Albion: The Enchanted Stallion

6 July 2017. Ablion holds up pretty well as a dazzling, colorful children's fantasy adventure. The landscapes are among the most vividly striking ever for a fantasy with standout colors that broadcast faraway and amazing places. Quite breathtaking. The storyline is predictable as most such fantasies must be nowadays, but this one has evolved a tad bit making it distinctive in continuing to set a slightly new bar for layered characters.

Two big distractions that take away some of the enjoyment factor are John Cleese's performance in his first appearance where is indomitable character is a bit too cheesy and perhaps so improvised comedy that it breaks the tone of the movie and later one there are some uncharacteristic lapses in the accompanying music that genuinely make the movie seem raggedly powerless and weak.

The distinctive characteristic of Albion is that director takes some risks in balancing the drama and comedy that collide with each other threatening to make this movie into a dumb screwball comedy (like the short-lived awkward fantasy-musical television series Galavant, 2015-2016) but somehow never quite succeeding thankfully. Overall, the sound track, the luscious and ethereal music, the decent acting, and the enriched most mature storyline for children contribute to retaining the audience interest.

Camera, lighting, art dept & locations looked great! Unfortunately, the overall storytelling & tone lacked a steady hand. Great work by the editor BTW who cut nonsensical scenes together coherently. The pacing is maddening as new characters are introduced too fast to grasp all the new lore they try to add with walls of exposition. Costumes look like they were made or bought yesterday. Story jumped all over the place from present day to dreamscapes to fantasy world to portal to music montages and more. I'm not sure what this was supposed to be- Comedy? Adventure?

I have long complained of the lack of truly great films in the last several years. There have been countless popular films that are entirely devoid of creativity that play to the audience's ignorance and basest nature. Films rife with titillation for the sake of selling tickets, a level of gore well beyond what is necessary to tell the story, stories that are weaker than wet paper, beautiful actors who can memorize lines but are unable to actually act.

Albion is not one of those. I got the film for my children expecting to be bored, sickened by the heavy-handed message, or irritated by an insipid production. I was so completely glad to be wrong. The film is visually stunning in many parts. The story is simple, relying on fantasy, fable, and myth for character archetypes as well as storyline. Refreshingly, the villain is not misunderstood or a shade of grey, he's just plain bad and the heroes are good.

It is a movie about hope, redemption, and love conquering all. Albion will be part of our family video library.

If you are one of those people who think obvious plot twists are clever, think that concepts of Good and Bad are trite, or believe that the world should be seen in shades of grey, this movie is not for you.

Surprisingly well acted family film. Excellent acting from John Cleese. Entertaining, magical plot which was moving in places. All in all very worth watching for all the family from youngsters to us older folk. We all really enjoyed it. This film speaks to the part of us that wishes to know that,'other' world in a similar way that many famous magical films do.

First off, the dialogue was hilarious and probably improvised on the fly with the help of John Cleese. It was very Pythonesc and fans of the Holy Grail would get a kick out of many of the scenes. Unfortunately, what the film needed was a faster pace and probably a more visionary director who could have taken this film to become the next Time Bandits. I did enjoy what I got, but couldn't help but see what this movie could have been.