The Neverending Story (Widescreen and Fullscreen)

Looking at this film through older, more cynical, world-weary eyes, it's easy to discount it and point out its many faults. YES, the acting is unbearable at times. YES, the last twenty minutes are overly preachy. And YES the narrative progresses aimlessly with no rhyme or reason. But you know what? I don't care. I even found myself getting teary-eyed at some points, something I rarely do.

I agree with the other reviewers. If you didn't see and love this film as a kid, you won't enjoy it now. I watched the DVD with my (now ex) girlfriend, who yawned and groaned and rolled her eyes throughout the whole thing. A shame, really. I felt like she missed the boat. If this movie captured you as a kid, you owe it to yourself to let it capture you again.

The NeverEnding Story, while a unique creation, is little more than a thin and flimsy canvas stretched upon a tired rack. The basic story should be familiar - lonely withdrawn youth finds refuge from worldly troubles in a fantasy book, and through the adventures of the main character grows more confident and whole. All the necessities are there, including a central internal conflict that must be reconciled (the death of his mother), a handful of bullies that in the end get their comeuppence, a wide array of superficially unique creatures, obscure magic forces, a quest to save the world. The problem is that everything is so poorly thought out that the movie becomes an inscrutable connection of disjoint and unsatisfying moments.

a key element to any fantasy is the degree to which its conceiver has thoroughly thought out his/her conception. the grand daddy of them all, tolkein, did an unbelievable amount of behind the scenes 'research' for middle earth, so much so that readers can bore themselves to death pouring through obscure appendicies on the origin of hobbit pipe weed and other trivial and irrelevent details. the upshot of this is that everything is tied together and every creature and race draws upon a complex history, which gives the story itself a tremendous amount of death. nothing in the the middle earth books is simply there; everything is there for a reason, and everything was somewhere else and did other things before it came to be there.

In the NeverEnding Story (NES from now on) nothing has a reason beyond its surface, and the writing to connect the dots of the plot is terrible. our hero, atreus, is summoned before a motley and completely arbitrary collection of 30 or 40 strange individuals who appear to form some sort of world congress. the language of the scene and the acting of the characters is tremendously unconvincing, and it reminded me of the initial meeting between flash gordon and his crew and ming the merciless. flash was a terrible movie, but it was supposed to be terrible and campy, while NES seems to be someone's best efforts at a child's tale. after some verbal sparring atreus is given one inexplicable piece of advice ("you must go alone, and you must go without weapons")and heads off on his quest. He travels from short, absurd vignette to short absurd vignette, buoyed by an enormous amount of deux ex machina, the greatest portion of which is supplied by the funny looking flying dog (a 'luck' dragon) from the movie trailers. to give you a sense of the inanity of the plot devices, the dragon saves the boy from a wolf and carries him while he sleeps 9,900 miles towards the next plot point. when the boy wakes up, for some reason he has to walk the last 100 miles, but at least it only takes him a couple minutes.

On the bright side, The NeverEnding Story is a unique creation, full of vast lanscapes and strange creatures, and it does have a good message. i was disappointed with the creatures. while most are unusual, they are generally either the wrong size of present some sort of contradiction. for example, we see an enormous giant (the presentation of scale is effective) and later on an enormous turtle. we see an enourmous snail that (surprise!) travels very quickly, an enormous flying dog, and some very small people who are helpful. nothing has any depth, and (sorry if i sound like a broken record) the lack of substance leaves one hollow. whoever was in charge of the musical score goes way overboard by way of compensation; the excruciating orchestral backdrops (with the exception of the title song is appropriately simple and joyful) ooze so much heavy feeling that you'll be smearing the emotive goo out of your ears with an oar.

an outstanding alternative to this movie is "the dark crystal", created by jim henson of moppet fame. it is extremely well thought out, well acted and well written. all the characters have a history and all interact with the world as if they really belong within it, as opposed to the pasted on characters of NES. this grounding gives the story a strong foundation on which to build, enabling the culmination of the dark crystal to resonate with meaning.

This is an awesome story about the importance of the story. Yes, the moral lesson of "The Neverending Story" is the importance of the story itself (and by extension the importance of human imagination). If one has read some of Joseph Campbell's "The Power of Myth" one understands this completely. It is that Native American idea of "he who does not have the stories has nothing."

The key force of destruction in this tale is "the Nothing" literally non-existence or the lack of imagination. The world in which "The Neverending Story" takes place, Fantasia, is a conglomerate universe composed of the dreams and hopes of all people. Every story ever told and every character who has ever lived exists somewhere in Fantasia. So that somewhere in Fantasia, Paul Atreides wanders a desert landscape while somewhere else in Fantasia Alice falls down the rabbit hole.

Fantasia, this conglomerate world of human dreams, is dying. The reason is that people in the real world no longer dream... of anything. It is a very modern tale about the death of the human capacity to, as John Lennon put it, IMAGINE. Without the capability to imagine anything, people become easily manipulated by forces greater than them... this is where the real villain comes in (more about that after the next paragraph).

The main protagonist, Atreyu, is the alter ego of the real life boy who is reading the story. The real life boy, therefore, is filled with imagination, brimming with it, in fact. He exists in a real world where nobody imagines anything anymore. Therefore, the alter ego (in Fantasia) of the real life boy with imagination is a young champion who is trying to save imagination itself and its conglomerate world, Fantasia.

The real villain of the story is, at least from a Christian context, Lucifer, or the Devil himself. He is the "force behind the Nothing" who is attempting the death of all imagination. This explains the creature known as the Morg. As Sir Adam mentioned in his review, this is the major adversary for Atreyu (and the real life boy who is his generator). The Morg is, in his own words, "a servant of the force behind the Nothing." The Morg is, I believe, a demon, or fallen angel servant who has somehow crossed the border into Fantasia and put on the guise of that mythical creature of destruction, the werewolf. The Wolf image is only a guise used by the demon to try to blend in with his surroundings.

Of course, we know who wins in the end. This is a very complex movie and a VERY relevant one to the times in which we are living. I see people around me who are quite literally mental cripples who are incapable of imagination. Without the stories, we are nothing.