It's difficult to see how a film like this could ever have mass popularity. It's melodramatic, poorly scripted, mechanically plotted and hasn't got any people in it.
But I *love* it.
This is a dark, ponderous, elegant, film. The emotional tones are murky, sometimes quiet, sometimes startlingly loud, always alien and dreamlike and only ever vaguely comprehensible. The design is just drop-dead gorgeous, and entire alien WORLD brought to life. It's mesmerising, and more details can be found buried deep within it on every viewing. Thick layers of meaning were woven into this movie, revealed only when reading the accompanying coffee-table book, which records in a painstaking watchmaker's manner every tiny bit of "iceberg" under the surface of this story.
There ought to be a word for the feelings aroused by this film, a word that means "alien yet hauntingly familiar". I still get the same dreamy mood as I did when I first saw this film many years ago when this movie begins, the first crash of the cymbal and the first recital of the theme of the Skekses sounding as if from terribly far away, a high, yearning phrase on a single horn, lonely and beautiful, calling from another time. The Age of Wonder.
It's what this film's all about, Wonder. There's no explaining it to people who don't like that sort of right-brain thing, they just won't like it.
Why does it make sense that staring into the reflection of a cracked crystal from deep within the bowels of a tortured castle will, with the aid of some ugly machinery, suck out your very soul? That the Trial Stone glows when it's cleaved completely in two by the General? That the shard responds to the notes of Jen's pipe? It doesn't, of course, but it DOES.
I also love the pace and the mechanical plot. This is the one film whose mechanical plot I must forgive, and even love, as it's supposed to be mechanical. The sand painting diagram at the beginning of the movie is a representation of the history of the entire world, including the events to come. The whole world is one huge piece of metaphysical clockwork, and so the film is as well, the tension building clearly and slowly towards the extraordinary climax, which still gives me the shivers... Prophecies are stupid things to have in films, except this film, in which the prophecy is the entire point of the movie instead of an unnecessary condiment. The slow machinery of this movie lends a great weight to it, the feeling that vast, invisible forces are at work intensifies pace by implacable Mystic pace...
I also approve of the ending's inherent mysticism, taken straight from Jung, the key to transcendence being the joining of the Ego with the Shadow, the Skekses and Mystics representing these structures respectively. It's true, and this film says so, pretty much in so many words.
It's not at all surprising that it's not very popular with people who don't particularly buy into the things I've outlined above. It's geologically slow. It's inhuman. It's VERY weird. But it does all these things *deliberately* with an artistry rarely seen these days.
And I just love the music...
But I *love* it.
This is a dark, ponderous, elegant, film. The emotional tones are murky, sometimes quiet, sometimes startlingly loud, always alien and dreamlike and only ever vaguely comprehensible. The design is just drop-dead gorgeous, and entire alien WORLD brought to life. It's mesmerising, and more details can be found buried deep within it on every viewing. Thick layers of meaning were woven into this movie, revealed only when reading the accompanying coffee-table book, which records in a painstaking watchmaker's manner every tiny bit of "iceberg" under the surface of this story.
There ought to be a word for the feelings aroused by this film, a word that means "alien yet hauntingly familiar". I still get the same dreamy mood as I did when I first saw this film many years ago when this movie begins, the first crash of the cymbal and the first recital of the theme of the Skekses sounding as if from terribly far away, a high, yearning phrase on a single horn, lonely and beautiful, calling from another time. The Age of Wonder.
It's what this film's all about, Wonder. There's no explaining it to people who don't like that sort of right-brain thing, they just won't like it.
Why does it make sense that staring into the reflection of a cracked crystal from deep within the bowels of a tortured castle will, with the aid of some ugly machinery, suck out your very soul? That the Trial Stone glows when it's cleaved completely in two by the General? That the shard responds to the notes of Jen's pipe? It doesn't, of course, but it DOES.
I also love the pace and the mechanical plot. This is the one film whose mechanical plot I must forgive, and even love, as it's supposed to be mechanical. The sand painting diagram at the beginning of the movie is a representation of the history of the entire world, including the events to come. The whole world is one huge piece of metaphysical clockwork, and so the film is as well, the tension building clearly and slowly towards the extraordinary climax, which still gives me the shivers... Prophecies are stupid things to have in films, except this film, in which the prophecy is the entire point of the movie instead of an unnecessary condiment. The slow machinery of this movie lends a great weight to it, the feeling that vast, invisible forces are at work intensifies pace by implacable Mystic pace...
I also approve of the ending's inherent mysticism, taken straight from Jung, the key to transcendence being the joining of the Ego with the Shadow, the Skekses and Mystics representing these structures respectively. It's true, and this film says so, pretty much in so many words.
It's not at all surprising that it's not very popular with people who don't particularly buy into the things I've outlined above. It's geologically slow. It's inhuman. It's VERY weird. But it does all these things *deliberately* with an artistry rarely seen these days.
And I just love the music...