• It’s achievement is neither Star Wars that proceeded it a little more than a decade before or Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings that followed a little more than a decade after, far from it- but Willow is just good enough to be worthy of the archives
  • James Horner’s score is certainly one of the main reasons to praise Willow– Horner too often gets ignored as one of the all-time greats and this is one of his finest
  • George Lucas may be the real author here (he gets producer and story credit), not Ron Howard, the Lucas LTD logo lets you know and the blending of mythology, Tolkien (Nelwyn’s certainly seem like Hobbits and the Shire and Warrick Davis’s titular character as Frodo), religion (the baby in the basket and prophecy)
  • Wipe edits like Star Wars
  • Val Kilmer is certainly Han Solo with his “I’m the greatest swordsman who ever lived”
  • Beautiful exteriors shot on location in New Zealand- mountains (where Jackson would shoot his Tolkien adaptation of course)
  • The Brownies are just awful- the film works better when you take them out completely
  • The first half, the world building and the time spent at the village
  • Some just awful choices, not just the brownies as characters, but turning Kilmer into a snowball when he falls running down a mountain in the snow – like a gag from a Naked Gun movie. Baffling
  • Recommend but not in the top 10 of 1988