Labyrinth (1986)

2021-12-25

This christmas I watched the movie Labyrinth, directed by Jim Henson and starring David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly. (It came on the public broadcaster's culture stuff channel, Yle Teema; probably wouldn't've watched it otherwise.) It was weird, not entirely bad, but in my opinion not a masterpiece, or a cult classic. It was a musical (synth-heavy), set in a fantasy world of goblins and casual magic. I'm biased, since I generally don't like musicals.

The movie starts with an obvious CGI owl, straight out of a 90s or early 2000s game cutscene, flying around a black void, occasionally intersecting a reflective labyrinth wall; the rest of the movie looks better than the intro.

Story spoilers next five paragraphs:
The basic story is that a teenage girl, Sarah, played by Connelly, is pissed off about having to babysit her baby brother, and wishes the baby would go away; having said the right words ("I wish the goblins would come and take you away, right now") some puppet goblins do come and take the baby away.

Noticing this, she comes back into the room, where David Bowie, who plays the King of the Goblins or something (the character has its own Wikipedia article), is all like "hey, you said you wished for him to go away, be careful what you wish for! But I'll give him back if you can reach my fantasy castle, in the middle of this massive labyrinth that just appeared, in 13 hours, otherwise I'll turn him into a goblin."

She enters the labyrinth, meets a caretaker-like goblin called Hoggle, who kind of works as a guide but isn't entirely malevolent, through this fantasy world. Not high fantasy of elves and lords of rings and stuff like that, more like Alice in Wonderland, with talking creatures living in every nook and every cranny, angry at others messing with their home, with even stuff like door knockers being alive; basically anything that has a face will talk back at you at some point.

Anyway, the labyrinth works against Sarah, and Bowie the Goblin King (who has a very noticeable bulge, he's very flamboyant) tries to scare Hoggle from helping her, by terrorizing him with the prospect of The Bog of Eternal Stench – we eventually do get to the bog of eternal stench, and it has murky water and fart noises. Jareth blackmails Hoggle to give Sarah a peach laced with I guess LSD, or maybe just some Magic Stuff, causing a ballroom scene interspersed with shots of Bowie's face, which has exactly one expression. This ball almost causes Sarah to miss the 13-hour deadline, but she escapes into a junkyard.

The final showdown, after a quick little battle against The Goblin King's goblins, is a musical number in an Escher-like staircase room. Then Sarah remembers the lines from a play she was rehearsing at the start of the movie, and Bowie is like "oh no" at like two frames a second (but with the exact same expression), it's really jarringly slowed down. Clocks chime and everything is back to normal again :)

(End of spoilers.)

So, I'm not entirely sure what the point of this movie was, and why David Bowie was in it. The whole thing is rather childish, it's a decent kids' movie I suppose, but not really fitting that mould either.

The effects were decent, the puppetry looks good, and the world was fun. There were a few scenes of obvious green screen, but that didn't detract from the world too much. Bowie's acting wasn't all that convincing. The story is pretty generic. It's more about the fun fantasy world than any big Themes, I think. I'm surprised by how much this movie has written about it on Wikipedia, seems like it was big at the time but has since been kinda forgotten; I'd never heard of it before now. Apparently it has a cult following, and a lot of kids grew up watching it on VHS; makes sense, at least my experience of growing up with first a VHS player and then a DVD player was that the twenty-odd films we did have got rewatched many times.

idk i'm not a professional film critic.