Last summer, I ran across a video about how the aesthetic of “medieval” fantasy is actually more early modern, from the 1600s up through the Victorian era (with pre-Raphaelites and the Gothic revival). The usual adventurer outfit with the high, cuffed boots and long coat is mid 1600s, as is the typical Renaissance festival wench outfit. The fantasy tavern is a 1600s-1700s coaching inn, etc. I posted about it then. Ever since then I’ve been looking at fantasy movies in a different way, and I don’t think it’s quite as bad as the video made it sound. The medieval fantasy movies I’ve been watching lately are pretty medieval. I’m no expert. I’ve just done some research on the topic and I read a lot of expert commentaries about historical things in movies, but I have a general sense for what fits into each period.

The Princess Bride is mostly pretty true to a medieval period, with some exceptions. Westley does have a bit of Leading Character Costume Syndrome, in which the main character wears less historic, more “normal”-looking clothes. He’s a bit closer to 1700s, with the slimmer breeches and loose shirt. He’s just missing the long waistcoat and frock coat. Inigo is similar, though he has the waistcoat but is missing the coat. Vizzini’s outfit is kind of Renaissance, as are some of Buttercup’s princess dresses, and Buttercup’s red dress is hard to place (per Frock Flicks, it’s a decent 15th century dress). Otherwise, the look is actually pretty medieval for most of the characters and the settlement outside the castle. There’s even an open hearth in the castle’s hall, and the female extras have their hair covered and are wearing wimples.

Ladyhawke also has some Leading Character Costume Syndrome, with Navarre and Isabeau wearing more fantasy-type clothes rather than anything true to any period (her dress at the end looks rather 1980s), but everything else in that movie is at least aiming at medieval rather than early modern (though they’re apparently not accurately medieval).

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is pure fantasy. I can’t identify any particular period they’re trying to hit. There are bits and pieces of things thrown into a blender. And that’s okay. This is a fantasy world, so they may as well make up their own thing. The costumes for The Huntsman: Winter’s War are also more fantasy than historical, but the dwarf women do seem to be in the Renaissance festival type outfits, so 1600s. The rest are a lot of leather “adventurer” looks that don’t belong to any particular period. I think the original thesis of that video that started this line of thought was more about people thinking they were doing medieval but missing it by several hundred years.

The Lord of the Rings movies do something interesting, with each culture being from a different time period. The hobbits are pretty much 1700s with the style of clothing. They’ve got the long waistcoats and frock coats. They also have cast-iron stoves and fireplaces. Then we get to the elves, which are basically pre-Raphaelite meets Gothic Revival, so they’re medieval through the lens of the Victorians. Then we get to Rohan, which is essentially Land Vikings. Their clothes and general style are a mix of Viking and various eras of medieval, except for the pants the men wear (men’s pants in fantasy movies are almost never anything close to period, since they aren’t wearing hose, they don’t do the short balloon-type pants of the late 1500s-early 1600s or the big, baggy pants of the 1600s, and they don’t have the tight front/saggy butts of the 1700s-early 1800s. Men’s pants throughout history are pretty weird to modern eyes. I’ll admit that even in my mental costuming for my books, I go with more modern pants because it’s my fantasy world and they can look the way I want them to). We get the open hearth in the hall, too.

I guess that makes the elves most advanced, since they’re Victorian (cosplaying as medieval), and then the hobbits are more advanced than the men if the hobbits have iron stoves and the men still have open hearths.

I’m sure for film, one reason you get period attire rather than going pure fantasy is that they may rent costumes for the background characters instead of making up their own thing. I didn’t pay too much attention to what the people in crowd scenes were wearing in Honor Among Thieves to see if they were likely in rented costumes and, if so, if they were from a particular period. But I would guess that some of the costumes for The Princess Bride and Ladyhawke were rented or possibly from the BBC costume stores. It would be cheaper to rent a lot of costumes designed for costume dramas for the extras than to design fantasy costumes, and that’s going to give you something reasonably authentic for a period. The main actors get costumes made for them, so they’re more likely to go “fantasy” rather than being period, for various reasons, including the actors wanting to have a certain image. A macho movie star may refuse to wear hose or those balloon shorts with hose. Female movie stars are likely to want to either look sexy (and thus flowing hair rather than pinned up under a cap or veil) or be a Strong Female Character in leather pants, regardless of historical accuracy.

