The Dark Crystal 1982
Jim Henson and the Muppets had a really amazing decade or so where went from being just part of Sesame Street to this entertainment juggernaut with TV shows, movies, and merchandising. But muppets couldn't do it all and this movie is a great example of that overreach. The creatures and sets are so ambitious in this movie, but the technology didn't exist to execute it very well. It almost would have been better to do this by animation, but even then you might end up with something like Disney's The Black Cauldron, which would come a few years later, another fantasy movie supposedly for kids that borrowed from J.R.R. Tolkien. A lot of this movie is really dark with some scary monsters and scenes of torture. However the characters generally look and move like muppets, never as articulated or expressive as a real creature would be, making them looks pretty fake. The Empire Strikes Back had already tried something similar two years earlier with Yoda and gotten similarly disappointing results. There is also some pretty bad matte compositing, often when it didn't seem that necessary. Anyway, the fake looking creatures and scenery are the highlight of the whole movie by far. The plot and characters are the big letdown. There is almost no sense of humor: a few cute scenes or eccentricities, but the big attraction with the Muppets was always the sense of humor and it isn't here. That leaves you with a long vocabulary list of creatures to learn and rules to be followed, never really straying from the expected hero's journey. It took me several nights to get through this fairly short movie because it just wasn't drawing me in. There is also minimal real action involved since these are all puppets with fairly limited motion. To me this was a tremendously ambitious project made by someone at the height of their Hollywood influence and it just didn't work.
Written: 16 Aug 2024
Owned on: Digital