Featured Creature: The one that starred an Ewok

 

Title: Willow

What Year?: 1982 (preproduction)/ 1988 (release)

Classification: Knockoff/ Mashup

Rating: That’s Good! (4/4)

 

As I write this, I’m approaching the end of my second year of hypergraphia on this blog, and one thing I decided I wanted to do was bring this feature to a full dozen reviews. As usual, I already had an ample backlog, and what I had really been wanting to get to was a specific time and genre, 1980s fantasy movies. I had already covered a fair number of entries, starting with Krull and coming most recently to (dear Logos, Bakshi's) Lord of the Rings. However, I still felt that a more in-depth survey was in order. Out of all the very promising examples I considered, there was one that stood out, as one of the very last, as the most influential to film history, and in certain lights as the very best. I present Willow, the George Lucas movie that maybe ripped off Tolkien.

Our story begins with a fast-paced introduction to a sword-and-sorcery world where a sorceress queen is fixated on destroying a baby that is prophesied to destroy her and become queen. The skullduggery ends with an iffy Biblical image of a baby floating downstream. The orphan ends up in the realm of a dwarfish race, where she is discovered by the family of an aspiring magician named Willow. Initially, he is opposed to getting involved, offering a line that will be prophetic in its own right, “Let’s push it downstream and forget we ever saw it.” When the agents of the queen Bavmorda arrive, however, he is convinced to return the infant safely to the humans, which the midgets refer to as dakini. When he emerges into the human realm, he finds himself in the midst of a war between the sorceress and an apparently free realm. He soon meets up with a sketchy but competent swordsman Madmartigan, who reluctantly joins a further quest to find a good sorceress who can aid them. A long and perilous journey still lies ahead, with the queen’s general and her own daughter close behind, and in the end, it is Willow who must face the queen to save the child’s life!

Willow was a 1988 fantasy film produced by George Lucas and directed by Ron Howard, reportedly from a story Lucas had created in 1972. Warwick Davis, the actor who played the Ewok Wicket in Return of the Jedi (see Battle For Endor) was offered the lead role as early as 1982. The eventual film starred Warwick and Val Kilmer (see Island of Dr. Moreau) as Madmartigan, with Joanne Whalley as Sorsha and Jean Marsh as Queen Bavmorda. Effects were provided by ILM, including a “go-motion” monster by Phil Tippett (all hail Phil) and a transformation sequence created with CGI “morphing”. The soundtrack was composed by James Horner (see the Krull soundtrack review). A merchandise campaign included a novelization by Wayland Drew, who also wrote the Dragonslayer novel, and an NES game from Capcom. The film was a financial success, earning $137.6 million against a $35M budget, but failed to revive interest in the fantasy genre. Kilmer and Whalley were married from 1988 to 1995. The film was released on VHS and DVD in 2001, and on Blu Ray and digital formats in 2019.

For my experiences, this is the quite rare ‘80s movie that I definitely remember seeing in the theater. From all my recollections, I liked it well enough but wasn’t otherwise impressed, and I definitely suspected Lucas had copied Lord of the Rings as well as Star Wars. (As I was prepared to point out at greater length, no evidence has emerged that Lucas was concerned enough to reach out to Tolkien or his estate.) What I had no way to contextualize at the time was how few movies had even tried what Willow did. By my own estimation, the only films of the 1980s fantasy wave that were both original and successful as “straight” sword-and-sorcery were Dragonslayer and Krull, and I have already documented the price they paid literally and figuratively. The rest of the field, good or bad, is dominated by late entries in older properties (kind of including Conan), movies that really belong in satire or other genres (I count Princess Bride as the former and Dark Crystal as the latter, though I’m not sure what), and more or less intentional low-budget “camp” (see Adventures of Hercules, if anything). Willow was nothing less than the last stand for serious, big-budget high fantasy. What really drove me to that appraisal was the protracted delay getting the damn thing on Blu Ray, which pushed me to the point of trading jokes whether George Lucas wanted it to be seen. It was in those dire straits that I truly took in both the non-trivial flaws of the film and just how far it exceeded anything else up to its time.

