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(this review was originally written February 25, 2023)
Alejandro Jodorowsky is fucking awesome. The director of Jodorowsky's Dune, Frank Pavich, correctly chooses to let him do most of the talking, since the man spins solid gold every time he opens his mouth. Everything he says could have come from the mind of any doofy drugged-out lunatic, but he's so good-natured and earnest that it's impossible to dislike him. If I said "my art will be the most ambitious achievement in human history, it will create a mass enlightenment", you might want to punch me in the face, but Jodorowsky is so interesting and charismatic he can get away with saying basically whatever he wants. At one point, he completely drops his train of thought to play with his cat for a minute; at another, he pulls a stack of cash from his wallet and yells at it for being fake and empty. He seems to have had so much fun making Dune, it almost doesn't matter whether or not it went anywhere.
Pavich's Jodorowsky's Dune's middle act even starts to FEEL like The Holy Mountain. In that movie, the hero travels to each planet of the solar system, getting the various authoritarian leaders of each planet to join his ragtag band of misfits. Jodorowsky, instead, goes around collecting celebrities; he convinces Salvador Dali by offering him "$100,000 per minute" (with a bit of clever fine-print), and he convinces Orson Welles by agreeing to house his favorite chef on-set. Mick Jagger doesn't even need to be asked. Pink Floyd could've been on board, but Jodorowsky is disgusted by their crass consumption of Big Macs during his meeting with them and refuses to allow them on. In the interview, the people joining his crew try to cover themselves by making it sound like they "respected his artistic prowess" and "followed of their own free will". They're all terrible liars. There is no free will involved at any point. I mean, look at him. Who would say no??
The least important part of his vision seems to be Dune itself. Jodorowsky's Dune sounds like less of an actual adaptation, and more of a vaguely Dune-themed Jodorowsky movie. Like, lock Jodorowsky in a room with a toaster, and in a week he'll have a grand vision of a surreal, toaster-themed film where the Bread Tsar finds profound truth in the Planet of Coils, and all his happy subjects are instantly charred to a perfect crisp. In the same vein, lock Jodorowsky in a room with a copy of Dune, and you'll get something kind of science-fiction-y that has sand worms and superintelligent emperors; his bizarre imagination will fill in the rest. Lock him in a room with a Bible to get The Holy Mountain.
I think this is good, to be clear. My experiences of Dune have universally been that it is stupid and ridiculous. Jodorowsky said he hadn't even read the book when he agreed to adapt it, basically choosing it to be his Magnum Opus at random. Jodorowsky's Dune claims that his storyboards inspired Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Masters of the Universe (???), and ESPECIALLY Alien. From this, and all the storyboards we see, I interpret that it would've been very campy and not at all the kind of Serious Philosophy For Serious Men that the books attempt to be. On some level, I think the people involved all realize the movie they were trying to make was absolute nonsense. They try to pump it it up and make you think it would've been Serious Art. They're missing the point: absolute nonsense is better than Serious Art. (At least, it is when Jodorowsky makes it so.)
There is one strong critique I have of Jodorowsky's Dune: I think it is trying too hard to minimize the part where the movie never actually got made, the immense disjunction between his vision and the possibility of actually bringing it to fruition. The last act finds the film's motley crew crushed by the iron fist of Reality as their dreams are turned to dust. This should be genuinely painful; it obviously stuck with Jodorowsky, if he can still remember his ideas in such detail 50 years on. Instead, little details like the part where he wanted it to be twelve hours long get skimmed past. I find this especially frustrating because I already agree with them that it's a tragedy Jodorowsky's Dune never got seriously attempted; they don't need to hide the executive meddling. They try to connect the happy ending of Jodorowsky's Dune to Jodorowsky's Dune to make it seem more 'inspiring', but to me it felt like pasting a happy face on something fundamentally very sad.
Like Jodorowsky's Dune, Jodorowsky's Dune tells an absurd story. I love it in its ridiculousness. Sure, he never finished Dune, but Jodorowsky still made plenty of movies without once compromising to executives or "the public". And he never stopped having fun along the way. If I ever make Serious Art (or, even better, if I ever make absurd nonsense), now it'll have a little bit of Dune DNA in it too.
9/10
PS: The first two search results on my computer for "where to watch jodorowsky dune" were op-eds in online magazines declaring that it's a good thing Dune never got created, and that Jodorowsky is actually cringe. In other words, Google search prioritizes telling me what my opinion on Jodorowsky's Dune should be over actually letting me WATCH it. Fuck you, Google. One might rebut that Google didn't choose this on purpose, because something something SEO something something. Bullshit. Google knows this is how their something something SEO works and they encourage it. They need to make sure everyone has the Correct Cultural Opinion whether they ask for it or not, on all subjects. For this heinous search-engine misfire, I declare myself 0.02% closer to switching to biting the bullet and switching to another search engine.