Krull (1983) Peter Yates

Production Budget: $27 million Worldwide Gross: $16 million

One of the quintessential D&D type movies we grew up with.  Krull is about a semi futuristic group of aliens with swords/blasters who invade the planet of Krull.  Two rival families decided to unite with a political marriage between Prince Colwyn and Princess Lyssa.  The princess is captured by the leader of the alien force to marry her in a few days.  Colwyn seeks out a mystical weapon called the Glave to defeat the Slayers.

This movie has a great look to it as most of the Slayer’s fortress is out of fantasy artwork from old Dragon magazines and Spelljammer books.  The best part of the movie is the music which is fantastic and almost a character in the movie.  It’s too good and dare I say this movie is not that worthy of it.

Yet despite all these really great elements, I didn’t much care for this movie.  In fact, it’s all kind of hollow.  It has a lot of style to cover for the fact there is nothing in the middle.  The plot is cookie cutter and lacks any kind of depth.  All we get is bad guys come and steal princess.  The rest of the movie is get macguffin, go here, sorry your princess is in another castle, go there, etc.

Now this certainly isn’t my chief gripe.  After all, most of the movies we like have stock plots.  But it’s with other elements like great characters or smart writing or great action that keeps us involved.  Our hero is bland, wooden, and in no way drives this movie despite having most of the screen time.  The rest of the characters range from forgettable to one of the most annoying characters in adventure movies in Ergo the Magnificent.  The dialog isn’t all that memorable either.  There are some nice exchanges but most of it is just explaining they have to go to X and get the mystical Y and blah blah blah.

Some of the action and the swashbuckling stuff is good, but its for me few and far between.  The second act just really drags for me as they seemingly forget the action in exchange for a mystical scavenger hunt.  The action at the bookends are rather cool though.

I’m still a little disappointed that I didn’t really like this movie.  Stylistically the movie is great and I appreciate every time they put forth a good effort in the fantasy genre.  But I just sat through the movie and I felt so indifferent to it.  The extremely slow middle, the rather mediocre writing, and the lack of interesting characters really brought it down for me.  What I am saying is probably nerd sacrilege but it’s MEH.