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After Metropolis (Blade Runner), Die Nibelungen. The heroine is Eve plus Pandora, a doe-eyed princess with a shark-toothed suitor, Mia Sara and Tom Cruise competing for who's the prettiest creature in the world. They cavort in the enchanted forest and pick glitter out of each other's hair, the marauding goblin (Alice Playten) is mightily unimpressed: "May be innocent, may be sweet, ain't half as nice as rotting meat." The vaginal ring is hurled into a river and the unicorn's castrated horn becomes a blasting wand, an arctic chill engulfs the lush realm, all part of the villain's plan to extinguish light once and for all. Cocteau's Bête is reimagined into a gargantuan bovine lobster, half a ton of Rob Bottin latex adorned with Tim Curry's lips. "Tonight, the sun sets forever." Fantasy as laboratory experiment suits Ridley Scott's imagistic mania, thus the most relentless mise en scène since Powell-Pressburger's The Tales of Hoffmann. Sylvan harmony and tenebrous discord, lyrical surfaces that darken and harden with the slaying of a sacred equine, flurries of petals and bubbles and snowflakes—a primeval glow cultivated in a cramped Pinewood set. It might be stained glass or painted Walt Disney cels, and then a gnome farts. "We are all animals, m'lady," rumbles the Horned One, attempting small talk with his comely captive. David Bennett and Annabelle Lanyon are Kinda Peter Pan and Maybe Tinkerbell, Robert Picardo's pantomime of the gruesome swamp hag adduces a note of Witch Hazel undone by girlish vanity. Vidor's Solomon and Sheba figures in the vanquishing of the overlord, the ending seals the dreamscape under fragile glass. ("Better you dread the waking," warns the runty elf.) Jackson's Tolkien pictorial is the unwelcome digital update. Cinematography by Alex Thomson. With Billy Barty, Cork Hubbert, Peter O'Farrell, Kiran Shah, and Tina Martin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |