‘Krull’ famously bombed at the box office, only to in recent years be heralded by many as a fantasy movie actually worth savoring. I can’t say I’m among them.
Sometimes you can pinpoint the moment a movie has completely lost you. For “Krull” (1983), the English director Peter Yates’ (thankfully) one and only attempt at fantasy filmmaking, that moment comes early. It’s when we’re getting a voiceover equivalent of the opening scroll associated with the “Star Wars” movies as means to provide context for the situation into which we’re about to be thrust. But all it does is make us feel dazed. That feeling of lostness dominates and never goes away — that is when garden-variety boredom doesn’t periodically have the upper hand.
A sort of amalgam of the “Star Wars” franchise and John Boorman’s “Excalibur” (1981) without retaining either property’s style or inventiveness, “Krull” follows a prince, Colwyn (Ken Marshall), as he searches for his soon-to-be wife, a princess named Lyssa (Lysette Anthony), after she’s kidnapped. Their marriage is the manifestation of an alliance between two rival kingdoms on the eponymous planet, but that’s lethally interrupted by a classic archvillain known as The Beast and the “slayers” who do his bidding. Unsatisfied to simply whisk the cherubic Lyssa away for himself, The Beast and his minions mow through both kingdoms’ armies and successfully kill both their leaders. Colwyn’s attempt at a rescue functions twofold: of course to get Lyssa out of harm’s way, but also to restore the royal harmony that had been so close before its dismantling.
Presented with all this, I couldn’t muster much more than a “who cares,” though I did like one set piece where a character is trying to navigate a cave covered in webs and stalked by a spider, who is naturally giant and not as naturally a snowy white. Whatever in the movie, whose scenes practically crash into each other, isn’t dull is derivative. It’s mostly just a competent cobbling together of fantasy tropes that barely does enough to feel like more than the basic sketch of a classical-style hero’s journey, damned especially by how the hero at the front of it, played by the profoundly bland Marshall, is so much of a nothing that he strikes you as able to be played by anyone. “Krull” famously bombed at the box office, only to in recent years be heralded by many as a fantasy movie actually worth savoring. I’m not among them, but power to them for finding something interesting in this movie I could not.
