for like a minute totasl, but wasn't even mentioned by name!) to put some minor character development and many sand scenes, but on the other they inserted many things that might been in the book but were only introduced partially in Messiah because during writing book 1 F.H. did not yet thought of it.

EDIT: Ultimately, the thing to do is to watch all three versions. Each of them have some strong and some weak points and all three complement themselves to make pretty much complete picture. And also infinite nerd discussion potential.