Jodorowsky's Dune (2013)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2013
	Director: Frank Pavich
	Actors: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Michel Seydoux, H.R. Giger
	Country: USA, F
	Genre: Documentary
	Conditions of visioning: 26.02.2016, SD VOD, 14" computer screen
Synopsis: The genesis of Alejandro Jodorowsky's project to adapt Frank Herbert's Dune for the cinema, project that was doomed never to see the light.
Review: The ambition of the project can be summarize by listing the team of "Warriors" that  Jodorowsky had assembled on this project: his friend Michel Seydoux as producer, French Comics books genius Jean "Moebius" Giraud, British SF cover designer Chris Foss and H.R. Giger (later designer of the Alien creature) as conceptual artists, Dan O'Bannon (also later on Alien) as special effects supervisor, Pink Floyd and Magma for the soundtrack, and in the cast his own son Brontis (already in El Topo and in the future La Danza de la Realidad) as Paul, Salvador Dali as the Emperor (requesting 100 000 dollars per minute of film with his image) and his muse Amanda Lear as the princess, Orson Welles as the Baron Harkonen, and also Mick Jager and David Carradine (known at the time from the Kung-Fu TV-series). A perfect cast and crew that started to work on the "Greatest Science Fiction movie Never made" as the tagline of this documentary announces. Because indeed the movie was never made in spite of magnificent storyboard that was sent to all Hollywood studios and that I have had the chance to see once exposed in a Paris museum. I had always thought that the project had been refused because of excessive budget while in fact it was because of its director and of the atypical story, although I suspect that had the movie ever been produced, it would have exploded its budget and/or would have looked rather cheap because of the limited special effects of the time. In fact Jodorowsky was at the top of his fame, but for movie that don't really follow Hollywood's standards: Fando & Lys, El Topo and La Montaga Sagrada. And the story freely departed from Herbert's version to incorporate Jodorowsky's vision (extremely interesting and philosophical when he tells it by the way). The documentary cleverly starts with a brief biography on Jodorowsky followed by the narration of the quest to find Warriors (almost like in a good Western or Martial Arts movie), accompanied by testimonies by those warriors themselves, like for example the one of O'Bannon who tells of his first almost Shamanic encounter with the director. Remember that the guy is the creator of Psycho Magic that I recently heard him describe at the Gérardmer Fantastic Film Festival. And the question that haunts the whole movie is: what if we lived in a World in which the movie would have been made (would it have been the greatest movie ever?), or on the contrary in a world in which its design work (the "Book") would not have been here to influence the Cinema from the past decades (would we have Blade Runner, Star Wars, Flash Gordon, The Matrix?). Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive), one spiritual son of Jodorowsky, advocates the major impact of the work by the visionary director and his team. Only a little of those choices transpire in David Lynch's version of Dune that was finally produced loosely re-using Jodorowsky's ideas. The documentary in itself is not revolutionary but the story of Jodorowsky's Dune has to be told to the World.
Rating: 6 /10