Legend

When I was about eight years old, my parents were out of the apartment for the whole day, and I had a problem when I accidentally locked myself out within half an hour. A returning neighbor from work noticed my head in my hands on the hallway bench and invited me to his place, offering to at least let me watch a movie until my parents returned. He only had two tapes on hand, the third Alien and Legend, with the latter seeming more appropriate to him. To this day, I still believe that if he had chosen Alien instead of Legend, my mental development would have progressed in a significantly better direction. Even back then, it felt strangely intangible, dreamlike, completely out of this world, and paradoxically, mature in contrast to intentional naivety. Twenty thousand years later, I revisited Legend in its director's cut (which is supposedly a different film altogether), and it still holds true that such bizarre and emphatic imagination is only seen a few times in a lifetime. The combination of visual motifs, where I recalled classic Disney movies, images of Thomas Kinkade, Frank Frazetta, or um Jacob's Ladder (oh my God, that dungeon!). Amidst all this, there is an uncontrollable casting monstrosity, which someone put together in a basement I never want to find myself in. The absolute overkill in the form of the main antagonist is undoubtedly the third evolutionary stage of Pokémon of Tim Curry after Frank N. Furter (and I also saw it as an inspiration for The Mouth of Sauron from the third LOTR), but where the real wood begins to split is in the casting of David Bennet as the Tin Drum into the role of a half-naked forest elf who practically never leaves the map after the end of the first arc, and his uncanny demeanor is like a capricious nightmare where your subconscious tries to insert an adult you dislike into a child's body. Mommy, I want to go home! The film's appearance must have required considerable resources because the set design and masks are breathtaking. The way the film refuses to elevate itself above its simple naive plot also strikes me as something endearing. The problem is that I don't know how to enjoy the film - I don't want to ridicule it for being genuinely simple and banal, yet I can't take seriously the jingling Mia Sara running through an incredibly kitschy forest and enticing the American heartthrob Tom Cruise with gingerbread. I still don't know what to do with that. (15.07.2024)

A strange piece that is not helped by several visual effects from Ridley Scott's workshop. The worst thing is that this effort doesn't try to lean towards either fantasy or fairy tale. On one hand, it creates a dark and depressive mythology around unicorns and also borrows a purely Tolkien-inspired world from The Silmarillion, but on the other hand, it gets lost in a series of weirdness and deaf spots. It doesn't come together, and when you're racking up one of the few performances from Tom Cruise that really annoyed me, that makes this Scott's worst film. (21.04.2007)

After a Blu-ray screening, with a widescreen and perfectly polished image, I can safely say that Scott's Legend is the most visually beautiful fairytale ever to appear on cinema screens. It may not as sophisticated and thought-provoking as, say, The NeverEnding Story, but the form, my friends, the form is unique. It’s a pity that it’s not properly appreciated by a wider audience. Scott was in extraordinary form in the first half of the 1980s. And Goldsmith's beautiful music is a chapter on its own. (19.12.2012)