Every now and then a film comes along that is so embarrassingly awful but trying so hard to be good that I can’t help but feel the need to give it pity points. Now, I know that no artist wants to be told that they’re being graded on a curve made out of nostalgia and pained sighs, but for “The Neverending Story”, I feel they’ll take all the comfort they can get.
Luckily for the audience of “The Neverending Story”, the title is not a warning—it does end at the…end? An ending containing a fantasy dragon (more like a puppet dog with a super-long neck) bursting through the fourth wall (literally and figuratively), and terrorizing the human world. Anybody who’s seen the film is now chuckling/grimacing with understanding, while everyone else is thinking: “schwa?”
Believe me, that “schwa?” doesn’t get any better.
“The Neverending Story” (1984) is based off a German novel (“based” being applied loosely here; author Michael Ende actually sued the production but lost), about a boy named Bastian Balthazar Bux (a name that inevitably means he’s going to be bullied by other kids). He steals/borrows a magical book from an elderly man (who, like many of the characters in this film, is vastly more interesting that the main cast but only receives five minutes of screen time), and becomes enwrapped in the land of Fantasia. In the story, Fantasia is besieged by this entity known as the Nothing, forcing a young warrior known as Atreyu to embark on a quest to save his world from obliteration.
The most frustrating part about watching “The Neverending Story” is how tantalizingly close it is to being a great film. The puppetry and special effects are overall impressive for the ’80s (at the time, it was the most expensive budget aside from the U.S. or the Soviet Union), and the production design works hard to make Fantasia feel like an actual place. Conceptually, it has all the classic benchmarks of a great heroic tale, beginning with the narrative conceit of a child being transported into a fantasy realm through a magical book (halfway between “The Pagemaster” and Tom Riddle’s diary).
However, the movie never ends up telling an actual story. Instead, it has flashes of genius. The infamous tragic scene involving Atreyu’s horse; the philosophy of Morla the ancient turtle; the lamentation of Rock Biter and his inability for his “big, strong hands” to save his friends—these are beautiful, emotion scenes that in any other film might have been remembered for their self-reflective poignancy. It makes it all the more disappointing that those moments get bogged down by terrible acting, groan-worthy dialogue, and a needlessly complex and undecipherable plotline.
