Release Year: 1982
Director: Jim Henson, Frank Oz
*****
Imagine watching The Lord of the Rings, chopped down to 93 minutes. Now, imagine LotR with muppets. Not one or two, like Yoda is the Star Wars trilogy, but a full cast of muppets. Good guys, bad guys, creatures...every last speaking part is for a muppet. Essentially, The Dark Crystal is the muppet version of Lord of the Rings. A quest film, a big bad meanie that has to be destroyed, a somewhat elaborate backstory, wondrous-ish looking sets, elements of science fiction and fantasy. The only thing left out of this 1982 film is an appearance by Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy.
I'm going to level with you: I'm not sure who The Dark Crystal is aimed at. Is it kids? Probably not, since the material is too dark and complex for them to comprehend. Is it adults? More of a possibility, but still not likely. What adult in their right mind wants to watch an action movie hamstrung by the very nature of the film. (We get very few full body shots of any character precisely because they are muppets.)
As good a puppeteer Jim Henson was, there is no way having these characters carry a dramatic full length movie was a good idea. They can't emote, they don't look real in any definition of the word and, frankly, look downright silly at times. Consider Jen running through a forest. The entire sequence is half covered in grass to mask the fact Jen is a muppet, which is painfully obvious to anyone watching. And it is shown in such a long shot, we get to see the landscape of this other world...complete with foam planets and wholly unbelievable wildlife. Suspension of disbelief only gets the audience so far; the movie has to meet us halfway.
The quest, by the way, is to destroy the Dark Crystal by reuniting a missing shard with the main crystal, which is in the hands of the Bad Guys. We're told all of this in an overlong and completely confusing prologue.