The NeverEnding Story

This movie holds a special place in many people’s hearts. A beloved film of their childhood. I did not watch it as a kid but was curious how it compared to some of the beloved 80s fantasy films of my childhood, such as Labyrinth and Willow. The answer is… very badly. This film is terrible. It is badly made, poorly written, unevenly acted, and essentially disappointing in every conceivable way.

On a technical level, the movie is a complete mess. It is an effects heavy fantasy film that looks amateurish compared to its 1980s contemporaries. Every location the characters visit is sparsely decorated or designed. Despite having significantly more freedom than the puppet heavy Labyrinth to shoot practical locations that look and feel real, The NeverEnding Story’s locations feel like fake soundstage locations. Where they do use puppetry, it is glaringly bad. Falcor, the luck dragon, is a large scale mechanical puppet whose main moving feature is his mouth. Unfortunately, that mouth rarely moves to match the line delivery. Instead it just flaps about for approximately the right amount time in a rather unconvincing way. When Atreyu or Bastian ride Falcor, the flying effect created with a practical dragon in front and projection in the back does not blend the two elements well. This style of effect can look good, as in another 1980s classic Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, but here it is yet another element that looks cheap or fake.

The storytelling isn’t much better. While the preamble framing device is handled well enough, especially for its genre and release year, as soon as the story shifts to Fantasia things come off the rails. The first characters the audience meets are a party of wayward travelers, including a humanoid bat and a strange man dressed like the Mad Hatter who rides a giant snail. This party then almost immediately has an encounter with a rock eater, a giant that eats rocks for sustenance and/or pleasure. Normally, this would mean that these characters, be it the travelers, the rock eater, or both, would be important in some way. They might not be the protagonists, but they would either play a key role in the story to come or help introduce us to the hero. In Hamlet, the opening dialogue is between two inconsequential guards, providing some light exposition, who are used to introduce first Hamlet’s best friend Horatio, then Hamlet himself, while also helping trigger the inciting incident of the piece. In The NeverEnding Story, our opening motley crew provides some ultimately pointless world building (rock eaters do not, in fact, play any important part in the subsequent story) and then lay story exposition about “the nothing” on thick before the scene ends. These characters, despite all the time establishing them and their relationships, only appear again for two small, largely unimportant, cameos.

And it doesn’t get better from there. Famously, Atreyu loses his horse, Artax, to the swamp of despair. This happens because the horse “gives up.” It is meant to be a majorly shocking moment. However, I mostly laughed. I laughed at how ridiculously tortured and obvious the swamp was as a metaphor for depression. I laughed because I was supposed to care about a horse whose only backstory was about fifteen seconds of eating an apple. I laughed because the whole idea of a horse giving up, psychological as opposed to physically, seems ludicrous. This kind of baffling or unintentionally funny writing carries on throughout.

At the end of the film, the crossover between the real world and Fantasia that has been teased throughout finally happens, but it doesn’t actually mean anything. It isn’t earned, it doesn’t reflect an important change in the attitudes of either Bastian or Atreyu, and so doesn’t feel like the consequence of anything in the story. It feels like the end to the first half of a story… probably because it is. The movie ends at the halfway point of the book on which it is based, where a major tonal shift happens. This is a bit like only including the fairytale first act of Into the Woods and leaving out the dark realism of the second act, when the dark realism as a deconstruction of the idea of fairytale happy endings is the entire point. Doing only half creates something largely unsatisfactory in its simplicity, and lack of good narrative structure, since it is all set ups and no pay off. There is, of course, a sequel to The NeverEnding Story which covers the second half of the source material, but I had such a miserable time with the first one I don’t think I’m going to bother determining if the sequel redeems it all.

The material is done no favors by the acting, either. There are so few characters, with almost no dialogue between them, and besides a dragon puppet with a poorly functioning mouth, all the protagonists are children. Child actors can be a bit of a mixed bag, and this movie definitely drew from the stage kid, “it’s not acting if I’m not over-acting,” side of things. Between unmotivated dramatic outbursts, unconvincing crying, and empty stares into the middle distance, the vast majority of character work meant to carry the film is abysmal.

The movie is also a dreary chore to watch. It is allegorically about working through grief over the death of a loved one, and it is about as depressing as that sounds. What passes for imaginative world building in this wild fantasy setting is the thinnest of veneers in front of a well of sadness. “The nothing” that destroys everything is grief, the swamp is depression, the aging turtle is lost hope, and so on and so forth. It is all so painfully on the nose. Ironically, while all this was likely done to help it resonate with kids, the target viewership of the film, no young person who has seen the movie seems to remember any of it. The one tragic thing kids remember is the death of Artax, but without any of the context around it. Rather, kids remember the otherworldly fantasy concepts like flying luck dragons and magical gates which protect powerful oracles. Despite the clear intention of making sad topics accessible for kids, young viewers all seem to end up blissfully ignorant to what a slog through sadness the movie really is. Only as an adult does the reality become so undeniably clear.

I think it is no accident that there have been more than a couple articles written for Millennial-focused publications about the dangers of rewatching The NeverEnding Story. As an adult, it is harder to ignore all the movie’s enumerable faults. Poor effects, bizarre storytelling, and bad acting in service of heavy handed takes on depressing topics makes for a tragically unwatchable film.

Would Recommend: If you have a friend who absolutely loves The Neverending Story and you want ammunition to take them down a peg.

Would Not Recommend: If you loved this movie as a kid and you don’t want your nostalgic feelings to be ruined by reality.