“What is the goal of life? It’s to create yourself a soul.”

Trouble at the first words, the quote above refuses humanity to anyone unwilling to put in the effort to “make” a soul. The hidden lie, of course, is: which totalitarian regime judges what work is soulful? And such is needed; something as ad omnibus as the pre-Revolutionary Roman Church which, after all, threw in the soul gratis with the flesh but held a proprietary accompt over how you treated it.

I have not seen El Topo or The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky but I will, because I wish to see what his Dune might have been like. That being said, any person who pauses to think should thank their lucky stars that Jodorowsky was stopped before he could make this film and destroy dozens of lives and untold wealth in the desert of Algiers.

Simply put: no man who could do what Jodorowsky did to his own son should have any position of authority ever. Those old silent films were not worth running cattle off of cliffs to their deaths; this film would have been no different.

Lots of charming stories are told by the would-be crew, most are quite entertaining and informative, painting Jodorowsky as an even more driven Steve Jobs. H.R. Giger sounds like a precocious prepubescent boy with a frog in his throat here; this dashes one’s expectations of a gravel-voiced necromantic cyberneticist but a surprising disconnect between a non-performing artist and his work is hardly new, just as Nicolas Winding Refn’s raging paranoia is not shocking but still unpleasant.

Indeed, as quirky as Jodorowsky is, with his expressive hands and onomatopoeia, the most threatening figures in this documentary are the rabid fanboys. Refn quietly seethes over the damage done by Star Wars and the “megabucks blockbuster structure,” ignoring that Jaws started that two years prior. Some blame the same big American film corporations that funded 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, both science fiction films with oddly spiritual takes, as out to destroy higher consciousness once and for all.

(Oddly, no one blames Michel Seydoux, who had never produced any film, let alone with a Chilean megalomaniac, before 1973, the year Seydoux distributed The Holy Mountain in Europe and offered, and failed, to fund said maniac’s next.)

The fanboys cite Frank Herbert’s spice “melange” as a consciousness-expanding drug, which makes some sense since Jodorowsky’s idea was to recreate ’60s LSD visions as drug-free cinema. But they also compare Arrakis, or Dune, to Afghanistan as a place of supreme geopolitical importance. What else do they get wrong?

In story, sandworms exude melange and are only found on Arrakis. Melange offers man life extension, expanded consciousness and awareness, and precognition. Only precognition allows safe use of the faster-than-light Holtzman drive. Thus melange alone creates the entire Galactic economy. The water of life, another sandworm product, offers access to past lives but it too becomes another control battle.

For Herbert, the spice of Dune is a hydraulic despotism, a lens to concentrate and examine political power, which is the core of Dune: a comparatively mature contemplation of power, its benefits and costs, its ultimate goals. I say “comparatively” because it is the sin of critics who know nothing of Renaissance England to babble about how William Shakespeare understood power and politics, who knew nothing of the sort. Shakespeare lived not too long after Agincourt, when men at arms did all the fighting as a disorganized mob, when authority end law extended as far as your mailed fist or naked voice could project. (When you read a Shakespearean king and his words suddenly shift into hyperdrive, the tingle up your spine is exactly this projection.)

Herbert began Dune as a novel about Liet-Kynes and desert ecologies, but by publication in 1965 (by Chiltons!) the true subject was power and CHOAM, his feo-totalitarian cartel earning most of its profits from spice, was explicitly based on OPEC (prescience indeed). Religion in Dune is taken seriously but never literally, as expression of human will, faith and drive. In Herbert, as in Heinlein, expanded consciousness leads only to philosophy on how and when to use governing force. Hippie visions need not apply.

David Lynch’s Dune was quite faithful to the book but inspires hostility from Jodorowsky and others, who come looking for religious ecstasy and get nothing but Machiavellian philosophy (the original maligned Republican). The friend who recommended Herbert’s novel to Jodorowsky may not have known how ill-fit the two minds were. Jodorowsky follows Strindberg, Lynch an American magical realism; Lynch frets the novel’s politics less. (Or perhaps magical naturalism: consider the ear in Blue Velvet: a call to adventure in the hero’s journey to the underworld, where nothing is supernatural at all but the world is still a strange and dangerous place.)