Last weekend I got around to the previous weekend’s planned movie viewing, with some fantasy from the 1980s.

First up, I tried watching The Dark Crystal but didn’t make it very far into it because it hit some serious uncanny valley stuff for me with the hero, who at times was very puppet-like but then was a bit too human for comfort. I also couldn’t follow all the story that was infodumped by a narrator at the beginning. So I gave up and ended up watching the US figure skating national competition.

Then on Saturday night, it was Ladyhawke. I have really mixed feelings about that movie. On the one hand, I love it, but on the other, it’s pretty seriously flawed.

In case you’re not up on 80s fantasy, this is the story about a young thief (a rather miscast Matthew Broderick, who half the time sounds like he’s doing Ferris Bueller—before he was Ferris Bueller—and half the time sounds like he’s trying to do a fantasy European-ish accent), who escapes from an evil bishop’s prison, then is rescued from recapture by a mysterious knight (Rutger Hauer) who wants his help getting back into the bishop’s citadel so he can kill the bishop. It turns out that the bishop used dark magic to curse the knight and his love (Michelle Pfeiffer) so that the knight is human by day and the woman a hawk, then the knight is a wolf by night while the woman is human. They’re always together, but also always apart. Then the priest who unintentionally betrayed them finds a way to break the curse, but the knight can’t bring himself to trust him. Can the young thief scheme to help his friends?

The main flaw is the score, which doesn’t fit at all. Whoever thought it was a good idea to put an electronic disco-style score on a fantasy movie needs counseling. There are moments in the movie that have a lovely traditional soundtrack, and they really work well. There’s a part when the hawk is flying over the water and the music is gorgeous, perfect for the scene. Then there’s another moment when the lady is next to the wolf when the transition happens, and for a split second they can almost see each other. It starts with the disco score, but then the synth pulls out and it becomes more traditional movie music, which works so much better. You can hear the orchestral line that should be there in the disco stuff, so it’s like we’re getting the disco remix of the real score. It’s mostly in the action scenes (and sometimes goes off into wacky cartoon-style music for a chase scene that should be tense), and it throws me right out of the movie every time.

Another issue is the fact that the difference between day and night is extremely important to the plot, but it’s hard to tell the difference because it looks like they did “day for night” filming using blue filters to make it look like night, but half the time the woman is human, it practically looks like broad daylight. They’ve gone overboard in making things dark these days, so you can’t see what’s going on, but there has to be a middle ground, where you can see what’s happening but you can also tell that it’s night.

As much as they like remaking things these days, I wouldn’t mind a remake of this one. The story is quite good, but this isn’t such a perfect movie that it would be blasphemy to make a new version (like, say, The Princess Bride). I was pondering what would need to be changed other than the score and the night filming, and maybe some of the casting (Matthew Broderick was the big name in the cast at the time, but he’s also kind of a weak link because he’s just a bit too extra. Even when I was a teenager seeing this before Ferris Bueller existed, he made me cringe). Not that this cast is bad, but the accent inconsistency is weird. The main characters speak with (mostly, in Broderick’s case) American accents, including Rutger Hauer, who only occasionally has a slight inflection that suggests this isn’t his native language. Everyone else with a speaking role (which isn’t a lot—they must have been careful to keep the speaking parts to a minimum) has a British accent. But they’re all from the same place. I like that they didn’t try to show the transition between animal and human forms with any kind of special effects. They just used editing and framing the shots, and I wouldn’t want them to try to morph using CGI now.

I think if I were given the assignment to update it, I’d make the thief a girl and create an unrequited love triangle, not for the romance, but for the moral dilemma. If it’s a girl who gets rescued by a handsome knight, she might develop a crush on him before she learns that the hawk that travels with him is the woman he loves. Then when they learn there’s a way to break the curse and the knight rejects it, wanting to go through with his plan to kill the bishop (which will result in the curse being permanent), the thief would have to decide whether to do what the knight wants, thus making him happy and essentially getting him for herself, or to go behind his back to help break the curse and thus make him angry if it fails and lose all hope of being with him if it succeeds.

