You’re in for a lovely surprise there! While the original film only had time to showcase one kind of Garthim, this prequel series will also reveal
Collect all their action figures today or you’re not a Real Fan™!
I love how the 1st one looks, but I think the plot is some pretty boring “Point A to Point B” kinda junk, sadly. That’s a super bummer, because I love the Henson look so much and think it’s the best looking stuff they made. On the upside, however, we can thank the flick for supplying some samples… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfUSyoJcbxU
I think many people overlooked the original The Dark Crystal as a child’s movie or for the fantasy folks. Though both are true, it was a fun romp and has so many little nuggets of creativity, beauty, and wisdom in it. This sequel had better POP and looks promising.
To both of your comments, yes and yes. The universe is so big. The universe of our collective imagination is maybe even bigger. So why do we need all these sequels and prequels and remakes and … more of the same? Have we really run out of new stories (and story tellers)?
In preparation for this, we finally showed the kids The Dark Crystal this past weekend (the movie, not the actual crystal - they aren’t ready to see the actual crystal yet). I think they enjoyed it well enough.
The Boy was a bit intrigued that it involved puppets, not any kind of special effects…
When the world that a story takes place in is so intriguing and huge that there’s more stories to tell about that world, I’m not sure why that’s a bad thing. Do we need a retelling of Point Break or Total Recall, using the same exact characters and story? No. But opening a new chapter of a book to tell a new story? That, I’m more than okay with.
If one wants to see more of a type of thing one advocates for it and against a perceived opposite. I want to see more original characters and worlds to the extent that anything is original. It’s as simple as that.
And yes, we retell stories. And yes that’s what we do as a species. But if you think this isn’t part of the same media and money patterns that produces the new CHIPS movie or all of the things both Fast and Furious, regardless of who’s behind it creatively then that is where we disagree most.
And that’s fine, and you are certainly welcome to express your own personal subjective preferences. But your original assertions / implications were much more that a mere statements of personal subjective preference.
Your original implications were that creative retelling of old stories is both somehow a recent trend and a universal failing. What I pointed out was that no, it isn’t, because we’ve always done it, and no, it isn’t, because sometimes it produces marvelous things.
I don’t think that. I never suggested that, or anything of the sort. I’ve never seen a Furious movie and never intend to. But I don’t resent the fact that they exist, either, because it literally costs me nothing to not see them, and because there are plenty of excellent stories I’m happy to read or see instead.
And a great number of those stories are entirely original! Your further implication seems to be that Hollywood is wholly incapable of producing original stories, and that it only engages in reboots and sequels. But that’s simply not true. Excellent new stories from the last 20 years of film that were told in powerful and interesting and wonderful ways: Memento, Mulholland Drive, Lost in Translation, The Incredibles, Pan’s Labyrinth, Juno, WALL-E, Inglourious Basterds, Inception, Moonrise Kingdom, Birdman, Grand Budapest Hotel, Spotlight, Hateful 8, La La Land… (ok so I think that Nolan and Anderson and Tarantino and Pixar are especially good at this). And we’re in the midst of new Golden Age of television, with an abundance of outstanding original television programming from the past decade: Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Americans, plus a huge list from Netflix alone including Sense8, Stranger Things, Orange is the New Black, Master of None, BoJack Horseman, and The Crown.
You prefer original stories. Great! Go watch those! There are lots of them! But please, let’s not pretend that retelling old stories is a new thing, or that retelling new stories doesn’t often produce excellent stories, or that excellent original stories are not also being told. Because none of those things is true.
I didn’t pretend any of those things. You seemed to have block quoted everything I said except the part when I agreed with your statement about our history as storytellers. We agree on some things and not others. Thanks for your permission to make my statements. You may now proceed to use more words to tell me what I was implying.
This may be taken as heresy, but I watched The Dark Crystal maybe a year ago, and it reminded me of nothing so much as James Cameron’s “Avatar”.
Not in the plot or characters, but more in the way those kinda weren’t the point, it was more of a “you won’t believe the things our special effects department managed to do” kind of movie. They made an amazing world, and the point of the plot was to showcase it.
What I remember from The Dark Crystal isn’t the plot, but rather images of a beautiful flower in a swamp, the row of Mystics travelling across a desert, the repugnant Skeksis, the mood of the thing.
What I remember from Avatar is bioluminescent plants, electromagnetic shenanigans and these small flying jellyfish things (and also rolling my eyes at the paint-by-numbers Mighty Whitey plot, so Dark Crystal comes out ahead there).
Absolutely, the plot is a fairly basic fantasy-quest “achieve this goal” sort of thing.
In essence, Jim Henson was enamored of Brian Froud’s artwork, so he said “hey, want to create a world for me?” and Froud went away and came back with the world of the Dark Crystal, and Jim Henson & Frank Oz built a movie around it. I’m being reductive and there’s more to it than that, but you’re not far off in saying that the movie was created to showcase Froud’s creature designs and the artistry of the Creature Shop at that time; the goal was to create a 100% puppet movie that wasn’t just “muppets blowing stuff up”.
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