Review of The NeverEnding Story (1984) by Sarah E — 01 Feb 2011

This is a dark and chilling fairytale that's not for the faint of heart or spirits, but for some reason, is perfect for children. In today's society, filmmakers wouldn't think of making a movie this bleak or deadly. Children are to be coddled and babied until they seek out transgressive or dark material in their teen years. But this is what movies were like for me when I was a child: they were scary, they were tragic, but they were ultimately hopeful. The Neverending Story succeeds at being all three.

In a book called the Neverending Story, something is consuming the land of Fantasia; it is called only the Nothing, because that it what it appears as and that is what it leaves behind. Bastian Bux, the audience's avatar in the film, picks the worst possible place to read the book: a dusty basement in a city where thunderstorms show up just to terrify the living daylights out of people. It certainly terrified me. But it was a good terror, the kind that comes from facing darkness and knowing, deep down, that everything will be alright. That's the kind of viewer The Neverending Story needs. I have to wonder if children might be too jaded for it nowadays, but then again, this movie is all about what the audience is bringing in to it. There is no author to the Neverending Story; there is only the reader.