Dark Crystal

Finally,I was looking to write a review on one of my favourite Non-Asian Fantasy movies of all time and here I found it!The Dark Crystal is definitely that!

Hmmmmmmm,where to start?Well,we have heard a similar story of good vs. evil from J.R.R Tolkien,but not one so realistic though!But probably the high point is the very deep character development.Probably have to agree with Riza about the skeksis here.They do seem like the most intresting of all the characters (save for Augra). I would not want to run up into them in the dark,or the light for that matter.Jen and Kira are very cute,but I think Kira is a little more interesting than Jen (no,I'm not sexist,I just think that Jen seemed rather emotionless most of the time,but then again,that's what you get by being raised by emotionless creatures).

Not too many flaws in the film.The story is great,the characters are fantastic,the soundtrack is uplifting,the SFX are more real that anything in "The Phantom Menace" and the ending.....well,it needed to be a little realistic,and the lengh needed to be a little bit longer,but other than that,we have a near-flawless masterpiece right up here!

I had never heard of dark crystal before they announced the Netflix series taking place in the same universe. I got curious and watched the film first and I am so not disappointed. Few years after the first Star Wars and the first alien, special effects didn't look so realistic compared to today. But what they achieved visually is worth the 200 millions of CGI a film nowadays requires. Amazing designs and colours. There is a feeling of immersion, which I have rarely achieved watching films from early 80's. The Story-telling is good and enjoyable once you accept this universe's basic rules, which are kind of dumb, but I'll give it a pass. This is a very enjoyable hero's journey before the era of comic-book movies and you can really feel that because everything in this film feels so honest and genuine. The film makers had really a lot of freedom and I believe there should be more films with such creative freedom in the 21st Century. The film aged well, but you can see that the characters move and special effects are old, despite a clever use of the camera to hide it as well as possible. An excellent surprise to discover this film, I had a great time!

You know, I'm not a fan of the majority of Jim Henson's work. I despise THE MUPPETS and generally all related things, finding them twee and unfunny; I was the same when I was a kid. Call me a curmudgeon, or old before my time, but this shouty, over the top type of humour just isn't my cup of tea at all. What a surprise, then, that Henson should make THE DARK CRYSTAL, one of the finest dark fantasy films of the 1980s!

I had this film on video as a child and it's a memorable film when you watch it as a kid - and for all the wrong reasons! That's because THE DARK CRYSTAL is a completely HORRIFIC film for a child to watch. I remember being scared out of my wits by the stuff on show here - the crumbling corpse, the enforced stripping sequence, the striders dying, and of course the essence-stealing scene, which is still disturbing even when I watch this back as an adult.

The level of cruelty and violence on display makes THE DARK CRYSTAL stand out from other, more twee stuff like LEGEND and LABYRINTH, and indeed I think this gives it an edge to the competition. Otherwise, the production values are strong, the characters memorable and the quest-style storyline fits with the material just right. THE DARK CRYSTAL is an underrated children's movie and one which beats every other animation or puppet film I can think of from the 1980s.

I didn't know a lot about The Dark Crystal before going in, other than it being created completely with puppetry, involving a giant crystal of some kind, and being reasonably dark for something aimed at kids. The story is pretty basic, especially considering how much thought and care went into everything else about this movie. Jen, the last of his kind, must find a shard of the crystal, and slot it back into place. Why? He doesn't know, but he embarks on the journey nonetheless, a journey that has him meet a variety of characters and creatures along the way. That's literally it; the entire story.

Thankfully there's heaps more to this movie than just its superficial story. For starters, the world created for the movie is quite unlike anything I've ever seen. It's a wholly original affair from the ground up. We're told through an opening narration that we are on a different planet, in a different time, and that it used to be peaceful and beautiful, but something happened when the crystal fractured and two brand new species emerged. The Skeksis are dark and greedy, vain and selfish. They hoard all they can and constantly fight amongst themselves, but they're a dying race, quite literally decaying as time goes on. Now there's only ten of them, who spend their time holed up in a macabre castle in a wasteland. On the flipside are the urRu, a group of placid, lumbering, four-armed creatures who live amongst the life magic around them. Jen is a Gelfling, the last of his kind after the Skeksis wiped the rest of them from the face of the planet. There's also the Podlings which are a small and timid people hunted by the Skeksis and exploited as slaves, the Garthim, a race of giant arachnid beetles who the Skeksis use as their muscle, and lastly Aughra, an ogre-like oracle who studies the planets and brews potions for trade.

Immediately I was struck by how dark this movie really is. Of course I've always found 80s fantasy movies to be of a darker calibre than any other period, but The Dark Crystal is darker than most. The Skeksis are a truly villainous race, with a frightening appearance, and a disturbing penchant for sucking the life out of their victims before using the zombified husks as slaves, not to mention the off-screen genocide they committed against the Gelflings. And this is a movie for kids! Of course, being aimed at a younger audience means it's not as horrific as it could be for adult eyes, but it still manages to skirt the line just enough.

But of course the single biggest lure for The Dark Crystal are the technical aspects. This was the first live-action movie not to feature humans at all. The closest it gets is with people dressed up as Jen and Kira in longshots to make running and climbing more feasible. To make up for the distinct lack of people, the puppetry department goes all out. I don't think I've ever seen puppetry this amazing, not even in other Jim Henson productions. There's so much detail put into every aspect of this movie. Each of the ten Skeksis are resplendently designed in such a way to be distinctly different to one another. They have different facial features, wear different clothes, and even act differently (as portrayed in a fantastic dinner scene displaying how varied their eating habits are). The urRu also have an incredible amount of detail just on their faces alone, but also the way they slowly lumber about and their four arms interact with one another. The sheer amount of practice this must have taken from their dual performers is impressive alone. The settings and world around the characters are also brimming with life. There's a staggering amount of creatures and animals here, each with their own role in the local ecosystems. You may only see one briefly in the background, but even they enjoy the same attention to detail. There's just so much here. It's a full and brimming world that's so easy to be immersed into. They even wrote fictional languages for each of the main races! I would love to have seen a version with this, but even I can admit that maybe would have been too much for a movie with already risky prospects at the time.

I'm hard-pushed to called The Dark Crystal a masterpiece, because there are some deep flaws here. The story is incredibly simplistic and is far from original, the Gelflings for some reason don't seem to enjoy the same attention to detail as everyone else, despite being the heroes of the whole story, and the dialogue and narration is a little lacking in places. Beyond that, this movie was still amazing to watch today and it's technical achievements still hold up. I'm looking forward to delving into Age of Resistance later. I give Dark Crystal a really, really good 8/10

This sprawling, part-homage-part-totally original fantasy brings us Jen, the last of a group of near extinct creatures who is the only one who can save all existence by bringing a crystal shard back into the balance of the dark crystal, in order to save the world from the evil Skekses. This is quite an enthralling film, and like with the other full-on Muppet films this works on different levels for kids and for adults. Kids may be both scared and enthralled by the scope and details, not to mention the graphic nature of the darker elements portrayed (as a kid I cringed a bit when the 'vital essence' scenes came up). And for adults there's a lot of great craftsmanship that goes into the story, which is with all of the effects and over-the-top creations very well told by directors Henson and Oz. Without the massive usage of CGI or the more controlled visuals from the past fifteen or so years, the mix of the production design (maybe some of the best ever in any fantasy film) and the inventiveness put into the set-pieces and character-creations, is a knockout even by today's standards. It's almost a shame looking back on how a film like this that employs so many people and such time is now spent clicking away on a computer to get it all done. As it is, the Dark Crystal is one of those few examples in post-modern cinema that it does seem something like a sci-fi novel come to life.