After creating several artsy, cult sensations in the early 1970s, Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky decided he wanted to make a feature adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel Dune.
After completing a script. Jodorowsky commenced by hiring some top artists. Moebius (Jean Giraud), a rising French comic artist, was hired to storyboard the film and to work with the director to create the overarching visual style. Chris Foss, a British artist renowned for the covers he had created for science-fiction novels, was recruited to design sets and spaceships. H.R. Giger a surrealist Swiss painter and sculptor, was hired to design alien creatures and further sets. Dan O'Bannon, who had co-written and done effects for Dark Star, was recruited for visual effects work.
Jodorowsky next recruited musicians to score the film. His idea was to have each world represented by a different band. One of the bands he recruited was Pink Floyd. Jodorowsky tells the story of meeting with an indifferent Floyd crew that only signed on with the film once the director screamed at them to put down their Big Macs and pay attention to his project.
For actors, Jodorowsky recruited Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, and Orson Welles for lead roles. To play the hero, Jodorowsky recruited his son and forced the teenager to endure two years of constant martial arts training for the role.
With quite a stunning package put together, it was time for Jodorowsky to go to Hollywood. And once he did that all we're left with 30 years later is this documentary on what could have been. Those damn Hollywood types will get you every time.
For any lover of film, particularly those that dream of science fiction and fantasy being given proper treatment on celluloid (excuse me, on digital cinema package), Jodorowsky's Dune is a must-see. It's as much a fantasy as any good science-fiction, in that it imagines that had Jodorowsky been able to bring his work to fruition, it would have been brilliant and may have changed the course of movie history.
Of course, the beauty of Jodorowsky's failure to bring his work to the screen is that it can be more powerful in the imagination than it almost certainly would have been in reality. The documentary openly laments that Jodorowsky was denied his dream, while also acknowledging that the dream itself may have had more influence than anything else.
Director Frank Pavich beautifully brings us snippets of what Jodorowsky was planning, including animating some scenes based on the storyboards and design work, but he doesn't try to make the film himself. He gives us just enough to power our imaginations and to make us salivate over what could have been, without overdoing it to the point where we, the audience, can't fill in the blanks. The result is a celebration of Jodorowsky's dream and a steadfast refusal to engage in any doubt or deconstruction. It is, in the end, fantasy, but a very fun fantasy.
The film is led by Jodorowsky's energetic presence as an interviewee - it isn't hard to see why the people that worked with him marvel at his ability to motivate. He's filled with positive energy. I could imagine people working with him would fall in love with his sheer passion and belief that they are working on something magical. And the visuals we see of what his Dune could have been, aided by some excellent animation, suggest something that would have been pretty damn interesting to look at.
Stepping outside of the fantasy, however, the wall that Pavich builds with his film crumbles a bit. The bashing of Hollywood for not seeing the genius of Jodorowsky's dream is a bit much. Various talking heads agree that Hollywood is a soul-sucking place that crushes dreams. It is only slipped in, as if a tangential point, that Jodorowsky was insisting to Hollywood studios that he planned a 14 hour running time. 14 hours!
In the present age a studio might rub its hands and start talking of trilogy, but there's no sense that Jodorowsky was pitching anything more than a single, jaw-droppingly long film at a massive price. There isn't a filmmaker in the bunch of talking heads that, if appointed to head a studio, would drop a record budget on an arthouse filmmaker without a record of commercial success in the United States pitching a 14 hour film. Hollywood has its many, many problems, but I think accusing it of being in the wrong here is terribly naive and fantasist.
Jodorowsky believed in his dream, and it is exciting, but it doesn't seem like anyone stopped to tell him that there was simply no way he would ever get the money he was looking for from a major Hollywood studio. Studios exist to make money, not art. It is up to the filmmakers to make the art happen - to sneak it in, if you will - not the accountants and MBAs in the corner offices. Demanding something from them that no one could realistically expect of them seems a bit pointless. Don't go to Hollywood asking for money and then act offended when Hollywood wants to talk about money.
Toward the end of this documentary the filmmakers and their interviewees also theorize that, while Jodorowsky's Dune didn't get made, it has nonetheless influenced Hollywood in the decades since. The case Pavich makes for this is actually fairly weak. The most undeniable connection is that Jodorowsky almost certainly helped pave the way for Giger to come to Hollywood. Dan O'Bannon would go on to write the screenplay for Alien, where Giger would first reach the screen with his design for the alien creature.
Beyond that, however, the film simply takes scenes from other films and tries to match them to Jodorowsky's storyboards. There might be something there, or there might not. Pointing to the light saber fight in Star Wars and pointing out that there was a swordfight in the Dune storyboards is a big reach. Was there something particularly unique in Jodorowsky's storyboard for the sword fight? Not that we are shown. It seems just as likely that both Jodorowsky and George Lucas were inspired by the same old swashbuckling movies.
For us to accept that there was really as much influence from Jodorowsky as Pavich insists, we should hear from the filmmakers that made those movies that were supposedly influenced by Jodorowsky's Dune. This is the greatest flaw of the film. While the interviewees are all excellent - particularly Jodorowsky and his surviving artist collaborators - where are the filmmakers from the 1970s and 1980s that were supposedly influenced by the guy? Director Richard Stanley, whose most famous work is probably Hardware from 1990, is the closest we get, but I do not recall seeing any comparison of his work with Jodorowsky's work from Dune. We also get an interview with Nicholas Winding Refn, but again no comparison between his work and Jodorowsky's.
While it's possible that filmmakers have been inspired by Jodorowsky's work on Dune, it seems far more likely that the Hollywood filmmakers were working from the same inspirations as Jodorowsky. The film incidentally makes a better case for the influence of comic books on Hollywood films than anything else. Which is to take nothing away from Jodorowsky - his Dune work really does look compelling.
In the end, while the case ultimately made by Pavich is not as strong as it may seem on first glance, it does not change the fun nature of this journey. Led by the enthusiastic, infectious Jodorowsky, film lovers are likely to come away from this movie themselves inspired to chase their dreams. If nothing else, it sparks our own imaginations. And in that the documentary makes its best case for the power of Jodorowsky.
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