When I first saw The Dark Crystal over a decade ago, I recall feeling amazed by the story.  As kids, I think we have a tendency to open ourselves to imaginative possibilities that adults have closed themselves off to (possibly because adults have “seen it all”).  Watching The Dark Crystal as a kid was like jumping headfirst into my own imagination.*  Re-watching the film brought back some of those mostly-nostalgic memories, in particular because the world of The Dark Crystal is a fully realized one.  There are enormous sets, moving plants and critters, unique characters, and astonishing puppetry.  It’s hard not to marvel at how much effort went into making this film. The problem?  Time has not been kind to Jim Henson’s 1982 classic.  Unlike The Labyrinth, which survives its ancient green screen and sometimes stiff puppetry largely because it is a quirky fantasy flick for kids, The Dark Crystal simply doesn’t hold up as well.  The stiff puppetry, a product of the time more than anything else, reminds us that we’re looking at, well, puppets; to suspend disbelief, we have to trick our minds in ways we generally wouldn’t have to.  This is true of almost all of the characters, with exception to Fizzgig, whose rambunctious behavior offers a few purely comical moments.**  The rest?  Stiff.  Their mouths barely move and their facial expressions are limited.  That said, you’ll find nuance in the bodily movements of the characters; the puppet masters — ha! — did their best to make up for the lackluster facial performances by turning those bodies into canvases all on their own.  I’ll never have that kind of skill, which is why I admire it so. I say this not because I think The Dark Crystal is a bad movie.  To say that, I would have to dislike much about The Labyrinth, even if I acknowledge that the latter receives some leeway due to tone.  For its time, The Dark Crystal was ambitious, to say the least.  It took all the glamour of the Jim Henson puppeteer studios and merged it with the mythical narratives of epic fantasy.  Critics were right to liken it to a Muppet version of a Tolkien story (The Hobbit, perhaps).  It has the right kind of characters, world, and elements to facilitate an epic fantasy narrative, right down even to the somewhat cliche “chosen one” plot line.  Most of these things work in its favor.  The film made $30mil in profit, though its sequel, Power of the Dark Crystal, has been in development limbo since the 80s, and it remains one of the highest grossing Henson films ever made. I bring all this up because I think that it’s time someone remade The Dark Crystal.  Hear me out, if you will. I’m not a fan of remakes.  In fact, I think most remakes shouldn’t exist, though the almighty dollar will keep them coming for decades to come.  But The Dark Crystal is the type of film that would benefit from modern technology, set design, budgets, and so on, in part because its original format, though beautiful for its time, has not aged particularly well (and don’t get me started on the annoying voice over that explains everything that has happened in the world up to the start of the narrative proper).  Contemporary puppetry, when properly funded, can produce more advanced characters and designs with developed facial features and facial mobility.  Those characters who seem somewhat stiff will come to life in a way they never have before.  The result?  Characters we all can easily connect to.  We’ll still know they’re puppets, but we’ll suspend our disbelief more readily if the characters look, move, and act like real people.  Just look at what they did for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (skip to 7:05): And that’s not even the best they could have done.  With advances in animatronic technologies and so on and so forth, you could create characters that practically cry on their own.  Throw in a little CG to help blend the sets and character together — and no more than “a little” — and you’ve got a mixture for what might be the most ambitious remake ever conceived. Of course, if Hollywood tried to remake The Dark Crystal, they’d probably CG everything and leave out the puppetry — assuming the Henson company would let them.  I think this would be a grave mistake, but it’s not like Hollywood is afraid to send out stinkers and pretty everything up with lens flares and explosions these days.  My only hope is that remaking The Dark Crystal will do honor to the original and add new life to a world that deserves the best adaptation possible.  There’s so much to love about The Dark Crystal, from its classic heroic quest to its complete absence of human characters*** to its settings, scenery, and depth.  Who wouldn’t want to see it re-imagined once more? This is where everyone chimes in with their thoughts.  Do you think a remake of The Dark Crystal would be a good idea? This is the most adorable character in the entire movie.  Fizzgig! —————————————————– *No wonder I couldn’t get enough of Fraggle Rock as a kid… **He’s sort of like a dog thing.  It’s hard to explain. ***If not for the fact that I desperately want to see this film remade, I might have talked about the curious absence of human characters in The Dark Crystal.  Perhaps for another time…

