Willow, The Movie

I vaguely recall watching WILLOW in the 1980s, but remembered no details of the plot and the story. So I decided to watch it this weekend since it’s currently free on Amazon Prime.

I would sum up the plot with two points:

1.) It’s kind of like a Dungeons & Dragons campaign where both the players and the Dungeon Master get progressively drunker as the session goes on.

2.) I mean that as a compliment.

It’s a good fantasy adventure. The kingdom is ruled by the evil sorceress-queen Bavmorda, and her seers has foretold that a child has been born who will undo her. Bavmorda hunts for the child, but a bold nursemaid gives the baby the Moses treatment and sends her floating down the river. The baby is found by the children of Willow, who is a Nelwyn (basically, a hobbit) who wants to become a wizard. After one of Bavmorda’s creatures attacks the Nelwyn village, the village council decides to send the baby back to the humans. Since Willow found the baby, he gets stuck with the job, which proves that the principle of “you found the problem, you fix it” is universal among all nations and creatures. Little does Willow know that the baby is a child of destiny and that Bavmorda’s creatures and minions are hunting for her.

It’s interesting to see the influence of Star Wars on the movie, since George Lucas was the executive producer – Willow is like Luke, Madmartigan is like Han, Sorsha is a lot like Leia, and so forth. (Queen Bavmorda, like Emperor Palpatine, should have spent less time messing around with black magic and more time focused on the practical applications of ruling and economics, which would have given her a much more competent army.) What’s interesting is that the movie seems to have influenced THE LORD OF THE RINGS movies in a few ways, but the Tolkien’s book very clearly influenced WILLOW! It’s like a perfect feedback loop of cultural influence.

Anyway, it’s an enjoyable fantasy adventure and worth watching. The version currently on Prime includes a bunch of special features, and it is interesting to see how the many special effects were approached at the start of the computer age.

-JM