Labyrinth

The immediate impression you get watching this movie: this same material would have been a different flick—and probably a better one, or at least more polished—in the hands of the contemporary master Steven Spielberg. As it is, we get Jim Henson's film, and, no disrespect to him and his unique and special creative vision, the limitations of the puppet approach do come through here. This is not to say that we’re left with a bad movie here, just that there is an undercurrent throughout these proceedings that suggests that this could have been something much more than it ultimately is. As this film is now largely forgotten, the implication is that that is not just my own reaction. Setting aside what might have been, we do get a mildly entertaining movie with many arresting visuals, and even a few well-developed puppet characters, the latter of which hold their own against the two principals, David Bowie (who was clearly having tons of fun playing the goblin king Jareth) and a teen-aged and ravishingly beautiful Jennifer Connelly as the heroine Sarah, who is occasionally feckless but ultimately proves worthy of the viewer’s admiration. Not that that’s a surprise; this is, after all, a fairy tale, and not one of those Grimm stories where someone dies a wretched death. It all works out in the end, both in the plot and for this movie as a solid if not spectacular work of fantasy entertainment. It just would have been interesting to see what a different filmmaker might have done with this material.