The fanboys also natter on how this unmade film influenced others. Some are honest and direct: Dan O’Bannon, post-Jodo, hired Giger to design the Xenomorph for Alien. But how many other films did this affect? They mention the Terminator’s computer readout vision as a legacy of the unmade Dune’s storyboards, but by 1973 we had already seen Westworld through Yul Brynner’s infrared vision. How many people saw Jodo’s storyboard books? How many were made when only two still exist?

As I watch, at some point, El Topo, I will not like it. Messianic, religio-political Latin/Catholic visions always leave me cold. But I hope to be fascinated at least once as I was by this documentary.

Fascinating, classic film about a visionary director and what might have been! From all the hype over this legendary documentary, I was expecting something like a re-creation of Jodorowsky‘s vision for his version of “Dune“. It’s really more of a biographical profile of Jodorowsky himself, and his amazing career in art and filmmaking. There are many images from the massive storyboard he created for the proposed film, but they are interspersed with interviews and stories, and you don’t really get a full sense of what Jodorowsky‘s “Dune“ would have been, except to recognize that it would have been remarkable. Still a very interesting look at this unusual artist and his crazed proposal for an unusual film.

It would be wrong to end without noting that Jodorowsky himself is a questionable and controversial character. There are many stories of his abusive treatment of actors and crew on his films. He himself claims that he literally raped a woman on camera in one of his early films; in this documentary he tells how he made his own son, from the age of about seven years old, literally live like Paul Atreides for years, and learn gymnastics and martial arts, in order to star as that character in the film. The film was never made, so the boy essentially devoted most of his formative years to living as someone else in service to his father’s grotesque artistic vision, and to no purpose; he admits in an interview that this had lingering effects on his life and his relationship to his father.

Throughout, the film makes clear how consuming and overweening Jodorowsky‘s belief in his art is; he seems to have little self-awareness of how badly he treats other people, or how much his artistry distorts his humanity. (The mere fact that he seriously proposed making a 14-hour version of “Dune,“ and didn’t seem to understand why no studio would support that, is incontrovertible evidence of how uncompromising his vision was, and how far divorced from reality!) But he is unquestionably a fascinating character, and this documentary is a tantalizing look at what surely would have been a fascinating, though possibly unwatchable, film.

I don't know what I was expecting watching this, as I didn't even realize until it was mentioned near the start that Jodorowsky was the guy who made The Holy Mountain. That only seemed to elevate my expectations going into this documentary, wanting to see and hear what this crazy man's vision of Dune would be.

For all the talking that Jodorowsky does in the documentary (and it is a lot), it is mentioned at some point early on that when the opportunity came for him to do a film after Holy Mountain, he wanted to make "Dune", despite having not read it, but just hearing about it from a friend. At no point for the next hour is it ever clear whether he actually got around to even starting to read "Dune" or what the plan or vision for this film even was.

Very little of what would have been the film is shown to us in this documentary; we get less than a dozen scraps of concept art and lots of meandering stories that basically amount to meeting people, and talking about what great artists those people are. Having only seen Holy Mountain once, and having been probably very very drunk, I have no way of interpreting what Jodorowsky's vision of Dune might be because almost no one interviewed for it has anything specific to say beyond "it's genius, too good for hollywood" and the like.

As for the actual contents, the only real things Jodorowsky offers are random snippets like Duke Leto being castrated long before meeting Jessica, and Jessica creating Paul by turning a drop of Leto's blood into semen, and this is all described and discussed in such a rambling way that it just screams to me of being weird edgy stuff that might have some deeper meaning or symbolism if it was actually done and depicted on screen.

But since all we're basically getting is a crazy man trying to incoherently describe something he wanted to create, it's difficult to make anything of it from either a literary or artistic perspective. It just comes across as the film sharing this tidbit of information just to go "Look how weird and crazy this guy is with his weird ideas!"

