If you must blink, do it now.

We liked this movie a lot.

It starts off very strong. Everything through the appearance of the sisters is close to perfect.  To that point, the movie hits like a hammer and cuts like a knife.  There are uneven patches after that, but nothing so uneven that it checks the momentum.

In all, the film really does seem like an old legend that has been filled out for the screen. That is quite a compliment, because I doubt there is any old legend.

The theme was simpatico—it was about the sterile, static perfection of the heavens (and the fear of death) in contrast with the love and affection and sorrows and trials and mortality of earth life. I Mormon-approve.

All in all, this was great middlebrow entertainment. Good for kids, but without being mindless dreck.

That is the necessary praise. Now for the necessary criticism.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

The movie has the strengths of an adaptation of an old legend.  It also has some of the weaknesses.  Both the hero and his father have a quest object that they need to defeat the evil Moon King.  In the notional legend, once the hero got the object he would have used them to defeat the Moon King.  End of story.

That kind of simplicity often gets tossed overboard in the effort to make a fuller, more substantial plot. So here, the quest objects do not help, and the hero eventually has to abandon them and embrace a power that fits with the theme.  It works well enough . . . but it makes nonsense of the hero’s quest and his father’s quest.  The ending needed to be more deft: the quest objects should have been good for something, for example.

But my biggest criticism is thematic. The story keeps mentioning that death is not the end for mortals.  The spirit lives on, these ties we make are not dated for expiration.  It’s a powerful theme.  The story is quite clear that our friends and families live on in our memories, yes, but also as souls, as a presence.  Then, at the climax, the movie loses the courage of its convictions and speaks as if the continued presence of the dead were merely a matter of memory.    In the afterword, the movie returns to suggesting the dead live on, but because of the climax, there is a strong suggestion that the afterward and all the presence of the dead earlier in the movie may be just something like a visual metaphor for memory.

Which defeats the movie’s own theme. Memory is not enough.  Memory alone is nihilism.

And so soon the memories of the dead and the dust of the survivors are buried in one grave.

-thus Robert Louis Stevenson.

The soul must live on.  Because life has meaning.