Some Childhood Films Not As Good As I Once Thought

I've been renting some films lately that I haven't seen in a long time. While some of them are just as fantastic as I remember (Clash of the Titans), others aren't so much.


One such film was Krull. While I enjoyed the nostalgia, I realized that a major element was missing from a great deal of science fiction and fantasy films of the 70's and 80's: depth.

The film plays out like a video game - action point to action point, with large portions of the storyline left unexplained. Had this been based on a novel, I would be O.K. with it; a lot of film adaptations are written for fans of the book and leave out known back story to edit the film down to a respectable run time. But this was a film from the ground up, yet provided little information regarding the world, it's characters, or their relationship with one another.

Even the awful films of the 90's and today have some emotional growth of the main character (albeit cheesy and overdone). Which gives me hope in terms of writing; it seems the general public's attention span has grown to appreciate good storytelling.

Krull was still fun to watch (especially seeing Robbie Coltrane and Liam Neeson in their early years), and it's a friggin masterpiece compared to the 1984 film Dune. While that film was based on one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time, it somehow managed to place itself if the category of worst science fiction film of all time.