Legend (1985) Review
7/10
Darkness wants the last unicorns killed so that night can be permanent. A boy who lives in the forest takes a girl to see them, she touches one, and the world freezes over by morning.
The 7 is for a film that is pure atmosphere and knows it. There is almost no plot here and the script is not trying to supply one. What it is trying to do is build a fairy tale as a physical place, and on that measure it succeeds completely.
The three points come off for a hollow middle. The characters are archetypes with nothing underneath, Tom Cruise is a forest boy with no interior life, and once the visual argument is made in the first act the film has to fill an hour before Curry can appear.
Scott Built the Forest and Then It Burned
Scott wanted an enchanted forest and decided location shooting could not give him control over it. So he built one on the 007 Stage at Pinewood, the largest soundstage in Europe, with fourteen weeks of construction.
The trees were sixty feet high with trunks thirty feet across, sculpted from polystyrene over tubular scaffolding, with five further soundstages carrying the other sets. Scott was reportedly still worried it would not read as real days before shooting began.
Then the stage burned down. It went while the crew were at lunch, which is the only reason nobody was killed, and it took with it a set of planned overhead and fly-through shots that were never filmed. The remaining sequences were completed on surviving pieces and in the gardens at Pinewood.
What survives on screen is a forest that looks like an illustration. Constant shafts of light through dust, floating pollen, water in the air, petals moving on no wind. It is not a real place and was never meant to be one, and it is the most convincing invented environment in eighties fantasy.
Alex Thomson photographed it and the technique is simple and relentless. Light comes from behind and above in visible beams, every interior is filled with something for the beams to catch, and nothing is lit flatly at any point. The air is doing as much work as the sets.
A built world gives you total control and takes away all accident. Everything in a constructed frame is deliberate, which means every element has to be worth the deliberation.
The tell for whether a built world is working is whether it has a weather. This forest has humidity, drifting particles and shifting light, and those are what convince, far more than the scale of the trees.
For prose the same principle applies at the level of sensory detail. A world that has a temperature, a smell and a quality of light reads as a place. A world described by its geography and its politics reads as a map.
Tim Curry Is Working Under Enormous Constraints
Rob Bottin designed Darkness, and the result is red skin, cloven hooves and three-foot horns that were hollow and still heavy enough to strain Curry’s neck and back across a long shoot.
The application took hours and the removal took over an hour of sitting in a bath while adhesive was dissolved. Curry has described losing patience once and tearing his own skin removing it too fast.
Through all of that he gives a performance of real subtlety. Darkness is seductive instead of raging, amused, courteous, and genuinely persuasive when he argues to Lili that he is only the necessary half of the world. The voice is doing almost all of it, because the face can barely move.
Scott found him by rewatching The Rocky Horror Picture Show while considering Richard O’Brien for a different part. That is the casting decision the film is remembered for, and it is the reason the film is remembered at all.
There is a lesson in the design as well. Darkness looks exactly like the traditional Christian devil, which most fantasy avoids as too obvious, and the obviousness is why he works. The audience needs no explanation of what he is, so every second of screen time can go to what he wants.
The Two Scores Are Two Different Films
Jerry Goldsmith wrote a full orchestral score for the European release. Universal, worried the picture would not reach American teenagers, replaced it for the domestic version with electronic music by Tangerine Dream, along with contributions from Jon Anderson and Bryan Ferry.
The two versions genuinely are different films. Goldsmith gives it the weight and grandeur of a fairy tale being told seriously. Tangerine Dream gives it a floating, synthetic, dreamlike quality that pushes the whole thing toward the eighties and away from timelessness.
I prefer Goldsmith, and the preference is about what the images are doing. Scott shot this as a Grimm story, and orchestral scoring matches that intent. The electronic version is not bad, and it is a different argument laid over pictures that were not built for it.
Both are now available. The director’s cut restores Goldsmith and runs a hundred and fourteen minutes against the eighty-nine of the American release, and it is the version worth seeking out.
A score is an argument about genre, and changing it changes what the work is claiming to be. The same images with different music are making different promises to the audience.
That is why the studio’s reasoning here is coherent even though I disagree with it. They were not attacking the film, they were repositioning it for a different buyer, and repositioning is exactly what a score can accomplish.
The lesson for any creative work is to know what your surrounding presentation is claiming. Cover, title, blurb and opening paragraph all set genre expectations, and an expectation the work then fails to meet costs more than an unfashionable one honestly stated.
The Hollow Middle
After the freeze, the film settles into a rescue. Jack assembles a party of elves and dwarves, they travel, they are captured, they reach the lair. It is the least interesting stretch and it takes up most of the running time.
The problem is that nobody wants anything complicated. Jack wants Lili back, Lili wants to undo her mistake, the fairies want to help, and Darkness wants the dark. There is no conflicting motive anywhere in the film except inside Lili for about four minutes.
That four minutes is the best writing in the picture. Darkness dresses her, dances with her, and she considers it. Mia Sara plays genuine temptation, and for a moment the film has a character making a decision instead of executing a plan.
Tom Cruise is the casualty. He was twenty-two and about to become the biggest star in the world, and Jack is written with no flaw, no doubt and no history, so there is nothing for him to play. Johnny Depp, Jim Carrey and Robert Downey Jr. were all considered and none of them could have solved it either.
Mia Sara was sixteen when filming started and turned eighteen before it finished, which tells you how long this production ran. She is the only performer in the film given anything resembling a contradiction, and she is the one nobody talks about.
Why It Failed and Why It Lasted
Twenty-five million dollars, twenty-three and a half back, and a domestic take around fifteen and a half million. It was a commercial failure in a year when Scott was coming off Alien and Blade Runner.
Part of that is the release history. Venice in August 1985, Europe shortly after, and the United States not until April 1986 after the recut and the new score, by which point there was no momentum to inherit.
What preserved it is the design. This film sits on a list of pictures the critics got wrong because the initial reviews were about the story, which is thin, and the durable value is in the images, which nothing has surpassed.
Every fantasy film that came after with a practical creature and a built environment is drawing on this and on The Dark Crystal. Bottin’s Darkness in particular has outlived a thousand digital demons, because a real object in a real light does something a rendered one still cannot.
Work that fails on story and succeeds on execution has a specific afterlife. It gets rediscovered by practitioners instead of audiences, and its influence shows up in other people’s work before its reputation recovers.
That is worth knowing when you assess your own projects. A book with a weak plot and extraordinary prose is not a failure in the same way as a book with neither, and the two need different responses.
The practical version: fix the thing that is weakest, and do not let a strong element convince you the weak one is acceptable. Legend needed one character who wanted two things at once, and it would have been a masterpiece.
Should you watch Legend?
Yes, and watch the director’s cut with the Goldsmith score. The story will not hold you and it is not meant to. What you are there for is a constructed forest, a red demon under three feet of horn arguing his case, and a fairy tale that commits entirely to being one.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists