One of the Greatest Unfinished Masterpieces of Cinema: Jodorowsky’s Dune

Jodorowsky’s Dune, Jodorowsky’s Dune could very well have been something spectacular, and remained spectacular unfinished in fact.

Authored by Alejandro Jodorowsky Via Dune Sketchbook Documentary

Before time itself, before the 80s, before David Lynch….there was Jodorowsky, this is the story of the first Prophet of the Dune Saga and how his visionary genius still gave us the vision of Universe of Our Messiah, the Kwisatz Haderach.

Jodorowsky was a director/actor coming from successes in the post-modern and dystopian trash-psychedelic genre who came across the Holy Book of Dune and decided to make a film after finishing reading it in the throes of a real Mystical Ecstasy from which he came away with very clear ideas about what he wanted to do. But how to do it?

Jodorowsky thus decided to assemble a real army to undertake what appeared to be in all respects a titanic undertaking.

He hired the French designer Moebius, one of the best in the dandy science fiction genre, and H.R.Giger, who then created the Alien series on paper based on this experience,

in order to put on paper what the Holy Book of Dune had definitely created in his mind.

Something really close to what is to come came out of it and the book tells the story.
The Coming of the Messiah was thus translated from the pure imagination of what the book tells will happen in a few millennia between the desert dunes of the planet Arrakis and under its Moons.

After Moebius, Jodorowsky then thought about the music and chose Pink Floyd, something also taken up by Villeneuve’s recent remake, at least.

Jodorowsky was convinced that this film would change the history of humanity, that the film would change the world.

Salvador Dali himself agreed to be part of the film as Emperor Shaddam IV,

and Orson Welles as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen

Amanda Lear was supposed to play Princess Irulan.

While Mick Jagger the evil Harkonnen Feyd Rautha

Jodorowsky did not hesitate to involve his young son in preparing hard to play Paul Atreides, and subjected him to exhausting and continuous training with one of the best European martial arts masters.

Small consolation after his project ended up with various setbacks was seeing his ideas used, included in the Storyboard of his Dune, in Hollywood films that years later marked the success of the Sci-Fi genre, such as Alien, Terminator, Flash Gordon and Star Wars.
It certainly would have been a much more visionary Dune than David Lynch’s pragmatic and spartan one, and as far as we know the new Dune, that of Villeneuve, except for the music, as written, has drawn very little from Jodorowsky’s vision, another reason to consider it an announced fiasco, as already and again written previously.