ripvanwormer Wrote:I just watched it yesterday on YouTube. I think I liked it over all, though I had a few problems with it. Criticizing this sort of movie seems a bit beside the point; it's not really supposed to be "good" in the way we normally use the term. It's just supposed to be an awesome barbarian movie with gratuitous cheesecake, dinosaurs, and magic done in a Frank Frazetta style, and in that sense it succeeds. As an animated movie, it was a lot better than a live-action movie would've been at the time; I pictured the same scenes done with cheesy special effects and bad make-up and shuddered. The beautiful backdrops and judicious use of silhouettes helped make it as enjoyable as it was. Possible spoilers below.

[hide]"Nekron" is a silly name. It's like calling the main villain Lord Deathicus. Or, I dunno, Skeletor or Hordak or Mumm-Ra the Everliving. Anyway, molten lava is arguably more deadly than glaciers.

"Juliana," the name of the witch-queen, is much too modern-sounding when all the other characters have names like Nekron, Larn, and Teegra. It's jarring.

There's a few characters that serve no real story purpose. First and foremost, the blonde barbarian guy (Larn) who's set up to be the apparent hero but never ends up actually doing anything but following everyone else around. He tries to rescue Teegra, but she always ends up rescuing herself. Or she bails him out of whatever trouble he's in. Or Darkwolf bails him out. And he just stands around getting himself captured while Darkwolf kills the villain. About the only thing he's good for is providing a dragonhawk for Teegra to fly home with him on - and presumably Darkwolf could have done the same thing. Thematically, he helps make Darkwolf look cooler just by being so lame in comparison, but I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Juliana was another character that ended up having not much purpose. Maybe in an earlier draft of the script there was a reason for Nekron's mom to be around, but aside from making it clear early on that Nekron has mommy issues, and allowing Nekron to unexpectedly reject carnal relations with Teegra (which I liked. "The next time you send me one of your sluts, mother, I'll crush you!") she mostly just stands around saying lines that Nekron could've said and dies without anyone bothering to confront her. Apparently she has magic powers, but other than communicating with the Dogs of Nekron via a campfire, she never uses them. She sort of fits the role of the villain who acts emotional when Nekron is too bored and filled with ennui to be excited about anything, but later on Nekron starts randomly getting excited about everything and takes over the movie, leaving Juliana sidelined. She just sort of wanders off screen and is shown falling into a crevasse without anyone having to push her. A scene where anyone bothers to fight her, or - better - where Juliana and Nekron turn on each other, bringing the Freudian subtext to its head - would've been much more satisfying.

A somewhat less useless character was the forest witch, who gets killed off immediately after a pointless scene in which she temporarily rescues Teegra, tries to sell her out, and then posthumously guides Larn toward his goal, urging him to avenge her death (something he fails to do). But Darkwolf figures out where to go without her help. She was actually a potentially cool character, but wasted in her brief scene. I was intrigued by her at first - I wondered if she was Juliana's exiled sister, or something equally interesting - but then she dies as quickly as she appeared and Teegra is right back where she started, with the plot scarcely changed from where it was by her too-brief appearance. This witch is also a bit of a Shakespeare reference; if Nekron and Juliana are Hamlet and Gertrude, then the forest witch and her pet ogre are Sycorax and Caliban.

The whole convoluted plot where Darkwolf and his useless sidekick Larn make it all the way to the glacial citadel and escape all the way back to Fire Keep just so the lord there can give them awesome dragonhawks to ride back with. No backtracking! Also, my ability to sustain my disbelief took a major hit when the only two people able to survive the extremely effective gauntlet of arrows as they stupidly, openly, and not stealthily at all flew their awesome dragonhawks through the narrow and subhuman-filled ice caves just happened to be the two main characters. If they had snuck in stealthily, like they'd done the first time, or just stayed where they were instead of pointlessly running over to Fire Keep, they would've been in equally good shape without having so many other dragonhawks and their riders die in an astonishingly poorly-thought-out frontal assault on a really defensible lair.

I guess a major part of Darkwolf's cool factor was how mysterious he was. He was basically the Wolverine of the movie, the super badass tank with no past. Why did he hate Nekron so much? Why did he have glowing green eyes? We don't know anything about him at all. But... I still would've liked to know more about him. My theory was that he was Nekron's father. He could've been just some like Larn whose village got crushed by the glaciers. Only actually useful.

My favorite part of the movie was when Teegra was complaining about it was getting cold, and Larn says matter-of-factly, "The cold comes from Nekron," and she just looks at him, like, "I know where cold comes from, jackass; I'm an educated woman. The world is made of four basic elements and cold weather comes from a sorcerer who lives in an ice castle. Obviously." My interpretation of this scene may have been more amusing than how it was actually filmed.

Man, was the gratuitous Teegra cheesecake blatant.

I really liked Nekron's initial characterization. Rather than a typical cackling villain, he spent most of his time sullen and depressed, sniping at his mother and showing no interest in much of anything. Using his powers clearly came at a price to him, causing him physical pain and exhaustion. He was kind of like if Shakespeare's Hamlet were an ice sorcerer conquering the world instead of trying to kill his uncle and avenge his father's death. If that analogy doesn't strip Hamlet of everything important about the character. Then later he becomes a typical cackling villain and he starts using his powers without any apparent price.

The "subhuman" Dogs of Nekron were pretty interesting stand-in for orcs in the post-Ice Age world of the movie, though as minions of the ice sorcerer (and, I guess, sort of Neanderthals, though somewhat more apelike than real Neanderthals) they should've been among the palest characters in the movie, not all swarthy like they were. I would've liked it if they were the same complexion as Juliana and Nekron, indicating some blood tie between them, though that isn't really necessary. I just felt a bit uncomfortable with the "blonde hero verses the dark-skinned savages" theme. The movie is supposed to take place just after the last Ice Age, meaning the glaciers have only recently retreated form wherever they are, though Nekron is busy trying to bring them back (were his people responsible for the Ice Age in the first place?). So they must be somewhere in Europe, given the features of the homo sapiens sapiens in the cast.

But still, I liked the subhumans as classic orcs: savage, easily cowed by powerful wizards, dogged, cunning, and effective in battle though ultimately cannon fodder.

This isn't a criticism at all, but Greyhawk fans might note the similarity between Juliana and Nekron and Greyhawk's Iggwilv and Iuz.[/hide]