SummaryWillow Ufgood (Warwick Davis) leads a disparate group of heroes to help save the world in this television sequel series to George Lucas's 1988 film "Willow."
SummaryWillow Ufgood (Warwick Davis) leads a disparate group of heroes to help save the world in this television sequel series to George Lucas's 1988 film "Willow."
I still wish that "Willow" were as consistently electric from the start as it eventually becomes from the third episode onward. Then again, if "Willow" takes a couple of episodes to find its greatness, perhaps the story's spirit dictates that is as it should be.
This is an unapologetically traditional fantasy, with no pretentions to Game Of Thrones-style grimness or Lord Of The Rings cultural depth. But it also has vivid characters, scary moments and fun obstacles, and they carry it briskly along. In the end it relies far less on nostalgia and more on expanding the world of the original film to encompass new complexity and new identities among all these daikinis, and that’s a real treat.
In visual, thematic, and spiritual ways, “Willow” manages to carve out some room of its own that doesn’t feel connected to algorithmic genre expectations or the finer points of a plot from decades past. Still, it takes a lot of journeying to get there.
Ultimately, “Willow” is an underdeveloped legacy sequel that somehow stretches the source material to its breaking point, while never reaching the same heights of good old-fashioned fun that a fantasy epic should have at its heart. By chopping up the story into tedious, overlong episodes, the magic has been bleached from its bones, leaving behind a rotting corpse that resembles its inspiration on the surface only.