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It's time to start up the nostalgia train and take a trip back to some of the best and most fantastical and magical tales of fantasy on the big screen! We keep looking at old TV shows and cartoons so lets have one for the big screen too!
I'll kick us off with some outstanding classics well worth a watch even now (and for those with youngens, well worth hunting down a DVD and exposing them too before they get corrupted on cheap CGI special effects ).
The Neverending Story - a world of dreams just beyond our reality, populated with heroes and princesses. With giants of rock, mighty beasts of the world and luck dragons. Fantastic puppetry and imagination the first film was a true masterwork. The sequels were good, but suffered somewhat here and there; but this first film is just oozing with charm.
A bit of Theme Metal as a treat
Spoiler:
Dragonheart - still the best (scottish) dragon film ever made! This was also quite the landmark in its day for being one of the first dragons done in CGI as well as top end animatronics. No more hiding the dragon in the corners of underexposed caves; nor men dressed in very bad costume.
Men in Tights - because not all fantasy has to be high nor epic; and not everything has to be serious !
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2019/09/25 20:11:44
I grew up on Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer. Even though it's not a strict adaptation of the short stories, Conan is one of the original musclebound badass heroes.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2019/09/25 23:34:30
"By this point I'm convinced 100% that every single race in the 40k universe have somehow tapped into the ork ability to just have their tech work because they think it should."
It's rather depressing how few quality fantasy films exist. It's easily one of the rarest genres. I think it's just too expensive and time consuming to bother with compared to simple quasi-sci-fi stuff that's so popular today. I wish we had far more quality fantasy films.
Elbows wrote: It's rather depressing how few quality fantasy films exist. It's easily one of the rarest genres. I think it's just too expensive and time consuming to bother with compared to simple quasi-sci-fi stuff that's so popular today. I wish we had far more quality fantasy films.
I blame Lord of the Rings and Thrones, made everyone a tad sniffy about even midrange fantasy stuff, then the capes came and done took all the resources
"AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED."
I agree but I think fantasy lends itself better to a longer format. Fantasy seems a lot harder to pull off successfully, compared to say Sci-fi films, at any rate. I also think Fantasy is more of an acquired taste and still has an image on the cheesier side of things. I do like my Sword and Sorcery films though.
I did enjoy this flick in a weird way but the trailer is pretty much the whole film
I'm looking forward, albeit with caution, to The Witcher and the Wheel of Time series but I think cinema wise we won't see too many fantasy films unless they have strong names attached to them.
Dragonslayer is a great film - it still has one of the best depictions of a dragon on screen for my money.
Watching Legend depends on which soundtrack your has. I'm pretty sure there are two, one is by Tangerine Dream (as noted in that).
Great film though, and bits from it got used in a lot of our RPGs for years since.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2019/09/27 11:24:28
Elbows wrote: It's rather depressing how few quality fantasy films exist. It's easily one of the rarest genres. I think it's just too expensive and time consuming to bother with compared to simple quasi-sci-fi stuff that's so popular today. I wish we had far more quality fantasy films.
I blame Lord of the Rings and Thrones, made everyone a tad sniffy about even midrange fantasy stuff, then the capes came and done took all the resources
Yeah. The Lord of the Rings trilogy raised the bar so high that even now, over 15 years after The Return of the King was released, nothing has come close to matching it. Even getting the same director and adapting another of the works of the same author failed to get anywhere near to its quality.
Part of the Fantasy problem could be that, outside of The Lord of the Rings, how many fantasy novels embed themselves within the general consciousness before a film/tv adaptation? I can't really think of any.
Many people know the name King Arthur, for example, but beyond that he wielded Excalibur, pulled a sword from a stone, had a round table, some knights (of which they can probably name 2) and a Merlin, I think that actual familiarity with the events of the Arthurian legends is quite poor. I wouldn't be surprised if people thought that Excalibur was the sword in the stone, for example.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2019/09/27 11:48:11
The Laws of Thermodynamics:
1) You cannot win. 2) You cannot break even. 3) You cannot stop playing the game.
Colonel Flagg wrote:You think you're real smart. But you're not smart; you're dumb. Very dumb. But you've met your match in me.
Most people think that Excalibur is the Sword in the Stone - in fact its not helped by the fact that many films display it as such or at least make little to no mention of other concepts.
I wonder if part of it is because great body of fantasy is based in a faux/fantasy medieval Europe and England and, as a result, doesn't get picked up on by a Hollywood machine that is very American focused in what they like to produce.
Also I'd argue that sci-fi has just as much it has to info dump on a viewer as fantasy does. The two are very similar in many respects save that one uses magic and one uses technology. You either get magicbabble or technobabble.
It might just be that they've loads of sci-fi sets and not as many fantasy ones and don't want to bother with making them. Plus they can likely do a lot of sci-fi settings close to the studios; even a futuristic setting can still use a lot of landscapes and such from the modern world. Whislt with fantasy you're either doing it all on greenscreens or paying actors extra to travel further to regions where civilisation is less apparent or absent.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2019/09/27 11:54:47
Overread wrote: It might just be that they've loads of sci-fi sets and not as many fantasy ones and don't want to bother with making them. Plus they can likely do a lot of sci-fi settings close to the studios; even a futuristic setting can still use a lot of landscapes and such from the modern world.
You aren't refering to the gravel-pit scenes, are you? I once heard that Blakes Seven were making a lot of noise in a pit. Doctor Who was being filmed on the other side, and had to stop filming until they finished.
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