dvd of the week
David Lynch’s 1984 sci-fi epic Dune is one of the grander disasters in modern film: weird, long, campy and disliked both by fans of Frank Herbert’s novel and fans of David Lynch. Jodorowsky’s Dune is the fascinating and entertaining story about what Dune could and arguably should have been. The Chilean auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky had the rights to Dune in the 1970s and spent millions developing what he and his production crew thought might be as groundbreaking as Citizen Kane or 2001. But Universal got cold feet and killed Jodorowsky’s version, eventually giving it to Lynch. The film tracks the failed version, using interviews with the delightful Jodorowsky himself and his crew (including H.R. Giger and Dan O’Bannon), and makes the case that the story boards and ideas for the unmade film were so influential, their traces can be seen in everything from Star Wars to Alien to Raiders of the Lost Ark.
