CREDIT: SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
A film chronicle of Alejandro Jodorwsky's attempt to re-create Frank Herbert's Dune.

The movie business is just that, a business. It’s a messy, angry marriage between those who want to be sensible with their money and those who want to express to the world the product of their imaginations.

Some of the best movies have been the product of epic struggles between the little guy and the big, bad studios: Ridley Scott’s loggerheads with producers over Blade Runner and Kingdom of Heaven; Spielberg’s constant budget overruns with Jaws and Indiana Jones; Kubrick being a general terror to everyone in his vicinity.

But stories behind the stories have had happy endings – products delivered that the world still loves and is influenced by to this day.

But Jodorowsky’s Dune is the story of the one that failed spectacularly.

In 1965, Frank Herbert’s Dune – a massive sprawling sci-fi epic – was unleashed unto the world with incredible acclaim. Naturally, such a property was ripe for a movie adaptation, especially after audiences were dazzled/put to sleep by 2001: A Space Odyssey. The difficult themes and general length of the book made it unfeasible for adaption in the eyes of filmmakers, however, except for starry-eyed Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Jodorowsky – the son of Ukrainian immigrants living in Chile – proved himself to be the master of cultivating on-screen bizarreness with El Topo (1971) and Holy Mountain (1973), before setting his eyes on Dune.

It was almost too perfect.

Hallucinatory effects of the book’s universe-driving drug, Spice Melange, were the perfect fit for Jodorowsky’s acid-inspired mindbenders. Calling on the likes of legendary artists HR Geiger and Moebius, set to star Mick Jagger and Salvador Dali, the $15-million budget film was set to enter production, when things fell apart.

Of course, I won’t spoil things further, because Jodorowsky’s Dune is probably one of the most incredible, maybe even creativity-inspiring documentaries you’ll see in a while.

Sure, it takes more than a few creative liberties with its claims, and wastes no time presenting all those involved in the film in a good light, but it never gets overly preachy with their merits.

The pre-visualization animations made just for this documentary, incorporating some of the various discarded storyboards’ artworks, will blow you away with just how ambitious they all were for the 1970’s movie scene that existed before Star Wars, the movie that made big-budget science fiction a hedgeable bet again.

Jodorowsky’s Dune is a great look at the mindset of a creative madman.