Review of The NeverEnding Story (1984) by David C — 22 Oct 2014

"The NeverEnding Story" introduces an interesting twist on a hackneyed idea, but it undermines its potential novelty by sticking too close to the kind of generic children's storytelling that it claims to transcend.

The observation that books, particularly fantasy and escapist literature, are refuges for imaginative and introverted children is a familiar and easy starting point, but deep into its runtime "The NeverEnding Story" is still restating it with tiresome simplicity.

It need not have leaned so heavily on that old saw, because the movie does have a fresh take on the theme, if only it would commit to it: almost from the beginning, we are tantalizingly led to believe that the "real world" and the world of books have the potential to cross over into and influence one another.

Given the early introduction of this idea, it is odd that the movie waits until the very final moments to explore its intriguing implications. The long delay means that the bulk of the film unfolds in a willfully generic, fundamentally unimaginative and uninspiring fashion.

Consider that the child hero of the movie's real world storyline claims to have read through the 19th and 20th century fantasy and adventure canon: Tolkien, Stevenson, Verne, Cooper. Theirs are works of real depth and observational detail and literary sophistication, and it is difficult to believe that a child who has read and enjoyed them could become invested in the derivative world of "Fantasia" that the movie creates and becomes mired in.

The film might have done better to use a known, celebrated public-domain story and characters instead of its own third-rate pastiches. This would have made the idea of crossover much more dramatic: the breaking of the fourth wall is necessarily less surprising and subversive when it is done by characters to whom we have only just been introduced and whose limits are not established than if a fictional person with a known set of parameters were employed for the purpose.

Perhaps the filmmakers could not resist the urge to create their own characters, but the puppetry that animates creatures like the stone troll and the flying dragon suggests no technological advancement over earlier works like Henson's "Dark Crystal" (1982), while the landscapes of Fantasia are far less ambitiously conceived than those in Henson's film.

Yet the child hero of the fantasy storyline is made to slog through them at length, and the protagonist of the real world storyline is, improbably, absorbed in the journey. The exciting new twist we were promised is relegated to an afterthought.