joel-84186
Scary Muppet things and David Bowie... Need I say more.Well maybe I could say more, but it's best kept mysterious. A maze of fun and unexpected turns... Dare I say it, a labyrinth of delight!
cricketbat
Labyrinth is a creative and wonderful movie. It was a childhood favorite of mine, and it remains a favorite to this day. I practically have the thing memorized and yet I've enjoyed finding new aspects of the movie as an adult. It features unique characters, amazing puppetry and memorable moments. I still love Ludo, I still laugh at Sir Didymus, I still sing along with the Fire Gang and I still have a crush on Jennifer Connelly (in a non-creepy way). I don't know why, but every now and again in my life - for no reason at all - I need Labyrinth.
david-sarkies
What was interesting about this film is that I was forever comparing it with A Neverending Story, and one of the things that I didn't like about the Neverending Story was that while that had some rather interesting characters in Fantasia, the entire story was focused around a single person (or actually two), and pretty much everybody else disappeared into the background. This is not the case with Labyrinth as even though we have one major character, as she treks through the maze she picks up a number of friends so that at the ends there is a rather disparate group wondering around the domain. While I should have made a note on the Atrieu's lack of companions in my review of A Neverending Story, it wasn't something that I picked up until now.
There is so much to love about this film, and in fact it is one of those films that, despite being a creation of Jim Henson, it has attractions to both children and adults (which is another thing that makes it stand out from the previous film I watched where the main character is a 'little boy'). Well, there are still a lot of elements to the film that would relate more to children than to adults, and the major aspect would easily be the use of muppets - back in the eighties, much in the way that cartoons were generally considered to be for children, so were muppets (even though I suspect that there is a decent amount of adult humour in The Muppets, if my Dad's reactions were anything to go by).
However, watching this film now (and having finally getting around to watching it after having it sit one a table for over a year), I suddenly realised how much I missed with this film when I was younger. Okay, I wasn't a huge Bowie fan back then, so having him as the major character did put me off, that is until I came to appreciate his skill as a singer, and an actor (though he doesn't make all that many appearances in film). The thing that struck me the most about this film is how enigmatic Bowie actually is, and even though he is the villain, he has an appeal that not many villainous characters actually have. Moreso, he has a way in which he won't necessarily send his minions to do his dirty work, but rather appear himself to deliver a message directly.
Then there is Jim Henson's muppets - they have a nature that not many other fantasy and science-fiction shows replicate. Well, there is Star Wars and Lucas' famous Cantina scenes, but Henson seems to follow this trend here were each of his muppets have something clearly unique about them. We aren't talking about a bunch of mindless clones, but rather a unique individual, even if we are in a situation were the characters are being swarmed by an army of goblins. The amount of time an energy that went into creating each of the characters in this film must have been incredible.
The final thing I wish to touch upon is how this film would have been a fantasy roleplayer's dream. Once again I never picked it when I watched it all those years ago, but it is what I would call a classic dungeon crawl. What I mean is that we have a labyrinth full of rooms and each of these rooms have a different challenge to overcome, with the goal to reach the centre of the dungeon. This is what I would call your classic Dungeons and Dragons adventure game, full of monsters, treasures, and basically an awful lot of fun.