Moving forward, it can first and foremost be reiterated that even considered as an LOTR knockoff, Willow is at a minimum as good as anything we got prior to the Peter Jackson trilogy. Even then, there really isn’t that much that is owed to Tolkien more than any other fantasy. The story and characters would be a checklist of cliches even in the early 1970s, yet Lucas succeeds in elevating this to likable and interesting characters in a fleshed-out world. Due credit must be given to the uniformly good cast and performances, perhaps especially Kilmer, who manages to balance entertaining and competent with every appearance of self-awareness. Then the obvious edge comes from the effects, which on consideration are deceptively limited. The one big “set piece” effect is the rampage of the nearly stationary two-headed dragon/ patchisaur and even that is balanced by the very low-tech trolls.  The rest of the action scenes are more about sword-swinging and punching than monsters and magic, while the effects are doled out when they are actually needed, to the point that some of the very best are relatively easy to miss. My personal favorite, which I first noticed on bootleg VHS, is a sort of incense burner that comes to life during the magicians’ duel of the finale. It lurches along in glorious go-motion for just a few moments before being disposed of, yet it makes a disconcerting foe while it lasts.

The part that’s difficult to explain or describe is that this all feels realistic. Part of this is that the villains, or at least their leaders, are dignified enough to be a convincing threat. But the other, almost counterintuitive side is that they are usually reasonably balanced against the heroes. For once, the forces of good include an actual army that seems no more or less capable than the hordes of evil, and have their own sorceress to boot. Willow and Madmartigan are correspondingly fallible, with the mage gradually emulating the warrior’s combination of arrogance and dirty tricks. What’s most impressive are the actual fights. This is neither stylized swordplay nor overchoreographed martial arts, but a series of brawls where blades are rammed efficiently into guts and even the sorceresses don’t hesitate to punch each other. The magic itself gets grim and gritty, as attested by the gruesome transformation of a troll into a gooey embryonic dragon. I wondered further if the demise of the villain somehow inspired the Toxo Warriors and their propensity to blow themselves up.

That leaves the “one scene”, and to me, the most memorable is the first encounter between Willow and Madmartigan. I’m sure I remember this from way back in the theater, though I’m sure I couldn’t have appreciated many of the layers of the scene. The party of midgets discover the warrior left to die in a cage. When Willow approaches, there’s a decent jump scare as the warrior grabs hold of him. Madmartigan quickly realizes some nuance in order when he demands water but has to let Willow go to get it. In the process, he refers to the little people as “peck”, clearly derogatory enough to compare to some familiar names, while they refer to him as “dakini” (an Asian term for anything between an ogre and a minor god), which obviously isn’t complimentary either. When he figures out they mostly just want to leave the baby and go home, he quickly offers to take care of her. Then there’s the part I certainly would have overlooked, as the warrior continues to refer to Willow as “peck”. When Willow takes explicit offense, he begins repeating the slur, notwithstanding Willow’s threat to turn him to stone. It’s an understated treatment of prejudice that becomes the beginning of a partnership, unfortunate only in that such subtlety has been lost in Lucas’s more recent work.

In closing, this is truly a case where I have said everything I wanted. It should be clear that I could have taken the rating down a notch, and there are certainly equal or better films I have treated more harshly. What brings it up is the time and genre context. As already outlined, 1980s fantasy was a trend that started marginal and went downhill from there. In that company, this might not be the “best”, yet it is strong enough that the films it can be compared to fairly (including most of those I mention above) are simply “different” rather than better or worse. What does set it apart is its transitional status, bridging the refined arts of stop-motion and practical effects with CGI, with a decent soundtrack from James Horner in the bargain. It’s more than enough to rate at least a little above the sum of its parts, especially for those who saw it back when. And with that, I’m done for another day.

Image credit Moby Games.