Ultimately, this is basically just a 30 minute story of a movie that never left pre-production phase padded and stretched out to 90 minutes to include endless sycophantic praise and a whole lot of people telling us vague generalities like "This movie would have been great" without telling us how or why it would have been great beyond just depending on the reputation of Jodorowsky.

I read Dune. I read it when it was FIRST printed: in serial editions of a sci-fi magazine decades ago. I thought it was a great novel. So did some film directors, like Alejandro Jadorowsky. This documentary is about his film making and his greatest work, which was never actually made: his version of Dune. Along the way you see brief shots from two prior films: El Topo and The Magic Mountain. These very quickly convinced me that he must be, at the least, a madman, or else a genius and a madman. By the end of the movie, I concluded he is both.

Giving away some of the plot: his work on this project pre-dated "Star Wars" by about two years. At the time, the furthest that computer graphic special effects had gone was "2001: A Space Odyssey". Dune is a fairly long novel, set on another world in a universe far, far away. Jadorowsky's vision encompassed special effects somewhat beyond Star Wars, to be done with a modest budget. It also planned to include some really BIG names playing some of the roles. It got as far as a beautifully designed storyboard, printed up like one of those over- large and hefty art books some people put on their coffee table to impress guests. This was sent to all the major studios, looking for the rest of the funding needed to actually go into production. They all found it very interesting, but too big a gamble. Jadorowsky, late in this documentary, then speaks of learning that the film rights were subsequently sold to David Lynch and how he was simultaneously happy and depressed. As he puts it, he knew Lynch had real talent, so the movie would get made, though not by him. He was terrified to think he might find Lynch's version better than his own. His son eventually talked him into going to the theatre and watching it, and he describes how, as the film went on, his fear turned into massive relief. A TERRIBLE movie! [True--it WAS a terrible movie--mainly because it completely perverted the central idea of the book, but that's another story]. He's generous to Lynch, in saying Lynch himself would never have done a movie like this--the producers must have insisted on him going along with THEIR vision. And Jodorowsky then gives a short, impassioned speech about the inherent contradiction between a director who wants to produce a work of art, and a studio that wants a guaranteed good profit more than anything else. Lastly there is talk about how it may be the most important film never actually made, and proceeds to compare designs in the storyboard with scenes from subsequent (generally science fiction) films that studios actually released.

It may be a good thing that he didn't get to make his version of Dune but this left me with an interest in seeing his other films, bizarre as they may be. He's obviously a director with charisma, passion...and a touch of madness. Great documentary.

Let's face it. The guy loves Dune. But honestly, this would have been absurd and set Sci Fi back years- like so much Sci Fi back then. File under looks good on paper, but a miss in reality. Fun to hear about, but glad it never happened.

Our popular culture is steeped in a fascination with the production and marketing of movies that often threatens to eclipse our interest in movies themselves.
What we are woefully in the dark about is the preproduction of movies, so much so that even though this documentary was all about Alejandro Jodorowsky, one of my favorite directors of all time, I was skeptical that it could hold my interest, seeing as it was all about a film that was cancelled before a single shot was taken. It seemed that even a best case scenario would only have one pining to see a movie that never could be seen, rather than enjoying the movie one is seeing.
My skepticism melted away quickly as I watched this. Jodorowsky, as anyone who's listened to his commentary on El Topo or Holy Mountain knows, is fascinating to listen to as well as to act. His ideas are so grandiose and at the same time so heartfelt, his erudition so inspirational, his spirit so untamed even at age 84, the age when he was filmed for this project. But his Dune is remarkable for how much other top notch talent was brought in. There's HR Giger of Alien fame, Dan O'Bannon who did Dark Star and Alien, Chris Foss, whose illustrations of space ships filled the Terran Trade Authority books that so fascinated me as a child, and of course Mœbius, that incredible French comic book artist who went on to do so many fascinating collaborations with Jodorowksy. And all of them participated in some fantastic work, including a full storyboard by Mœbius, which is brilliantly animated here, sumptuous costume sketches, a full-color painting of a zebra striped, psychedelic hued pirate spaceship hemorrhaging spice by Foss and four stunning airbrush paintings of the Harkonnen castle by Giger, And then at the end, just after the story is told of how Hollywood turned down an opportunity to fund the project to a score of a (measly sounding to today's ears) $15 million, irony of all ironies because they doubted that big budget, special effects laden science fiction epics would be capable of attracting big audiences (and more reasonably because they were afraid that Jodorowsky would make the movie too long and too challenging for American audiences) documentary makers tack on a pretty astounding montage of how many of the Dune ideas have been translated into such memorable films as Star Wars, Flash Gordon, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Contact.
The film is relatively merciful on David Lynch's Dune, but the minuscule sampling they do have, featuring Sting, of course, makes it hilariously clear that Lynch's version was simply on a much lesser plane than Jodorowsky's. Lynch would bounce back to make the amazing Wild At Heart, which I just watched recently (wow!), but one gets the sense that a part of Jodorowksy never recovered completely from having this project, which could well have been his masterpiece, scuttled so unceremoniously.

