Lets talk about Jodorowsky’s Dune movie that never got made (and why it wouldn’t have been a good Dune movie).

With all the talk of the new Dune movie coming out I see a lot of people mentioning the canceled adaptation that almost happened in the 70s by film maker Alejandro Jodorowsky. It is considered by many to be the “greatest movie never made” and has become something of an urban legend in the industry.

The thing is regardless of whether the film was a good movie it would have been a terrible Dune adaptation.

I see people talk about how good this movie would have been and how it would have been much better than the 1984 David Lynch movie (which is also notoriously unfaithful to the books) but I think those people must have seen that Jodorowsky’s Dune documentary but never actually read Dune, or they haven’t seen the documentary and have just heard the legends surrounding this movie. Or both. ...and they have definitely never seen a Jodorowsky film.

Let me clarify some things. First of all the documentary is good (watch it if you are a fan of Dune, Jodorowsky, H.R. Geiger or just film making in general) and Jodorowsky is a great film maker in his genre.

The large problem here is Dune is not Jodorowsky’s genre, like at all. Jodorowsky is considered a “filmmaker’s filmmaker” meaning he makes art pieces that are mostly only appreciated by people who work in filmmaking or film critique. His movies are experimental and not catered to mainstream audiences or even most smaller niche audiences.

Dune, as written, is a science fiction epic heavy with world building and political intrigue. While it also deals heavily with philosophical elements which would be more in Jodorowsky’s wheelhouse you cannot have one without the other and still call your movie Dune. In some regards Dune is Game of Thrones in space with its massive cast of intertwining plots that mostly revolve around different families and organizations plotting against each other for power or survival. Where Jordowsky was really interested in creating a bizarre visual masterpiece at the expense of the story to “simulate the experience of taking LSD” in a film as he puts it.

But furthermore the most glaring reason Jodorowsky was not a good fit for Dune was because, and this is by his own admission, he never read it. He didn’t even know the plot when he decided he wanted to make the movie, he had just heard that the book was good and kind of trippy. And throughout the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune it was painfully clear he didn’t understand Dune at all. I could list dozens of ideas he mentions in the documentary that are completely antithesis to Frank Herbert’s novels but instead I will just share this quote from the documentary:

“It’s different. It was my Dune. When you make a picture, you must not respect the novel. It’s like you get married, no? You go with the wife, white, the woman is white. You take the woman, if you respect the woman, you will never have child. You need to open the costume and to… to rape the bride. And then you will have your picture. I was raping Frank Herbert, raping, like this! But with love, with love.”

...unfortunate metaphor aside I don’t know how much more clear he could make it that it he had no intention of making an accurate Dune movie, or even a movie that respected the spirit or philosophy of Dune.

Now am I saying the movie would have been bad - not necessarily. I’m sure it would have been a great Jodorowsky movie, that is to say a good art house film, and with designs by Moebius and H.R. Geiger and an eclectic cast I’m sure the movie would have been visually interesting. But it wouldn’t have been Dune.

TL;DR - Jodorowsky’s Dune would have been a visually interesting movie but a terrible adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Submitted April 04, 2019 at 02:41AM by KnowMatter https://ift.tt/2Uno58g