Casey Read

I know, I know. I’ve only watched the first episode. But I think that’s the point here… I am an avid fan of the original movie of the same title, ‘Willow’. It had well-timed, CLEAR dialogue and jokes/humor as well as mostly correct TONE throughout the film’s silly, yet fun, whimsical adventure. It had everything a kid (or adult) could want: a funny, charming hero in Val’s Madmartigan, an endearing heroic role of the unexpected sorcerer Willow, a strong, yet misguided, Sorsha, a couple of misfit brownies, an elderly woman as a powerful sorceress and a sweet baby thrown in for good measure. A haberdashery’s collection of characters that somehow worked! Let’s take a look at the new series. A smattering of young folks, most of them weak actors with little to no charm, and the only elderly, wise knight character that goes with them DIES right away after trying to bestow his wisdom on vigilance in the wilds was not humorously played (but was supposed to be?…) and then the character was not mourned whatsoever in the aftermath. That knight was supposedly someone that Kit, the silly, immature swordswoman princess (daughter of Madmartigan and Sorsha) had known her WHOLE LIFE. No reaction there. Terrible writing. That is just one example of many moments in which I questioned this show. I was definitely left wanting for more of the Boorman character…he seems like a benched replacement for Kilmer’s Madmartigan and had, at least, tempered a bit of Princess Kit’s awful, immature rampage with some wisdom about her not knowing anything about the outside world and her naïveté within it. For anyone upset about the lesbian scene, here is WHY I am upset about it: it’s incredibly forced with little to no heart behind the character’s’ development. Why should we care about this relationship? No reason. What’s the point of that scene? No reason. It was just so out of the blue and almost seemed to be a ‘look at this!’ moment rather than a moment of love or tenderness or a meaningful connection between two characters that would develop into something special. It didn’t feel right at all in the TONE and pacing of the introduction of these characters. It just felt like the gay thing was being USED (and abused) as a tool of pleasing certain people rather than actually developing a relationship between the characters…creepy. Strange and off-putting choices in the script with little to no thought as to WHY things happened left me scratching my head. Dialogue is so fast at times, I had to rewind to catch everything going on. With the movie, I could laugh along with the silly lines without feeling completely patronized by slower pacing. This seems to be a recurring theme in modern film- the faster and more indiscernible we speak during scenes, the more the dialogue seems witty/funny/smart to our audience because our audience, in fact, can’t keep up. In fact, let’s do that to disguise the fact that we can’t write dialogue and make our audience feel dumb. Whew! What a disappointment.