Jodorowsky's Dune

Sometimes, the stories behind bad films or films drenched in behind-the-scenes drama can make for better entertainment than the movie itself. Documentaries like Best Worst Movie, Doomed!, and Lost Souls offer peeks behind the curtain at abominations of cinema that are way more endearing than their subjects. There's some people who prefer Hearts Of Darkness to Apocalypse Now. On paper, then, a documentary about the unmade 1975 film version of Dune by provocative avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky should be a fascinating watch. Jodorowsky's vision for the movie was both legendary and insane, impossible to film in its time for a myriad of reasons. Seeing the how and why should make for a good documentary for film nerds, as long as it was done right. You know, objectively and analytically. That is the infuriating failure of the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune. It does not stop at failing to be objective. Jodorowsky's Dune is a hagiography. It spends ten minutes of its ninety minute run time establishing Jodorowsky's bonafides, less than ten at the end in a wrap-up, and the rest worshipping the ambitions of his unrealized dream and mourning their loss. The outlandish sets that would be too bizarre for an Olympic village. The special effects shots that would be difficult to pull off at the turn of the century, even with CGI (including wanting an interstellar tracking shot that would be longer than Orson Welles' opening shot in Touch Of Evil). Casting choices that break the boundaries of fantastical, and the silly and expensive promises needed to land people like Salvador Dali as The Emperor (hiring his equally-inexperienced muse to play Princess Irulan) or Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen (hiring his personal chef). Putting his own son in the lead role of Paul and putting him through rigorous martial arts and knife-fighting training. Getting Pink Floyd to do the soundtrack because they'd done Dark Side Of The Moon, so, you know, moon ... Dune ... the connection is obvious. Assembling a super-crew of people like Dan O'Bannon (who worked on the special effects for John Carpenter's first movie, Dark Star, and would go on to write Alien) and H.R. Giger (to do concept art and design) and get them to drop their lives and move to France. The documentary treats none of this as quixotic, and it certainly never questions whether any of these lofty goals were pushing his ambitions out of reach. Each one is introduced as discussed with fawning praise you normally don't hear outside of obituaries for recently passed saints. It takes the time to roughly animate some of the shot sketches from his personal log book to give us, the viewers, what it would've been like, highlighting portions where Jodorowsky deviated wildly from the script, treating these scenes as holy scripture from a misunderstood genius. It never questions the idea of getting non-actors for key roles, or getting one of the biggest bands in rock music to score a soundtrack when they were in the middle of creative struggles recording the follow-up to their most successful album. Even his desire to make the movie somewhere between 10-14 hours long -- not a series of movies totaling that, but ONE MOVIE -- doesn't get treated with skepticism. That's pretty much the message of this entire documentary: the poor Jodorowsky had his dreams stifled and crushed by a cruel, uncaring industry that cares only for commerce, not art. He had a singular vision for a movie that would awaken a level of consciousness in the people of Earth heretofore never realized! I'm not kidding on that last bit, the guy really thought this would be some kind of religious experience, and every talking head in this movie agrees. Nobody, and I do mean NOBODY, in this movie, at any point, even suggests that maybe Jodorowsky got out over his skis on this. Nope, the Hollywood machine had it out for him, it didn't see the importance in his art and how it could change the world. But it doesn't stop there, folks, because then the movie has the audacity to claim that this movie that never got made, that few people have ever even seen the artbook Jodorowsky was using as his script-slash-bible, is directly responsible for a slate of legendary movies, often making veiled accusations of theft. One person tries to say that a swordfight planned for Dune looks just like the lightsaber fights in the Star Wars movies, because, as well know, there were never swordfights in movies before Jodorowsky's Dune. Columns of fire belching out of something and destroying crowds of people? Lucas and Spielberg stole that for Raiders Of The Lost Ark. The colorful and fantastical costuming of Flash Gordon or Masters Of The Universe? Stolen from Dune. Because O'Bannon and Giger went on to work together on Alien four years later, they must've stolen things from an unmade movie! Even cyberpunk movies like Blade Runner and The Matrix, this movie claims, wouldn't exist without Jodorowsky's mythical genius paving the way. The way this documentary paints it, half of modern sci-fi's slate of movies wouldn't have happened if this movie that didn't happen ... still didn't happen, I guess. But it also then claims that if it HAD happened, it would've changed the industry in irrevocable ways, putting forth the notion that big-budget blockbuster entertainment like Star Wars wouldn't exist because this movie, which would've been so artistic and enlightening, would've made it impossible. The same Star Wars that, by Lucas' own admission, was inspired by film serials from the 40's. If you're keeping score, this documentary is trying to say if it HAD been made it would've killed these movies, but by NOT coming it, it inspired them. I don't know whether to be insulted at the sheer audacity of these claims, or laugh at their obvious contradictory nature. Every moment of Jodorowsky's Dune is spent verbally fellating an egomaniac. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying everybody with a grandiose artistic vision is a maniac. I've had my fair share of ideas that were too big to accomplish. Many of the greatest directors in history, the greatest authors, and the greatest bands, have unrealized projects that exist only in their heads because the roadblocks to making them a reality were insurmountable. But if having an unattainable artistic dream isn't bad on merit alone, then the opposite, that it isn't good either, must also be true, and that is Jodorowsky's Dune fundamental misunderstanding. Nobody in the making of this documentary was able to separate their hero worship from the realities of the situation. They went in with a conclusion -- Jodorowsky had a vision that was impossible to realize both because of the cruel nature of the business and practical limitations -- and worked backwards from there, with the mindset that the split between those two reasons was 90/10. But having an unrealized dream doesn't make someone an under-appreciated genius ahead of their time; it just makes them an artist with an unmade project. The value and quality of that vaporous concept is, at best, speculative, and at worst, non-existent. Jodorowsky's Dune does not, cannot, and will not, consider such heretical concepts. Without the ability to be objective or even critical of Jodorowsky and his ideas, Jodorowsky's Dune has as much value as his unmade movie: none whatsoever.