The Dark Crystal (1982)

Some old things just don’t really hold up.

I was hoping that this movie was going to be a lot better than it was. To myself, I thought it would be great as this was one of Jim Henson’s more notable films. However, the story didn’t really grip me all that much. That could be because today we have a ton of these movies. The one where the is the hero who must overcome an orphan story to become the hero that they are today.

However today, that has been all, but played. There could be the argument that it wasn’t done at the time all that well, and that is why this movie is good. However, I’m not a fan of that argument. As older movies can still hold up even though they have the same overarching story as the movies in the genre that succeed them. This one, I didn’t feel like had any real differences except it was done with puppets. The fact that you have puppets in a movie should not be the selling point. The selling point should be that you can use those puppets to tell a better story.

In summation. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t all that good. It was right in the middle of the road for a movie.

When the old emperor dies, a new even nastier "Skeksis" one takes his place, and so begins this latest reign of terror for all the "Gelfling" on the distant world of "Thra". The only way to rectify things is for the dark crystal, damaged aeons ago, to be restored to it's former glory and that can only happen at the conjunction of their planet's three suns. That onerous task now falls to the timid "Jen" and his friend "Kira" and so they set off on a series of perilous adventures as they must locate the crystal and get it to the temple so that it can regenerate and defeat the vulture-like (look at my avatar) creatures. It's a cracking story of good versus evil, with the monstrous creations of Jim Henson delivering quite an effective, in a pantomime sort of fashion, degree of peril as the tension builds up. The humans I didn't care for so much - they're a bit weedy; but the monsters are crafted with detail and originality and the use of colourful visuals to augment the story whilst evoking a sense of mystery and danger works well too. It's got plenty of action, mysticism and even if I did hate the predictably goody-goody denouement, I did enjoy the film and though it has dated, that didn't spoil it too much.