Krull (1983)

Written by Filipe Manuel Neto on November 30, 2022

An expensive film, typically from the 80s, but it aged badly and was forgotten.

I usually like fantasy films, but this film mixes things that seem so different from each other that I don't understand how such a thing was possible: on the one hand, the film shows a threat coming from space in the form of a spaceship, which looks like a black mountain with a big egg on top, and troops that shoot ray guns. On the other hand, it shows us an apparently medieval world, with castles, knights, princes and princesses. Almost as if Darth Vader had decided to invade planet Earth during King Arthur's reign.

The cast is quite satisfying, as the actors do what they need to do and make no mistakes, even though the job isn't demanding and there's nothing deep or very challenging here. The dialogues, for example, sound like they were written for a TV movie rather than something that has cinema quality. Despite the film featuring a young Liam Neeson, I barely recognized him.

Technically, the film is a very expensive production, and this can be seen from the quality of the sets and effects used. Well, quality doesn't exactly mean good taste, from what I can say that the film's visuals are expensive, elaborate, meticulously designed, but quite "kitsch", and the truth is that the special effects, although they were very good in their time, have aged badly and seem archaic nowadays. Finally, a word for the soundtrack, quite epic and triumphant at certain points.