Then I started trying to think of a way to file the serial numbers off it and write that story. I could make the way to break the curse better and more of a dilemma (in the movie, breaking the curse involves being in the same place as they’d be to kill the bishop, so I don’t see why they didn’t try for the breaking, then have killing the bishop as plan B or a follow-up. I’d make it a true either/or where having both would be impossible). The trick is coming up with a “always together, forever apart” curse that’s not obviously a ripoff of Ladyhawke.

I’m actually writing a similar triangle now, with a woman traveling with a man who’s on a mission to save a different woman, and as she falls for him, she’s torn between helping him save the woman he loves and holding back to maybe win him for herself, but she never meets the other woman and he’s never been involved with that woman. It’s been a crush from afar on his part and he’s hoping this heroism will help him win her. It’s not like Ladyhawke, where the thief becomes friends with both and passes messages between them and they were in an established relationship before they were cursed to keep them apart. Mine is a bit more like Stardust but with the woman he’s trying to win actually being in danger. He’s not just doing this to win her.

The trick with the more Ladyhawke situation would be resolving the triangle. If the thief is the viewpoint character, then we’d be pulling for her to win the knight. It would be disappointing to go through the whole thing with her sacrificing her own happiness for the man she loves, only to be left aside as he goes back to his love, but he looks like a jerk if he ditches the woman he was cursed for because of a girl he just met. The whole idea of Ladyhawke is that these were people and animals who mated for life but were kept apart, so they were doomed to be alone. You’d have to make the thief realize it was just a crush and she wants them to be together. Maybe she finds a more suitable love interest along the way.

Actually, if they could digitally make night more night-like and replace the score, they wouldn’t have to remake Ladyhawke. I think it would hold up pretty well with different music. Other than that, it doesn’t scream “80s!” too badly. They did a decent job of making it a fantasy world that didn’t look obviously made in the 80s.

With the end of January approaching, I’m trying to decide what my next movie theme should be. I’m not really in the mood for rom-coms or romances for Valentine’s Day. I’ve been thinking of doing a big Star Wars rewatch to build up to Andor season 2, which would include rewatching Clone Wars and Rebels, so I’d need to start with the prequel movies, then it might take a month or two to get through all the animated stuff that comes in between. Or I could extend fantasy month. I haven’t seen the extended editions of the Hobbit movies, but those are already so bloated. Are they like the LOTR extended editions, where the extra stuff is all the character development that makes things make more sense, or is it just more swarms of orcs?

I ended up changing my weekend movie-watching plans. I didn’t get around to a movie on Friday night because I spent the day out and about instead of working (taking advantage of a nice day before the next deep freeze hit) so I had to catch up on work in the evening. Then on Saturday I’d noticed while looking up 80s fantasy movies that Conan the Barbarian was leaving Peacock soon, so I watched that.

I could have sworn I’d seen it. It was the kind of thing they showed during movie nights in the dorm big-screen TV lounge or that my group of friends watched either in the study lounge on our floor or in someone’s room. I can quote lines from it. And yet it was utterly unfamiliar. I didn’t recognize most of the characters, had no idea what would happen, didn’t know the plot. Usually if I saw something once decades ago, it starts to come back to me when I watch it again. This was all new to me.

And I liked it more than I expected to. I haven’t generally been a big fan of the barbarian-style sword and sorcery fantasy, and I thought this would basically be big-budget Fantasy Cheese. But it was at least a bit deeper than that, with stronger characters and a more coherent plot. It was surprisingly enlightened, given the era in which it was made. Yeah, there were a lot of topless women, but the woman who got dialogue was a strong character without fitting the Strong Female Character trope (they didn’t just put a sword in a woman’s hand and declare that this made her strong, and she wasn’t Rambo in drag). The romantic relationship is relatively non-toxic, based on mutual respect and trust. The cast is rather diverse, especially for that era. Aside from a few special effects and the ages of the cast members (or the fact that they’re alive, RIP James Earl Jones), this could have been a movie made today, and you can’t say that for a lot of 80s fantasy movies.

