Krull (1983)

Directed by Peter Yates. Starring Ken Marshall, Freddie Jones, David Battley, Lysette Anthony, Alun Armstrong, Bernard Bresslaw, John Welsh, Liam Neeson, Robbie Coltrane, Francesca Annis. [PG]

A mountain-like spaceship arrives on the planet Krull, where its omnipotent leader decides to kidnap a princess (Anthony) on her wedding day; generic hero prince Marshall seeks a magical weapon called the Glaive and teams up with assorted characters (Fellowship of the Glaive?) on the journey to slay the fiend and win back his bride. Expensive production features fine photography and scenery, uneven but occasionally inventive special effects, and a James Horner score that, while liberally cribbing from his work on Star Trek II, promises lots of excitement and adventure—a promise not kept. Instead, this plodding, dreary mash-up of fantasy and science fiction is illogical, derivative, confusing and, ultimately, quite tedious. The protagonist has no screen presence, the villain is an underdeveloped non-entity until the mundane climax, and the action is both infrequent and uninvolving. Possesses greater ambition and higher visual quality than the average sword-and-sorcery effort of its era, but elaborate does not always equal entertaining; they should have spent more of that exorbitant budget on a livelier script that made sense.

29/100