Jodorowsky's Dune (2013)

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

An epic behind-the-scenes tale of massive creativity gone off the rails with legends of film and music intertwined with one man's uncompromising vision of Dune. If you miss scifi's hey day of quiet introspection and larger-than-life concepts married with cutting edge visuals, this documentary will whet your appetite.

"Almost all the battles were won, but the war was lost,"Jodorowsky writes in an essay on his experience with the project. "The project was sabotaged in Hollywood. It was French and not American. Its message was not 'enough Hollywood.' There were intrigues, plundering. The story-board circulated among all the large studios. Later, the visual aspect of Star Wars resembled our style. To make Alien, they invited Moebius, Foss, Giger, O'Bannon, etc.," to say nothing of its traces visible in Blade Runner and The Matrix. While the 80+-year-old Jodorowsky has made a return to filmmaking in recent years, his Dune will most likely remain on the lists of the greatest movies never made. But its influence, if not its scale, will no doubt continue to manifest in generations of sci-fi cinema to come.

If you love the metaphysical, if you love the spiritual, if you love passion, documentaries, science-fiction, or movies, watch this.This documentary on 'the best movie never made' takes you through the process of an uprising director on the path to making one of the 1960's most ambitious movie-projects.Jodorowsky's intent was to change the perceptions of the public by adapting the sci-fi novel Dune into a glorious big-screen piece of art. He wanted to do this by subtly reproducing the effects a drug like LSD has on you in order to 'open the minds'.I especially loved how he talked about several synchronicities, spiritual concepts, and other things like working from the heart. Jodorowsky is a legit artist and one massive ball of energy, even at the age of 84. This was a very inspiring watch and I highly recommend it if you're into the more qualitative documentaries.

I love good documentaries and this is one of them but one thing to keep in mind about most of them is their need to steer and corral you into a point of view. The point of view of this one is that Jodorowsky's Dune wasn't made because of inflexibility and lack of vision by the Hollywood studio machine.The film ended with me thinking that was an unfair judgment. Two key factors would kill this film even today: One was the demand by Jodorowsky that the film be 15 hours. Imagine if the original Star Wars trilogy was made all at once into a 6 hour film. We'd certainly enjoy it but would many 13 year olds who fell in love with the first film be able to handle sitting for 6 hours straight even with an intermission? Also, three movies made 3 times more money than one.This film COULD have gotten made! If Jodorowsky started out from the Planet Caladan and ended on Arrakis just after the Baron had killed Duke Leto and Paul had escaped, for instance. The budget would have been reduced and even if Hollywood had rejected it, he could have filmed from a private investor (no doubt Salvador Dali and Orson Welles could have made some phone calls) In the end, ironically, the studio execs were right: Jodorowsky simply wasn't practical enough of a director to get the film cut. He was ingenious in negotiating and compromising with the biggest egos of all time including literally Orson Welles and Dali but couldn't figure out a way to make this project viable to a simple minded Hollywood exec? His genius could have manipulated such a simple mind if he had allowed himself to.So it's thoughts like that which make this documentary into one of the best thoughtful experiences ever. Even if you disagree with my conclusion, the vision of what this film could have been, and why it wasn't, is as engaging as any of the three Star Wars "prequel" films. What I think the film could have been like is a 100 times better than what Lynch's Dune turned out to be.