A good movie

It is one of those 80’s classics I wanted to watch for many years. Eventually, I thought it was rather difficult to judge this movie. You can actually sum up this movie with the animated owl at the beginning. On one hand, it looked terribly cheesy and was not really convincing. On the other hand, more than 25 years ago, it was the very first attempt at a photo-realistic CGI animal character and, from this point of view, it was actually quite impressive. I mean, the story was decent but nothing really original and I never understood why in so many of those movies (see also ‘The Neverending Story’ or ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’), the main character starts in our world and, then somehow, travel to some fantasy realm. I understand that it is a probably a way to allow the viewers to identify themselves with the main character but it is a rather tiresome and boring gimmick since you have to wait for a while before the adventure finally get started. Furthermore, at least 3 times, they suddenly started to sing a song and I thought it didn’t match at all with the rest of the movie. Adding to this, those songs were really average even the ones sang by David Bowie. Concerning Jennifer Connelly, I was rather neutral concerning her. I mean, it was pretty neat to see her when she was very young but I can’t say I was really impressed by her performance. Still, I enjoyed most of this flick anyway. Indeed, the whole thing looked really awesome with some great monsters/goblins/weird creatures. Not only they looked great but the way they moved was also really impressive. In this age of CGI overdoses, it was really refreshing to see some physical effects. Like I said before, even though the plot was nothing really original, it was still entertaining enough. To conclude, in spite of its flaws, I thought it was pretty good and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

7/10