3 out of 5

Director: Jim Henson, Frank Oz

The puppets are fantastic. Jim Henson’s vision and sense of imagination (and dedication to bringing these things into a tangible reality) are inspiring. And The Dark Crystal is not a bad movie – it’s a great tale, a surprisingly dark spin on a kid-geared adventure/quest format. But it is slow, and contemplative, and combined with the questionable decision to make the leads more human-like (and thus dipping into the whole uncanny valley a bit), it makes it hard to get in to. Jen – seemingly the last of his race, a human-like elf race called Gelflings – is tasked to retrieve a shard and heal the ‘dark crystal’, which should rid the land of the grim Skesis, some vulture-looking baddies who are all bad news. You can piece together most of the general ebb and flow of story from that, but Henson and director Oz wove in a bunch of mature and frightening elements that elevate this above a puppet show and the more ‘cool’ Labyrinth. To go into each notable piece – the strong female lead, the horrifying assault on a Skesis early in the film – would take a while, but each moment plays like a vignette for some reason and so it’s difficult to nestle in to a set feeling on the movie. Part of that stems from the quiet. The score is interesting but played way down in the mix, and no scene is rushed – characters wander and shuffle slowly, and plot is developed instead of outright explained (rare and respectful, again, for a kid movie). And the other part: it was probably a conscious decision to make the Gelflings human looking, but it makes the in-human puppeteering of the characters that much more obvious, and so scenes focusing on our leads are off-putting, and you want to get back to the rest of the movie. Still – if you saw this at the right time as a kid, I’m sure it hit the right blend of weirdness and wonder, and as an adult, you’ve rarely seen such amazing costumes and puppets and sets executed so professionally for an entire film.