Willow You Like It Or Not

Queen Bavmorda (Jean Marsh) rules the realm of Nockmaar with an iron fist – but a prophecy has it that a child will soon be born, a young girl identifiable by a special birthmark who will be destined to overthrow Bavmorda. Thus, the Queen has all pregnant women in Nockmaar tracked down and imprisoned, so that the child can be identified when born and then slain. The baby of destiny, who’ll come to be called Elora (variously played by Kate and Ruth Greenfield and Rebecca Bearman), is duly born – but her mother (Sallyanne Law) persuades the midwife Ethna (Zulema Dene) to smuggle the child out of Bavmorda’s palace.

Ethna sets the baby down in a basket and allows it to float down the river, because apparently we’re mashing up the Christ and Moses narratives here, and is retrieved by the children of one Willow Ufgood (Warwick Davis). Willow is a hobbit Nelwyn, and the hobbits Nelwyn are an insular people who just want to be left alone by the “Daikini”, their term for humans; Willow’s neighbours are especially put out when one of Bavmorda’s vicious hounds attacks the village festival in the hunt for the baby.

The High Aldwin (Billy Barty), the hobbit Nelwyn shaman-wizard-mayor who sees in Willow the potential to be a great sorcerer if he’d just believe in himself, considers the matter and sends off Willow and a party of Nelwyn to take the baby off to a nearby crossroads on the periphery of the Shire Nelwyn territory, there to hand the child off to a suitable human. Arriving there, Willow and his party meet Madmartigan (Val Kilmer), a condemned man that Willow’s party encounters imprisoned in a cage hung over the crossroads at the border of the Shire Nelwyn realm.

Most of the Nelwyn immediately turn around and go home at this point; only Willow and his buddy Meegosh (David J. Steinberg) stick around, hoping someone more appropriate than Madmartigan will come along. Eventually they decide to take a chance on the rogue, free him, and hand over the baby – only to discover on their return journey that the child has been taken back by a clan of brownies under the orders of Cherlindrea (Maria Holvöe), the fairy queen, who strongly informs Willow that he has been chosen by none other than the baby herself to be her guardian. Off Willow goes on a new quest, with baby in hand and brownies Rool and Franjean (Kevin Pollak and Rick Overton), to help Elora with that nagging destiny issue – and who knows, maybe that layabout Madmartigan will turn out to be more relevant than expected?

Star Wars Prequels: Not As Bad As I Remember

I actually don’t mind that George Lucas spruced up and modified the Star Wars prequel for the Blu-Ray releases. CGI dates poorly, after all, and the prequels are extremely reliant on it. On top of that, whereas the original trilogy was made at a time when the prospect of redoing the special effects at a later date was simply unthinkable, the prequel movies came out in the wake of the Special Editions.

Plus, of course, there’s the fact that the impact of the prequels was rather different to that of the original movies. The original Star Wars changed the direction of cinema and revolutionised the use of special effects; the prequel trilogy instead changed the direction of fandom, and not in an especially positive way. Cast members – and Lucas himself – have had to suffer enduring abuse for what the movies have wrought.

This is largely undeserved. Ahmed Best and Jake Lloyd in no way deserve the abuse that’s been rained down on them for their roles as Jar Jar Binks or baby Anakin, for instance; it’s pretty evident from most behind-the-scenes featurettes and stories that George Lucas was wholly in control of the production process and was the final decision maker, so if the blame lies anywhere it’s with George.

At the same time, there comes a point where piling on George becomes tiresome in its own way. Sure, there’s aspects of the movies which are unconscionable and which he richly deserves to be called out for; the reliance of The Phantom Menace on a range of crude racial stereotypes as a means of providing cheap, lazy characterisation for alien species was abhorrent at the time, and only feels more and more dated and disturbing as time goes by. There’s really no debate needed on that – if you can’t see that the Trade Federation are based on thinly-veiled stereotypes about Japanese business culture, or that Watto draws on cartoonish antisemitism, I’m not sure what I can say at this stage to persuade you.

However, two of the three prequel movies are perfectly cromulent family entertainment – not excellent, often not even good, but functional at what they do. The remaining one is an utter mess, but still, overhyping how bad the prequels are does everyone a disservice: it lets the really unforgivable errors and mistakes off the hook whilst casting aside the redeemable bits.

Star Wars As I Remember It

This is the first year in a while when we haven’t had a big Star Wars release around Christmas, Disney deciding to unleash Solo on us early – the combination of botched promotional marketing and market oversaturation killing off a range of the spin-off movies they were planning on doing. I’d already tended to associate Star Wars movies with Christmas anyway, since I recall seeing the original trilogy on television when I was little at around that time (thankfully the Star Wars Christmas Special didn’t make it across the Atlantic), so to fill the gap I thought I’d rewatch the movies and share my thoughts on the rewatch here.

For this first article, I decided to finally get around to acquiring Harmy’s “despecialised editions” of the original trilogy. These fan edits by a team headed by Petr Harmáček are about as close as you can get to Blu-Ray-quality versions of the original theatrical releases of the movies. The desultory 2006 releases of the original cuts – sourced from Laserdiscs and not even presented in anamorphic widescreen – felt like adding insult to injury to many fans offended by the tweaks made to the Special Editions, and Harmy is famously the one who stepped up and, using a range of sources, produced fan edits showing just how good the movies could look with a bit of effort. Subsequent incremental updates to Harmy’s editions have incorporated a range of commentary tracks, bonus features, and most significantly improvements to the main feature here and there as a result of more sources coming to light.

But is all this really necessary, and even if it were, is it equally necessary for each film in the original trilogy? Let’s dive in and consider that.