Despite the title, this documentary is really more for fans of science fiction in cinema than of the novel Dune. In fact, I'm thoroughly convinced that Jodorowsky's version of Dune would have been an atrocity. Jodorowsky comes across as very charming but also a bit of a charlatan. He keeps emphasizing that his film would have changed the world and uplifted consciousnesses, but I have a hard time believing that any movie could have such a profound impact (Star Wars comes the closest). More importantly, Jodorowsky admitted to not having read the book and clearly didn't understand key aspects of the story (Frank Herbert wanted to warn against charismatic leaders, not make Paul into a Christ-like figure).

The documentary does a very good job in bringing this unmade film to life. There are some great images from unused concept art, as well as a few neat camera tricks, to keep it lively. However, felt the documentary really became JODOROWSKY'S Dune rather than Jodorowsky's DUNE. Jodorowsky's is definitely the focus and gets the lion's share of time. Most of the rest of the interviewees spend their time talking about Jodorowsky. This is fine insofar as the documentary needed to personalize the struggle to put Dune on film, but at times I felt it almost distracted from other parts of the production.

The other aspect I felt missing from the documentary was the story of Dune. The actual story is barely mentioned. The film pretty much assumes you know Frank Herbert and his works. Yet there were some missed opportunities to think about how and why Jodorowsky's Dune differed from Herbert's work. I would have enjoyed perhaps hearing what Dune scholars thought about those changes. I'd imagine Frank Herbert, who was alive at the time, also had some thoughts on the subject. Unfortunately, there's probably not enough for hardcore Dune fans.

Ultimately, I definitely recommend checking this documentary out if you're interested in science fiction in cinema. There are some notable sci-fi gurus, including H.R. Giger, who got their start on this movie. If you're just coming at this documentary from a Dune perspective, you'll probably find less to satisfy.

For any film fan of cinema or even SCI-FI, or what goes into the film production process, its a decent documentary, well researched and interviewed but I would have preferred a less bias approach to this presentation and one that would have been braver to explore both sides. Objective opinion on others that were directly or indirectly involved, or fans of the source material as a juxtaposition to what was being interviewed; ex. Douglas Trumbull would have been a great insight as to his take technically on the project, the studio exec that sat in on the proposal, an animatic short of the story board as they did for the opening would have been a nice added touch in the special feature, with 3-D rendering of the production painting are utilizing the dialogue & illustration of the "actor/actress" slated to appear. Nevertheless the documentary allege this would have been cinematic vision bar setter feature without factoring into what was available and the "creators" would have produced but in actuality if you view the previous work of the director as well as compare the European SCI-FI production market at the time: ex. Queen of Blood (1966: note SFX from Queen of Blood was made using special effects from the Soviet films Mechte Navstrechu [A Dream Come True] and Nebo Zovyot [Battle Beyond the Sun].) Barbarella (1968), Zardoz (1974), Moonraker (1979), Saturn 3 (1980), Flash Gordon (1980) vs Forbidden Planet (1956), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Wars (1977), Superman (1978), Alien (1979), Outland (1981) and note for yourself the deciding factor vision to conception between these production on those the actually innovated the genre to "A" status verse remaining their B-status.