Director: Frank Pavich
Cast: Alejandro Jodorowksy, Michel Seydoux, H.R. Giger, Chris Foss
Have I Seen It Before: That’s the real question, isn’t it?
Did I Like It: I think I came to the realization about halfway through the documentary that Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film of Frank Herbert’s novel not only would have been difficult at the time—a talking head reductively compares the scope of the film with the Star Wars prequels—but with all of its ideas probably couldn’t have been contained by a movie, or even a series of movies. This is before Jodorowsky walks into Disney, insists that the movie be 10 hours long (the Mouse House was amenable to a 90-minute version, which simultaneously makes them sound imminently reasonable and the movie sound inoffensively terrible), and still can’t understand decades later why that was a problem.
That’s part of the appeal of the movie: we’ll never see it. A movie you haven’t seen yet is all potential, all possibility. It may be terrible. It may be, again, inoffensive but bland. It may be one of those movies that completely re-wires your brain, and you’re not the same afterward. Before seeing any movie, it could and is any of those things. After seeing it, it is confined by the restrictions of the form (to say nothing of runtime) and becomes finite.
The movie that never was, aiming for a cast including Orson Welles (excellent, if slightly mean casting for Baron Harkonnen) and Salvador Dali (what an Emperor he would have been!), can stay that way, just as say (oddly enough) David Lynch’s Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983) will always be just beyond our comprehension.
How the documentary plays out might vary. It’s sanitized in that way documentaries about movies often are, but that’s to be forgiven when the subject—had it ever seen the light of day—was supposed to be the cinematic equivalent of LSD. Your affection for the Jodorowsky himself is… Well, I generally liked him a great deal and found him interesting, but I certainly had to do more than a little mental gymnastics when he compared creating a cinematic adaptation of a novel to rape, and that they are both the only way to produce a child…