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Legend (Ultimate Edition) Customer Reviews (19 - 21 of 68 Reviews)

Legend (Ultimate Edition)
I "grew up" loving the Tangerine Dream version of Legend. The soundtrack is so haunting, and listening to it always reminds me of that surrealistic forest Jack and Lilly inhabit. However, the Director's Cut has its own magic. I like the extended sequence when Jack meets Gump and his friends, and has to be tested. The menace of Darkness is enhanced as well. I love both versions of the movie.

Legend
Tom Cruise and Mia Sara (why don't we see more of her?) portray the innocent love, that we all yearn for, amidst a magical, beautiful forest in a time, we romantasize about. The lavish back-drops, costumes and creatures don't go unnoticed. The story is never dull, nor feels dragged out and at the end, it makes you want for more. I am very happy to have purchased this movie for my collection and watch it frequently; even bought a copy for my adult daughter as a present.
Well worth having

Interesting Failure
The Ultimate Edition of Legend has been out on DVD for a few years, but it's taken me awhile to summon the courage to plunk down $10 to revisit this enormously flawed fantasy from the mid 80's.

When Legend was released, I was incredibly excited to see it - Ridley Scott, the director of Blade Runner and Alien, had made a fantasy movie - a genre that had been much neglected in those years - along with a script by William Hjortsborg (Fallen Angel, aka Angel Heart). At the time, I was enormously disappointed - the simplistic, childish script, little character development, terrible dialogue, fake (though impressive) looking sets, muddy photography, uninspired special effects, choppy editing and a forced, improbable plot left me bewildered and underwhelmed. Rob Bottin's make-up is generally pretty great except for the dwarves (or are they supposed to be gnomes or elves?).

The film seems cramped and disoriented...probably due to a frequent lack of establishing shots that would give the viewer some bearing on where the action was taking place.

That said, I was very interested to see just how the fabled "European" or "Director's" cut would differ from the US Theatrical version that so disappointed on its initial release. I'd heard it totally changed and improved the film. Boy, was I led wrong. This is not a completely different movie and in fact, there is actually very little different between the two versions:

The one major difference is the original score by legendary film composer Jerry Goldsmith. Most film music geeks laud Goldsmith's lush orchestral score and deride Tangerine Dream's electronic "modern" take that was included in the US release. I'm not sure what score they're listening to, but it isn't one of Goldsmith's better ones. For capturing the film's mood and pacing I think that TD's score fit the film much better in the long haul. Goldsmith's classic score is flowery, forgettable and incomplete. In at least two scenes, he recycles old music In particular - two well known cues from his truly great score for Psycho II, with mixed results. Neither cues match the mood or action.

Although the director's cut is almost half an hour longer than the US release, one would be hard pressed to point out where this extension comes from. There is very little restructuring of the film - the plot moves in the much the same manner as before with very little of real substance added. If you like or hated it before, this version won't change your mind. Essentially, they just lengthened several scenes a little bit here, a little bit there and wallah, you have a drawn out two-hour movie, where once there was a drawn out 90 minute one. The ending is lengthened (sappy and unnecessary), two songs by Mia Sara are included (ditto), scenes with the unicorns lengthened a fair amount (if you love unicorns with bouncy horns, then great, otherwise, it's just more of the same) , a clever bit about synchronizing magical watches (which may have already been there), a slightly longer scene with Meg Mucklebones (the only truly good inclusion) and maybe a short bit more with the woman peasant at the beginning are the only scenes with substantive additions.

I was expecting Scott's commentary to be a rant on how difficult the movie was and how ultimately unsatisfying the results were. But no, Scott seems quite pleased and leaps to the defense of it's many deficiencies. For one, the film was targeted by movie executives and Scott himself to appeal to the 8 year old and up market - an audience Scott was and is totally at odds with. He simply does not direct with a light comic touch like Peter Jackson has been able to do so well with his Lord of the Rings movies. This is a weakness Scott should have recognized early on and constructed the film for adults, as per his evident original intentions (e.g. Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast was a prime inspiration). And this detachment is clear in the depiction of the good magical dwarves (or elves? Gnomes?). Apparently, they were going for characters that were humorous and appealing to kids, but what they ended up with were scraggly wrinkled old men in suits (legendary Billy Barty among them). Rather than admitting that Jackson's shrinked hobbits were far more effective and successful, Scott insists here that the result was quite satisfactory, if not superior to CGI and computer effects [not mentioning that forced perspective has been an effective screen trick for years - see Disney's Darby O'Gill]. He does this again with a comment on the fairy light, for which the audience can clearly see the filament string throughout the movie. "A CGI version would have cost $200,000 and here it cost nearly nothing...and look, you get the light on the faces, too". Scott's being incredibly disingenuous here, for in his superior film, Gladiator, he used CGI effectively quite a bit, showing off the wonders computers did for the coliseum sequences (and rightfully so...it sells those scenes). If Scott were to have made this film today, there is no doubt that he would have used CGI to a great extent, and great improvement. He does this sort of thing frequently throughout the commentary, justifying the sets as opposed to location shooting, the pacing, the story, the effects, the acting, the writing, the music, etc.

It would have been refreshing to hear him just say it didn't turn out as he wished.

Bottom line; interesting failure. For die hard fans only.

A better movie of the same period with essentially the same plot: Krull, 1983.

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