Is anyone else excited to see this? Netflix is making a prequel series to the original 80s movie. They’re using puppets again, no CGI. The three major gelfling protagonists are voiced by Taron Edgerton, Anya Taylor-Joy(the girl from Split) and Nathalie Emmanuel(Missandei from GoT). Alicia Vikander and Helena Bonham Carter are also voicing gelfling characters and Mark Hammil is voicing a skesis.
Here is a first look and here is the home page where you can brush up on your Dark Crystal lore. The series comes out sometime this year, possible this fall.
I’m very interested, and I’m actually not a huge fan of the originally, except visually. I think it’s confusing and weirdly paced and kinda flat – but I think that aesthetic combined with 30 years of advancements in visual storytelling combined with a format that has more room to breathe could be delightful.
Very very excited for this. There is a lot of new exciting genre stuff coming out this year (I personally found a lot of last year’s output to be a bit weak) and I am really eager to see it all.
Yeah the dialogue and pacing are bad. It has a lot of characters talking to themselves or each other and stating the obvious. But then again it was made for kids so a lot of that is understandable.
I wouldn’t say it was a kids’ movie though. Some of the Skeksis scenes were pretty disturbing. And as I remember, this movie was an attempt by Henson & Company to work with more adult material…
I thought that Labyrinth was great, but The Dark Crystal just never worked for me, for reasons that I’ve never been able to put my finger on. I think maybe it was because it was just too alien: There were things that we were supposed to just take for granted, but which I couldn’t, because I didn’t grow up in a world that took them for granted.
I am also interested - The Dark Crystal had incredible imagery, and the Making of is an absolutely awesome Story of what People could create just with costumes and puppets at that time. I am a sucker for different art forms in film - Leika and their Stop Motion Movies are absolutely incredible, for example. So I am looking forward to what you can do with a puppet movie today.
It’s a tad unfortunate that it’s a prequel - those rarely work out well from a story point of view. But Dark Crystal didn’t exactly lend itself to a Sequel, either, so lets see what they come up with.
As an aside, there are not any Muppets in Dark Crystal. Nor in Labyrinth, nor Farscape, nor Star Wars. The Henson creations in those films are all Creatures, not Muppets. It’s a distinction between stylized, “cartoonish” creatures, and representations of creatures that are supposed to be “real”. Muppets (like Big Bird, Kermit, Ms. Piggy, or Cookie Monster) are not amenable to serious, adult works, but Creatures can be.
The important thing to remember about The Dark Crystal is that, despite being an adventure movie, it is not an action movie. Its pacing reflects an attempt to convey its reflection on hubris and to establish immersion in a completely scratch-built world. It tries to show viewers a lot of things about the world, so that they can make their own connections. That’s not to say that the pacing couldn’t be better–it certainly could–but I feel it’s important to look at it from the correct perspective.
I loved The Dark Crystal, but I’m wary of prequels in general and this one in particular. Still, it has Mark Hamill voicing a Skeksis, and I’ll give it a shot for that alone.
It’s definitely scary for kids but the tolerance for that was higher back then. Visually it looks amazing and all of that still holds up but I would suggest watching it again if you haven’t seen it in along time.
I’m not saying it’s bad but it definitely has some weaknesses that are evident with fresh eyes. That is why a reboot is a good idea. I am very curious to see what we get.
I was fired up for the original back when it originally came out. It proved to be an exceptionally tedious movie, despite intriguing character design and sets. I may look at this prequel, but if it doesn’t grab me in the first few minutes of episode 1, I’m gone. There are too many good shows and movies available to waste time on another misfire.