I watched this movie again and it was amazing, the authors vision and intent are truly a sight to behold, but you have to do research before you watch the movie. What this movie is essentially about is an alchemist and his quest to teach a fool/Jesus figure how to change shit into gold. He physically does this in the movie but the real alchemy he's creating is turning the human body (shit) into a purified ascended being (gold). To do this he highlights the fool in his daily life (all of us) and paints a path towards redemption using other parts of the fools psyche dressed as planets (pluto, mars, uranus, saturn) who all have their own struggles to overcome. This is symbolic of understanding the different parts of yourself and engaging your struggles one by one to become an enlightened being.



What Jodorowsky's attempting in this film is truly ambitious: he wants the people that watch this movie to be more highly ascended at the end than they were at the beginning. To accomplish this he constantly shocks you with nudity, rape, murder, animals, violence etc and that makes the movie difficult to watch. He tops it off at the end by saying "Camera, zoom out!" which is basically his way of telling the audience to pull themselves out of normal reality and see the game/film for what it is. It's impossible to understand this movie without knowledge of Jodorowsky's affinity for the occult (especially the Marseilles Tarot) and without knowing psychedelics played a huge part in this movie. In some scenes he actually fed his actors mushrooms and recorded their trips as scenes in the movie. Basically this movie couldn't get made today because he broke all sorts of rules making it, which is the point of the movie (Break out of convention aka CAMERA ZOOM OUT!)



Jodorowsky's a genius, but the problem with genius is that unless you have some understanding of their focuses it just seems like gibberish. Imagine Einstein talking about gravitational waves to a baby. That's what this movie is to the uninitiated, and that's what makes it hard to watch. You have swallow your pride, morals, sensibilities and most importantly ego to watch this movie and appreciate it. Some marijuana would help. At the heart there's only one relationship the movie discusses, and it's the relationship between the fool/us/the uninitated and the teacher/Alchemist/Jodorowsky in an attempt to overcome societies and reintegrate with the one soul thus achieving lightbody/3rd eye awakening. It's a movie on the scale of 2001:A Space Odyssey but done 20 years earlier and with a 3rd of the budget. It can be watched, and it can be enjoyed, but only by those willing to pay the price. It's like the title says, it's a "Holy Mountain". You can get to the top if you really try but it's a hell of a climb.