I think it helped that they were very restrained in the dialogue and let the action tell the story. I didn’t do a count of lines, but it seemed like James Earl Jones’s character had the most lines, even with much less screen time, and that was a good decision because he managed to make lines that probably were pretty corny on paper sound like Shakespeare. He elevated the material to the point of transcending it, and he was utterly mesmerizing. It made me wish I’d had the chance to see him do Shakespeare. He was menacing enough here that I managed to forget the warm smile and infectious giggle he had in person (he was the guest speaker at the opening of a new library where I used to live).

One thing that was familiar to me was the soundtrack. A friend gave me a copy of the soundtrack on cassette, and even though I’d never seen the movie, I loved the music, and it became my background music for reading fantasy books throughout my teens. As a result, I had very different mental images associated with that music. I haven’t listened to it in ages (I’m not sure I even still have that tape), but I listened to it so often that as soon as I heard the music again, it all came back to me, and it was a little disconcerting hearing it in context with the movie while also getting flashbacks of mental images from things like the first couple of Shannara books or the Katherine Kurtz Deryni series. The CD doesn’t seem to be available anymore, but you can get a digital version, so I may have to do that and burn a CD because it does make good reading music and would probably make good writing music.

I don’t think the movie is going to go into my regular rotation. I enjoyed watching it, but I also had nightmares about beheadings afterward. It’s definitely not a repeat watch comfort movie. There’s no part of that world I would want to live in, so it’s not a place to revisit, and I don’t particularly want to hang out with those characters. That’s generally why I like rewatching movies.

On an entirely unrelated note (aside from the thing about places you’d want to live and people you want to hang out with), the first two Rydding Village books are now available on audio. Here’s the first one.

In January, my movie-watching (and often my reading) theme tends to be epic fantasy. I think it’s because cold nights are perfect for burrowing under a blanket and immersing myself in some other world. It gets dark early, so I have time to start a really long movie after sunset and finish it before bedtime. Plus, it seems that a lot of epic fantasy movies have at least one sequence involving snow, so it seems seasonal.

I did a Lord of the Rings rewatch a couple of weekends ago, this time the extended editions, which I hadn’t seen before. It was hard for me to tell which material was new because I have mental images from the books, and I’ve seen clips of extended edition scenes. There’s a YouTube series I’ve been watching in which someone compares the books to the movies, chapter by chapter, to show what was changed in the translation between book and movie, and he uses the extended edition versions of the movies, so I’d seen a lot of those scenes up to the point where he is in the series. It seems like the extra stuff is mostly character moments that weren’t critical to the plot but which flesh out some of the character arcs. We do get the trudging through snow sequence in the first movie. If only I’d known that would be my life a couple of days later!

Last weekend, I rewatched The Huntsman: Winter’s War, mostly because of the winter imagery. I thought Snow White and The Huntsman was a total mess, but this prequel/sequel that plays with the Snow Queen fairy tale is actually a decent fantasy movie. Then I rewatched Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which is rapidly becoming a Happy Place movie for me. Everyone in this movie knows exactly what movie they’re in, and they managed to walk that fine line between spoofing the genre and taking it seriously. This is a rare movie that’s a brilliant and hilarious spoof of a genre while still being a good representative of that genre. And we get some trudging through snow.

I think this weekend is going to be about the 1980s fantasy. I discovered that Ladyhawke is available through the library Hoopla service, and I haven’t seen that one in ages. And then there’s The Dark Crystal, which I never managed to see.

In scrolling around, looking for good fantasy movies to watch, I’ve come to the conclusion that the 80s were kind of a golden era of fantasy movies. Some of them look cheesy now because special effects have come a long way since then, but a lot of the classic fantasy films came out in that era, and most of them were at least somewhat original, not based on an existing popular franchise. There weren’t even a lot of sequels. Conan the Barbarian had a sequel, and it looks like there were sequels to The Neverending Story, but were they direct to video? I don’t remember hearing about them, and they were in the 90s. Willow had a sequel TV series, but that came decades later.

