The Dark Crystal Best Review
This movie is rated PG for scary monsters and violence, including the deaths of several sympathetic characters. My recommendation is that parents shouldn't let small children see it. One reviewer here wrote that this movie traumatized him when he was five. It does have some nightmarish imagery. It looks like a kiddie movie because of the puppets, but don't let the puppets fool you, it really is not a kid's movie.
Classic mythic stories have certain elements and structures which set them apart from melodramas or action-adventures; they're journeys filled with mentors, heralds, shape-shifters, shadow-figures, hidden powers and secret knowledge. The Dark Crystal has these and one can arguably label it a modern hero myth. I will do so.
The hero of this myth is Jen, who is to all appearances the last of his race - the Gelflings, elf-like people who once had cities and high culture on Thra, a faraway planet. The rulers of Thra are called the Skeksis, nasty reptilians who are themselves dying out and whose numbers are down to just nine. Jen's family was killed by the Skeksis' minions, the Garthim soldiers. The mirror opposites to the Skeksis are the Mystics, who have been hiding Jen, thus tricking the Skeksis into believing the Gelflings are all dead. In Skeksi-think, this is a good thing, for the Skeksis fear Gelflings. There's a prophecy about a Gelfling destroying Skeksis, so the Skeksis attempted the genocide of the race. They believe they have succeeded, and are unaware of Jen's existence.
And thereby hangs a tale.
Planet Thra is vividly imagined in textured detail; a second viewing reveals things one missed the first time around. There are all sorts of fascinating creatures running around in the corners of the frames, and there's even a live "dessert" that scampers across a Skeksi dinner table as the lizards try to catch it. On Thra, life takes surprising and bizarre forms.
No human appears on the screen, all the characters are puppets. In a few scenes, live actors in costume do duty to show characters at full-length. The Skeksis and Mystics are amazingly complex and sophisticated puppets which each require entire teams of puppeteers to bring to life. The lifelike detail with which these are crafted is truly remarkable. They each have unique wrinkles, crow's-feet and scars, they can frown, smile, laugh, blink, wink, sneer, roll their eyes...they require skillful acting from the puppeteers, and it's here that I must commit my heresy. I'm sorry to have to say that Jim Henson is not the best puppeteer in this movie. In the special features, Henson is shown in a filmed interview in which he said that he wanted to make the characters as lifelike as possible, and that in doing some of his other characters (such as Kermit the Frog) over the years, he'd used actions and mannerisms which were broad and exaggerated, but for Dark Crystal he had to adopt a different style of puppetry which wouldn't look "puppety", to use his word. He failed on that front, in my opinion. There was no time in which Henson's puppetting of Jen didn't make me think of a puppet. By contrast, we do get to see a female Gelfling named Kira, puppetted by Kathryn Mullen. Mullen's portrayal of Kira is quite believable. She imparts mannerisms and attitudes to Kira which make Kira seem very female and real. There's just an ineffable something in a tilt of the head or a hand gesture that "sells" the character, and Mullen gave Kira those subtle qualities. It's interesting that in one of the special features, Mullen says how she had to tell Henson how to make Jen more lifelike. There is also Frank Oz's performance of Aughra, a sort of witch, I suppose one might say, though there's more to her than that. Aughra is one of those personalities one doesn't soon forget. Think of Yoda on a caffeine high and you'll be in the ballpark. Oz gave Aughra both believability of action and motion, and an interesting, mysterious ambivalence - I was never sure which way Aughra would jump.
Myth is the oldest kind of storytelling in the world; the epic myth of Gilgamesh is the oldest known story on Earth. In five thousand years of myth-making since then, we've pretty much covered the variations on the form. As such, The Dark Crystal is nothing new. Joseph Campbell deconstructed the mythic story structure down to its component elements which he called the monomyth, and The Dark Crystal hews closely to the Campbellian monomyth right along with King Arthur, Achilles and Luke Skywalker. So, there's not much here in terms of story that we haven't seen before. Henson and company really put no new spin on the hero's journey, it's all fairly clear and straightforward. The structuring of the story, then, is competent, if just barely so. However, I have a bit of a nit to pick with some of the elements Henson wrote in. There are certain events which telegraph the ending to some extent, so that the end comes as no great surprise. In my view, this is a mistake. I think the ending would have been much stronger with a slight rewrite to keep the ending more of a surprise. Instead of the desired reaction, "Oh! - so THAT'S what this is about!" the reaction is more along the lines of "Yeah, they've been kind of driving toward that." It's too bad. The story would have been better without the telegraphing of the ending, I think. In my opinion, Jim Henson was an undisciplined and self-indulgent director who showed a predilection for things which weakened his stories (I could have screamed at the final thirty seconds of Labyrinth).
The puppets are many and varied. Again, there are all sorts of odd and wonderful creatures in this movie, everywhere you look. Each one of them required a clever new solution to the question "How to we put THAT on screen?!" Most of the things in this movie are what are called practical effects. These are distinguished from special effects in that special effects are added in post-production, after the principal photography is complete. Practicals are done on-set, with actual tangible objects in front of the camera. I would estimate the ratio of practical effects to special effects in this movie at maybe 20:1, but that's just my perception, I didn't make a systematic count. They used special effects only when there was no other way to show things.
This too is too bad in one case. There are creatures called landstriders which look for all the world like men on stilts because that's just what they are. I never for a moment bought into the landstriders. That was a case where special effects were called for. Henson should have called Ray Harryhausen out of retirement and used Dynamation stop-motion effects for the landstriders.
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, once spoke about the Egyptian pyramids and said, "Ancient astronauts didn't build the pyramids. Human beings built the pyramids, because they're clever and they work hard."
This for me is the wonderful thing about The Dark Crystal; it's old-school fantasy filmmaking, with clever, hard-working humans meeting ten thousand problems with ten thousand innovative solutions to put a complex, impossible world on screen. No such cleverness is required today, processing power will do. Today, these problems would all have one answer: CGI. Skeksis - CGI. Garthim - CGI. Mystics, Gelflings, and weird mounds of dirt that eat unsuspecting passersby...CGI, CGI, CGI. If it doesn't look right, re-render it until it does.
A story is more than just a story, it's an artifact of human ingenuity and a child of the soul. The Dark Crystal is a monument to virtuosity, it's a stroke in our signature - a sharp, inventive stroke.
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The Dark Crystal Overview
THE DARK CRYSTAL is a masterful live-action fantasy starring some of Jim Henson's most imaginative creatures ever! Directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz and produced by Gary Kurtz (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back), THE DARK CRYSTAL brilliantly weaves a timeless myth of Good and Evil! In another time, THE DARK CRYSTAL- a source of Balance and Truth in the Universe- was shattered, dividing the world into two factions: the wicked Skeksis and the peaceful Mystics. Now, as the convergence of the three suns approaches, the Crystal must be healed, or darkness will reign forevermore! It's up to Jen -the last of his race- to fulfill the prophecy that a Gelfling will return the missing shard to the Crystal and destroy the Skeksis' evil Empire. But will young Jen's courage be any match for the unknown dangers that await him?
The Dark Crystal Specifications
Jim Henson's fantasy epic The Dark Crystal doesn't take place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but like Star Wars it takes the audience to a place that exists only in the imagination and, for an hour and a half, on the screen. Recalling the worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, Henson tells the story of a race of grotesque birdlike lizards called the Skeksis, gnomish dragons who rule their fantastic planet with an iron claw. A prophecy tells of a Gelfling (a small elfin being) who will topple their empire, so in their reign of terror they have exterminated the race, or so they think. The orphan Jen, raised in solitude by a race of peace-loving wizards called the Mystics, embarks on a quest to find the missing shard of the Dark Crystal (which gives the Skeksis their power) and restore the balance of the universe. Henson and codirector Frank Oz have pushed puppetry into a new direction: traditional puppets, marionettes, giant bodysuits, and mechanical constructions are mixed seamlessly in a fantasy world of towering castles, simple huts, dank caves, a giant clockwork observatory, and a magnificent landscape that seem to have leaped off the pages of a storybook. Muppet fans will recognize many of the voice actors--a few characters sound awfully close to familiar comic creations--but otherwise it's a completely alien world made familiar by a mythic quest that resonates through stories over the ages. --Sean Axmaker
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Customer Reviews
Star Wars meets Muppets - D. J. Nardi - Washington, DC
I had mixed feelings about The Dark Crystal. The puppet animation holds up surprisingly well even in the age of digital animation. Some of the scenes are beautiful, such as the heroes rowing on the lake with papyrus. The movements are generally smooth and not jerky. It shows Jim Henson's genius with puppets. My problem with the movie is with the human side - the script and voice acting. Sometimes, it seems the scriptwriters got lazy and just copied scenes from Star Wars, including characters suspiciously similar to the Ewoks and Yoda. Some of the voices also seem a bit weak and lighty for their characters. Finally, the movie seems to want to be an epic, and has the makings of it, but is just too short at 1.5 hours to really be of epic proportions. I'd recommend The Dark Crystalfor kids who like fantasy/epics like Star Wars, but I don't know if it will appeal much beyond that audience.
Much better than on VHS - Thom Carey - Yonkers, NY United States
I have always liked this movie and I had a copy on VHS. It was dark and detail-less. I purchased this Blu-Ray copy to replace my original and it is much better. Colors are truer, more details are visible and, although it is set on a dark canvas, it was much easier to see everything even in the darkest frames. Of course, the sound was incredible and much easier to hear even the slightest sound.
Stop editing the classics! - M. Higareda - Chicago & DC
Am I the only one who noticed that they've edited this film? Just so we're clear, I LOVE this movie; I'm pretty obsessive about it. I've seen it 8 times in the theater (6 when it first came out) and own every single edition on every media platform, including PSP and iTunes. So when I finally sat down to watch the Blu-Ray edition, i noticed pretty quickly that they've changed the dialogue; Jen suddenly speaks a line in Aughra's laboratory that I've never heard.
Between this and the edited editions of Erik The Viking and The Last Unicorn, I'm wondering how much of my childhood is left intact. Shame on whoever decided to alter history. It wasn't necessary and this is not what I paid for.
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