Jodorowsky's Dune covers the infamous film that never was: a 10-hour-plus epic that would have starred Salvador Dali as The Emperor and Orson Welles as Baron Vladimir Harkonen, all against the backdrop of an H. R.-Giger-inspired world of sci-fi oddities.
The greatest film never made is captured in this documentary with the notorious eccentric filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky hosting the journey chronicling the film's journey into never-being: yet the fact it never happened didn't stop its influence permeating EVERY nook and cranny of the film industry then onward. It was a project so wild, so ambitious and so groundbreaking that there was no way the 1970s could muster such an impossible film. Yet the story behind it and the attempts to make Dune for the big screen: nothing short of great stories themselves.
Hopefully there will be a film like this for George Miller's Justice League: Mortal, or Guillermo Del Toro's The Hobbit, Edgar Wright's Ant-Man or even David Lynch's Star Wars: Episode VI. The possibilities for 'never made cinema' documentaries feels like an untapped well of potential begging to be tapped into.
Jodorowsky's Dune is a wild yet necessary window into the world of high-concept filmmaking being stretched so thin that all the effort was too much for one project to carry alone; so literally everyone attached divided and conquered cinema in their own ways after the film ceased production.
One of the 2010s' finest documentaries and easily 2013's craziest one by a long shot. Heck, it could even be the finest film covering Dune's impact on cinema and one of the best Dune films out there, period. 5/5 stars.
The greatest film never made is captured in this documentary with the notorious eccentric filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky hosting the journey chronicling the film's journey into never-being: yet the fact it never happened didn't stop its influence permeating EVERY nook and cranny of the film industry then onward. It was a project so wild, so ambitious and so groundbreaking that there was no way the 1970s could muster such an impossible film. Yet the story behind it and the attempts to make Dune for the big screen: nothing short of great stories themselves.
Hopefully there will be a film like this for George Miller's Justice League: Mortal, or Guillermo Del Toro's The Hobbit, Edgar Wright's Ant-Man or even David Lynch's Star Wars: Episode VI. The possibilities for 'never made cinema' documentaries feels like an untapped well of potential begging to be tapped into.
Jodorowsky's Dune is a wild yet necessary window into the world of high-concept filmmaking being stretched so thin that all the effort was too much for one project to carry alone; so literally everyone attached divided and conquered cinema in their own ways after the film ceased production.
One of the 2010s' finest documentaries and easily 2013's craziest one by a long shot. Heck, it could even be the finest film covering Dune's impact on cinema and one of the best Dune films out there, period. 5/5 stars.