Off the top of my head and in no particular order, the 80s gave us:
Excalibur, Dragonslayer, Clash of the Titans, The Dark Crystal, Legend, Labyrinth, Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, Kull the Conquerer, The Beastmaster, The Neverending Story, Ladyhawke, The Princess Bride, and Willow.

Fantasy seems to have tapered off in the 90s. There was yet another King Arthur retelling, and there was Dragonheart, and some of the Robin Hood movies in that decade had fantasy elements. Otherwise, I think most of the movies that might have counted as fantasy in the 90s were animated (mostly Disney, but some from other studios).

The early 2000s brought us The Lord of the Rings, but not much else other than the Narnia movies. We were in the age of the franchise. We did get Stardust then. That was also the era of the Harry Potter films, but those were more contemporary fantasy than epic fantasy, as they took place in our world.

In the 2010s we got the Hobbit trilogy. There were a few fairytale movies that seemed to be aimed at the Twilight audience, like Red Riding Hood and Snow White and the Huntsman (and then its sequel that veered away from that vibe). And that was when we started getting all the live-action Disney remakes of their fantasy animated movies. But this was when they started doing more fantasy for TV with Game of Thrones. In a sense, that’s better for the epic stuff based on long series of long books, since you can’t tell the whole story of those sagas in even a trilogy of movies. Ten episodes of a TV series can do a better job of telling the story of a long novel than even a three-hour movie can.

But all this means that I have a hard time finding good fantasy movies to watch when I go into epic fantasy mode. There are a lot of “fantasy cheese” movies with much lower budgets, but they vary widely in quality. I’d love to have more stuff with the production values of the Lord of the Rings movies. I’d have thought that success would have triggered a trend, but it just gave us the Narnia movies and the Hobbit movies. I’m trying to decide if I want to bother with the extended editions of the Hobbit films. The regular versions were so bloated already, but if the extra stuff is the character moments and all the Bilbo stuff, it might be worth it (by the last movie, Bilbo was barely in the movies that were supposedly about him).

I also wouldn’t mind original fantasy that isn’t based on a series of books or an existing franchise, but I guess these movies are expensive to make, so they don’t want to risk it on an unknown quantity without a built-in fan base. I’m glad they didn’t have that attitude in the 80s, or we wouldn’t have had something like Ladyhawke.

Last weekend, I revisited the movie Stardust, which is one of my all-time favorites, as well as the ultimate example of that romantic fantasy road trip structure. I hadn’t watched it since I initially started developing that theory and used it to help map out the structure, so it was interesting to revisit.

First, to address a related issue: I’m aware of the disturbing allegations against the author of the book the movie was based on and don’t want to promote him. I’m not even sure I’d be able to read his books right now without being a bit uncomfortable. But I look at the movie as being its own entity. A movie is a collaborative effort involving hundreds of people. He didn’t write the screenplay, and the screenplay veers fairly significantly from the book in a number of ways. I’ve found that the things I like most in the movie aren’t in the book. The book doesn’t really fit the romantic fantasy road trip that well and is structured differently. So, I’m not letting the author of the book the movie is based on being an alleged creep ruin one of my favorite movies for me.

One thing I noticed was that the protagonist doesn’t meet the love interest/traveling companion until 28 minutes into the movie, which is approximately one-quarter of the way through. That’s pretty common in most of the movies that fit this trope, which is interesting, given that in a romance novel, you generally want the hero and heroine to meet as soon as possible, preferably in the first three chapters — if not the first chapter. These stories come closer to fitting the Hero’s Journey structure, in which the traveling companion/love interest is part of the “new world” the hero enters in the threshold crossing that comes when he takes on the quest. That usually is at about the 25 percent mark. It also fits the “Save the Cat” structure, in which the break into the second act and the meeting of the B-story (romance) character happens at the 25 percent mark, with the hero taking decisive action toward the goal and meeting the love interest at that point.

