![]() It was further proof that Scott’s eye for detail, grand visions and world-building was utterly unparalleled, except that instead of the future, Scott now looked to the past, an imagined past, a world not of cities, technology, cars, spacecrafts and electricity, but one of forests, magic, monsters, unicorns and even pure Evil itself. Essentially, it is absolutely ravishing, and one of the most beautiful-looking films ever made. Ridley Scott’s 1985 epic Legend, which was one of the last of its kind to arrive during this wave of fantasy filmmaking, is not the greatest fantasy film ever made, but it does represent the ambitious summation of the genre’s comeback during this time: it set the bar so high for the amount of immersive detail to be found in its imagined world that nothing after could hope to match it. Of course, not all films in this genre could pull it off – sometimes the monsters looked fake, sometimes the make-up was ropey, sometimes the effects used for, say, aerial combat or aerial travel, looked clunky, and sometimes the films were clumsily executed as a whole, but at the time audiences, especially the younger ones, were captivated. ![]() They trod a delicate balance between reality and unreality – it was all imagination, but it really was there on screen, daring us to find the flaws that would break its spell. As they were, for the most part, genuinely physical and not created after-the-fact (the likes of matte paintings, animation and rotoscoping excepted), these films felt convincing in a vividly tactile way that felt closer to the real thing than ever before. If you were a child growing up in the Eighties (or even in the early Nineties, when these films were still mainstays on television), then some, many or all of the above may have been or still are your nearest and dearest favourites.Īlso, because these films were made prior to the common usage of computer-generated effects, much of the strengths of their visuals was conjured through extensive set design, make-up effects, miniatures, prosthetics, and carefully executed cinematography and lighting. They were everywhere: Excalibur, Flash Gordon, Clash of the Titans (although that film was tied to an earlier, stop-motion/Ray Harryhausen-dominated era), Time Bandits, Dragonslayer, The Beastmaster, Conan the Barbarian and its sequel, The Dark Crystal, Krull, The Company of Wolves, The Neverending Story, Return to Oz, Labyrinth, Willow, Hawk the Slayer (bless it) and of course, the two massive Star Wars sequels… all of these and many more comfortably nestled in the fantasy genre (and more specifically, the kind of fantasy film that explored other, imagined worlds or imagined times), yet they were also all wildly different works in terms of approach, tone and mood. It led to the demand for, and a wave of, North American and British movies that redefined what was possible to experience in the cinema. Thanks to staggering advancements made in the fields of special and visual effects, and boosted by the phenomenal artistic success of 1977’s Star Wars and 1978’s Superman, so much was now possible in regards to creating new, believable and fantastical images onscreen. ![]() ![]() That most rapturous, dreamlike and out-of-time of genres, the fantasy film, experienced something of a boom in the 1980s. Exploring the nature of good and evil in Ridley Scott’s misunderstood fantasy ![]()
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