(A different subtitle might say this:  “A World of Oppositions, Stricken By Their Equilibrium.”  This, of course, assumes I will follow Jason Sanford‘s story-title-generation process for these features.  I’ll leave artistic license aside for now…) One of the curious things about Ridley Scott’s 1985 fairy tale — appropriately entitled Legend — is how desperately it clings to its fairy tale origins.  I do not mean “desperate” in a negative sense; rather, I see Legend as trying to avoid falling into the trap of its own making precisely so it can maintain its format in a way that benefits the fairy tale that is its heart.  Thus, what begins as a saccharine childish fantasy of naive, star-crossed lovers from different worlds (Princess Lily from the Court of Men and Jack from the Court of Nature) falls into the abyss of its darkest undercurrents (love, betrayal, darkness, blood, and utter wickedness) before it is righted by a terribly cheesy narrative reversion (it was a sort-of-dream) and a return to normalcy — Jack and Lily part, presumably to repeat similar events the next day, always a step away from “completing” their relationship (marriage, more or less). It’s perhaps because of this structural necessity that I love Legend in ways befitting greater works.  Despite the narrative tricks, the sometimes too-cutesy plot points andcharacter quirks, and so on, I am drawn to the narrative’s return to a static universe.  True, the Lord of Darkness and his wicked goblins (Blix, expertly played by Alice Playten, still terrifies me)* disrupt the perfect world of Jack and Lily by assassinating one of the two living unicorns and shrouding the world in cold and darkness, but all of his damage is instantly reversed in the last 10 minutes of the film when Jack is allowed to jump back into the forest pool and retrieve his love’s ring.  The only indication that anything ever happened is the convenient arrival of Gump and his dwarf friends — themselves aids to Jack in his quest — with the two unicorns.  Only even in that moment the world is magically righted again, because the unicorns cannot, as far as the film makes clear, magically rebirth young in a matter of seconds, thus proving to us that the only true change to the world is that of memory.  Historical time is disrupted to return us to a special alternate world of “perfection.” For lack of a better term, I am calling this necessity for a static fairy tale world (a utopia, perhaps) the politics of innocence.  Legend never shies away from its affair with innocence, reminding us from the start that Princess Lily (Mia Sara) is naive, perfect, inquisitive, and ultimately unaware of the very real dangers in the world — one of her “royal subjects” even tells her so in the opening scenes.  Jack (Tom Cruise), too, suffers from this naivety, though with at least some awareness that certain “codes of conduct” should not be broken — which is exactly what he allows to happen. Innocence is so central to the story of Legend that it even dominates the conscious thoughts of the principal villain:  the Lord of Darkness (Tim Curry).  In a revealing scene — because, why not, right? — he admits his unquenchable desire for Princess Lily, calling upon his faceless father for advice, who tells him that he must “turn” her to darkness.  After all, the very person whose existence as an “innocent” was required to end the joyous reign of the unicorns — Lily being a diversion and temptation of sorts — must be the object of focus here, not because she’s a woman, but because she embodies a certain fairy tale stereotype of a woman. I don’t want to read this movie as a stereotype of ideal womanhood** — naive, innocent, and in need of controlling.  Why?  Because I think a more compelling view of this film is to imagine how it operates through a variety of innocences, some of them products of a misogynistic fairy tale tradition and others governed by the profound static-ness of Legend‘s world.  Nobody is left unaffected by the power of innocence, whether Jack, who cannot seem to grasp the fact that Lily is a “free spirit” who has no concept of boundaries (perhaps because she is a rebellious youth); the Lord of Darkness, who is compelled by desire to cross the social barriers befitting a, well, lord of darkness; or even the unicorns, who are just as tempted by Lily as by Jack (who, it appears, they trust well enough to let him know where they will be). This is the profound power of innocence, whether embodied in the ideal image of Lily (virginal, free, beautiful, and sweet as rain) or in the internal philosophy of a fairy tale, where innocence destroys itself, only to be reborn exactly where it began.  Legend is only static because innocence is cyclical.  For the world to return to its original place — a world of life, beauty, and wonder — no trace of the real consequences of the temptation of innocence can remain.  It’s an almost childlike reversion, if you will — as if Legend were the child that had to be returned to us, pre-influence (say, pre-Janet Jackson).  The audience, however, can’t return.  Ever.  The world might right itself, but we will always remember, like parents remember their children’s experiences, that something has occurred and that, just as innocence and light are cycles of power, so too are the darkest recesses innocence and light produce.  The Lord of Darkness is right:  he is in all of us, and he will return one day, perhaps in a different form, but returned nonetheless.  Regardless, historical time shifts, because we know the history as it actually happens, and narrative time swings back around to start all over again.  Rinse and repeat. Stepping out for a moment, I think it’s interesting to consider how this might apply to the narrative if we consider Legend either as a children’s fable OR as an adult