In this movie, we spend the first quarter of the movie with a bit of a prologue showing our hero’s origins, then we see the life he’s living and the fact that there’s something he wants that we as the audience can tell is not what he needs — he’s in love with a village girl whose only interest in him comes from her knowing she can manipulate him and get what she wants. We also get the setup of the big-picture plot in the magical world, with the king launching the ruby into space and declaring that the prince who finds it will win the crown. Then the ruby knocks a star out of the sky. Tristan finds his opportunity when he spots the falling star and swears to the girl that he’d go into the magical land on the other side of the wall to bring the star to her. His goal is born when she says if he brings her the star before her birthday, she’ll marry him — but his romantic rival is also planning to give her a ring, so if Tristan isn’t there with the star by then, she’ll marry the other guy (a young and unrecognizable Henry Cavill). Then we get the setup for the antagonist, with the witches planning to go after the fallen star, and we get Tristan learning about his history and getting the tools he’ll need to go to the magical land where the mother he’s never known lives.

The movie spends the next quarter on the phase I call “bickering,” as he and the fallen star, who turns out to be the woman Yvaine, travel together. She’s not at all keen on being presented as a gift, but he has a way to get her back home in the sky that he promises to give her if she’ll come with him as proof that he’s retrieved the fallen star. But a lot of this section is taken up by what the antagonists are doing, as the princes continue killing each other until they’re down to two and they both set out to find the ruby. Meanwhile, we see what one of the witches (an absolutely delicious Michelle Pfeiffer in a very different fantasy role from what she played in Ladyhawke) is up to in her quest for the star.

Which brings us to the midpoint, when one of the princes, Tristan, and Yvaine all show up in the trap set by the witch. This is the part I call “Attack,” and when Tristan and Yvaine escape together, we start to get the Bonding portion, where they start to get to know each other and find things they like about each other. In general, the bickering phase is when they’re focused on what they don’t like about each other, then surviving the attack together forces them to look at each other again, so they start to find things they like about each other. And there’s dancing. I’m not sure why there’s dancing at this point in so many stories. I had a friend who used to joke that the dancing in the Disney movies was a metaphor for sex, so she found it hilarious when Aurora says, “I don’t even know your name,” after the “Once Upon a Dream” dance in Sleeping Beauty. In the Hero’s Journey, this is a part called Seizing the Sword or Reward, which is often a bonding time. Dancing together requires trust and synchronization, so it’s a good visual shorthand for a growing bond if the characters can move as one.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I love this movie so much. I think it’s the combo of fantasy, romance, humor, and adventure. The main character has a solid growth arc. It’s a coming of age story — as the narrator tells us, it’s about how a boy becomes a man. There are secret identities and revelations. The villains get their comeuppance. People who’ve been separated are reunited. The cast is pretty astonishing. Even some of the minor roles are played by recognizable people, in some cases because they became famous later. Robert De Niro isn’t the sort of actor you expect to see in this kind of movie, especially not in that kind of role, but he seems to be having an absolute blast.

One fun thing about this viewing is getting to see something like Rydding Village. The village scenes at the beginning and end of the movie were filmed in the village that was the starting point for my mental model of Rydding. Once I started writing, I added, subtracted, rearranged, and changed elements, but my starting point was this village in the Cotswolds. I watched a lot of videos from people walking through this village to set the imagery in my mind, and it’s fun to see the village dressed for a different time period. Apparently, this village is often used for films, and years ago a film company paid for the village to get a central TV antenna on a nearby hill and underground cable from it to all the houses so there wouldn’t be any TV antennas in the town that they’d have to take down. Just about all they have to do to make it serve for anything from the 1600s through the Victorian era is dump dirt over the paved streets, change out the signs in shop windows, and add whatever set dressing they need for the story.

I have one personal connection to this movie. They based a lot of the look on the illustrations in the original illustrated version of the book, painted by Charles Vess. He was the artist guest of honor at the local science fiction convention back in Texas a bit more than ten years ago, and as the Mac expert on the convention staff, I helped him set up his new MacBook and get it ready for him to do his presentation. He gave me the chocolate from his guest gift basket, and I have a signed print of a painting he did for the convention. When I have a real office again, I’m going to get it framed to hang in there.

