Jodorowsky's Dune

Jodorowsky's Dune (2013) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Frank Pavich. It reconstructs one of cinema's great unmade films: Alejandro Jodorowsky's attempt, starting in 1974, to adapt Frank Herbert's novel Dune into something far stranger than any science fiction film that had existed before.

The team Jodorowsky assembled reads like a fever dream. Jean "Moebius" Giraud drafted storyboards. H. R. Giger designed the Harkonnen home world. Dan O'Bannon was brought in for effects. Salvador Dalí and Orson Welles agreed to act in it. After two years and millions of dollars spent, Hollywood passed on the funding and the project collapsed. But the concept art, the storyboards, the ideas — they leaked into everything that followed.

Pavich's real argument is that influence sometimes travels through failure rather than release. Alien, certain corners of Star Wars, the entire visual grammar of big-budget sci-fi — threads trace back to this aborted production. Nicolas Winding Refn, among those interviewed, calls it the most important film never made. Stream Jodorowsky's Dune (2013) online on iFILM.