A Legend in Its Own Mind

It seems that until The Lord of the Rings films came along, nobody in Hollywood seemed to think that fantasy films should be taken seriously. The few fantasy themed films that were made all had very light touches. Sometimes, the results were still enchanting, as with The Princess Bride.

Other times, you got Legend.

Director Ridley Scott, who played it so wonderfully serious with Alien and Blade Runner, didn't stay with that approach when he moved away from science fiction. He wanted to make a classic fairy tale, and found a little-known writer to deliver him this script. This very hokey script, loaded with ludicrous and overwrought dialogue. He then guided his actors, a young Tom Cruise and Mia Sara (of Ferris Bueller's Day Off fame) in very unnatural and awkward performances. The only actor who manages -- barely -- to not be laughable is Tim Curry, who hides unrecognizable behind intense makeup and just hams it up, Rocky Horror style.

The movie isn't a total loss, because the look of it is pretty fantastic. While most of the sets definitely look like sets and never like convincing real-world locations, they're all so detailed and vast that the film is still a wonder to behold. And the makeup is still striking and thorough even decades later. It's enough to make you wonder if a more believable, natural, and entertaining movie could be lurking in there somewhere if you only took the sound away and dubbed in new dialogue.

That's perhaps not that fanciful a notion if you know what happened to the musical score to this film. Originally, composer Jerry Goldsmith created the music for the film -- and his work was released in the European version. But Ridley Scott, ever one to tinker with multiple versions of his films, decided to cut portions of the movie for the American release, and he also decided to completely replace the music. He enlisted Tangerine Dream (featuring eventual Babylon 5 composer Christopher Franke) to create the score that now adorns the film. I don't know that a serious Goldsmith score could have "saved" this mess of a movie, but I think it likely would have been easier to take it seriously without the sing-songy, synthetic plucking of the Tangerine Dream score.

But I'll certainly make no effort to hunt down the European version to compare. I suffered enough watching the movie once. I rate it a D-.