Last weekend, I decided to go back to where it all began and rewatch the movie that got me started thinking about that whole romantic fantasy road trip subgenre, which made me realize it was a thing that I like, which made me realize that a story idea I had long ago actually could fit into that, which led me to replot it and try to write it. I’m currently rewriting it (I’ve been working on it off and on, but I’ve also written seven other books and a number of novellas since then), so since I found this movie on Hoopla, I thought I’d rewatch.

Back in early 2021, I started watching a fantasy movie called The Crown and the Dragon on Amazon, and very early in the movie I knew that this was a kind of movie I’d like, so I stopped it to go make popcorn before settling down to properly watch it. It perfectly fit what I later identified as the romantic fantasy road trip story structure. I’d never seen it before, but I knew each major beat that would happen — not really predicting the outcome, just knowing where the turning points would be. It was interesting rewatching it after doing so much thinking about this topic.

This movie is just barely fantasy cheese. It looks gorgeous. There’s not a lot of info on IMDB, but based on the names of most of the production crew, I’m guessing it was filmed in Ireland. The cinematography is excellent, the score is good, and the acting is far above most fantasy cheese. The actors are neither wooden nor overdoing it. Most of them don’t have a lot of film credits, so I’m guessing they mostly cast Irish stage actors. The two things that drag the movie down are the effects and the plot. Any time a dragon shows up, it’s painful. It’s like someone taped a stick figure drawing of a dragon to the film, or else like a really bad Photoshop job where you can tell that an image has just been pasted into another image, without correcting the light angles, shadows, etc. Then there’s the plot.

Not that the plot is necessarily bad. There aren’t big holes or logical leaps. It just seems to be missing a lot of context. I’ve watched this movie twice, and I still don’t have a good sense of what’s actually going on. The heroine is on a mission to bring a particular item to a castle in time for a king to be crowned, while the bad guys are trying to stop this, and yet we never see the king and we don’t really know why he needs this item. The item’s actually needed for fighting a dragon. We don’t know who the bad guys are or what they’re trying to do. I know fantasy writers are encouraged to leave some of their worldbuilding off the page because you don’t have to explain everything, but you do need to leave the stuff that’s essential for understanding the story. This movie feels like it was based on an 800-page novel that had to be cut down to a two-hour movie, and then the movie had to be cut to under 90 minutes so it could be on TV. Given that this movie is just under 90 minutes and has transitions that seem like they were created to stick in commercial breaks, I wonder if maybe it did start as a longer movie, then the only distribution it got was on TV, so they ended up cutting the stuff that explained the plot.

But it really does fit my pattern. We have the hero and heroine striking the bargain for him to help her get to the castle. There’s bickering along the way, until they’re attacked by the bad guys and barely escape together, which leads to a bonding scene and later to dancing. At their destination, he’s ready to leave her to her destiny, but then he returns to her and helps her achieve her destiny.

The romance is satisfying (though a bit more development in the middle might have helped). The fantasy elements had potential if they’d been explained a bit more. They needed much better dragon effects because that was 1980s-level bad, even though this movie was from the 21st century. There are some continuity issues (that may result from things being cut), like the heroine falling in mud in one scene and the same clothes being pristine in the next scene, or the hero having nothing but the clothes he’s wearing, and then in the next scene, with no explanation he has on different clothes and a sword. Or the time he drops the sword and dives into the ocean to escape a bad guy in one scene, but then in the next scene he has the sword again after he’s out of the water. All in all I’d say the impression is good fantasy cheese that’s a bit frustrating because with a bit of work and a slightly bigger budget it could have been a good romantasy movie. The people making the movie did a good enough job with what must have been a tiny budget that they should have been able to get the chance to go on and do bigger and better things. I remain annoyed by the scarcity of good, big-budget fantasy films. There’s clearly an audience, but aside from the Lord of the Rings movies, it’s like the studios have no clue what to do with them. They don’t know how to pick projects, and they utterly fail in promoting them, which then creates the self-fulfilling prophecy that fantasy movies don’t do well enough to justify the budgets they require.