Hacker Cinema
Willow
1988 · Film · 126 min
Directed by Ron Howard
The evil Queen Bavmorda hunts the newborn princess Elora Danan, a child prophesied to bring about her downfall. When the royal infant is found by Willow, a timid farmer and aspiring sorcerer, he's entrusted with delivering her from evil.
4 positive1 negative9 neutralfrom 14 commenters
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14 comments on Hacker News
It's got some incredible animation. The story and studio infighting was what hurt the film, but it's still worth a watch if you haven't seen it. It really should have been a better movie. Targeting older audiences was a good idea and fantasy was a big genre. On the animation side The Last Unicorn was a recent success that was also darker fantasy than what disney was offering (fire and ice too, although that didn't get as wide an audience) and in live action Legend released that same year and Willow came after and both attracted a lot of fans. I really wonder what that movie might have been if Disney had been fully committed to the idea.
That movie was such a foundational document for me, and (obviously) for many other nerdy GenX kids.
I found this site years (decades!) ago, and was happy to discover it's still there:
https://monkeybagel.com/culture/movies.html
The blurb there for _Real Genius_:
"The most accurate portrayal of geeks in the wild I've ever seen. The geeks in Real Genius LOOK, ACT and TALK like geeks. And Jordan gave me hope that I'd someday -- just maybe -- kiss a girl on the lips."
I remember a discussion of this film on a long-running private listserv back in the late 90s or early 00s about possible real-world antecedents for some of the characters, including and especially Jordan. A proto-web site existed for this person where she elaborated on her connection to the writers of the film, and more or less confirmed that she was "Jordan", or at least the inspo for it, but of course I can find no trace of this now.
Anyway, between TOP SECRET, REAL GENIUS, WILLOW, TOMBSTONE, HEAT, and TOP GUN, he's about as inconic as an actor can get. For a dose of maybe less blockbustery work, seek out 2002's THE SALTON SEA where Kilmer is joined by Adam Goldberg, Luis Guzman, Anthony LaPaglia, Peter Sarsgaarad, BD Wong, R. Lee Ermey (!) and in a spectacular turn Vincent D'Onofrio.
Tombstone was a cultural icon in my fraternity house as we had a drinking game based around it. But Val will always be in my memory as the wild swordsman Mad Mardigan in Willow. RIP!
Every time Doc Holiday drinks you take a shot. Nothing less than 80-proof allowed. No other food or drinks allowed. You cannot vomit before the end of the credits. If you get through the whole movie you get to sign the house's Tombstone movie poster. With the director's cut I believe it was 21 shots total, with one or two of the scenes in the saloon what really push people over the edge because he drinks frequently in a short period of time.
I never even attempted it. We had one or two brothers who vomited during the credits.....FAIL! Ah good times.
"I got two guns...one for the both of ya."
Willow is one of the most ignored, underrated movies ever.
Also "Willow", one of mine, and IMO one of the best fantasy movies Hollywood ever produced.
And of course the iconic role in "Top Gun", and the silly but classic "Top Secret"
As the article notices, he really had a wide range. Probably my favorite actor of his generation.
The use of the term "xenomorph" in the film predates the development of the morphing technology, seen early on in Willow, The Abyss, and it largely entered popular perception after T2 in the early 90s. So: no.
Willow is a semi-common name. But good chance it is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_(TV_series) and/or the original movie.
Among other issues at Lucasfilm before the acquisition was they just didn’t make much anymore. Star Wars, one of the biggest series ever created, sat from 1984 to 1999 without any features (outside of Ewoks made for TV entries). The universe was left to novelists and game creators. Indiana Jones was similar.
Both of these were created in the spirit of serials, but then the series stopped unceremoniously.
Other entries like Willow weren’t main stream hits and Lucasfilm just stopped making movies for about 10 years. By the time George Lucas directed again it had been 22 years since he had directed a movie.
A lot of wonderful things have come out of Lucasfilm, but it was pretty much abandoned by the 90s.
Both the Star Wars and Indy universes are great, but let new creators make new things. I’d much rather see a mediocre original concept than yet another mediocre franchise movie.
Yeah, a lot seems kind of weird. Many things get mentioned in odd places or credit seems somewhat misplaced.
* It mentions James Kajiya, but David Immel usually also gets co-credited for the rendering equation. (He's credited in the glossary, but not in the main section on global illumination!)
* Particle systems mentioned elsewhere, but not in the ILM (Lucasfilm) section.
* "1968 also saw the arrival of Ray Tracing developed by Bell Labs and Cornell University." Here, it seems to be confusing Appel, who published on ray tracing as a visibility algorithm in 1968, with Whitted who published on recursive ray tracing as a shading algorithm in 1980 while at Bell Labs. One needs to be really careful about conflating ray tracing as a visibility algorithm vs as a shading algorithm.
* In the timeline: 1987, "Willow (Lucasfilm) popularizes morphing" vs. 1988, "Willow (Lucasfilm) uses morphing in a feature film".
* "One approach to taking more responsibility from the CPU was done by the GeForce 256 from NVIDIA (the first graphics processing unit, or GPU)." Next paragraph: "3dfx introduced their GPU, the Voodoo in 1996." Umm, the GeForce 256 came out in 1999; 3dfx was first here, though I believe that NVIDIA was first to coin the term GPU as a marketing term. And of course there were things like the SGI Onyx with its 3D accelerators before either (and SGI was discussed in the previous section).
* Shading languages? BRDFs? Shadow mapping? Free form deformation, skinning, and non-rigid animation? Dithering and halftoning? Digital color? POV-Ray?
OT, but that take on Lucas has to stop. Was he surrounded by many capable people that contributed to his works in great ways? Of course, that's what collaborative art of movie making is all about. Spielberg movies would probably suffer a lot without Kahn editing them, so would Scorsese's without Thelma Schoonmaker, etc.. Look at the other world-building things Lucas did to gain some perspective on him as an artist - from THX 1138 and Graffiti, over Star Wars OT to Indiana Jones, Willow, and ultimately the prequels - yes, the prequels; Compare their cultural presence and impact (even mentioning Jar Jar here) to what Disney Juggernaut with all of the talent and money couldn't bring to presence. Now, combine that with the gravity around him that brought in people that managed to pull technical wonders of digital video editing (AVID) and image manipulation (Photoshop), and many many other things (THX, Pixar, etc.) on top of all of the legendary businesses that spawned up from Lucas Film itself, to Lucas Arts, Skywalker Sound (THX), and ILM. That's not a coincidence, and not on his ex wife (alone) - that's a bunch of smart and hard-working talented people around guy that told them a story, people including Spielberg, and De Palma, and Coppola... Story which they all liked. Give the guy a break, number of successes around him, and not any of the mentioned individuals, is no coincidence. One Howard the Duck does not his legacy make.
> This may be an unpopular opinion
I believe it's not so unpopular.
I believe it depends on the demography, I, for one, am tired of seeing things I grew up with being ruined by poor writing and/or low interest in keeping the source material as a pivotal element of the narration.
Few examples
- Foundation wasn't bad per se, if it was marketed as fan fiction. As an adaptation of Asimov's works it's really bad and also chose a timeline that's totally unsatisfying for everybody, both newcomers and book fans. Starting from "Prelude to Foundation" was a much better idea to set up the stage for future story development and as an introduction to the characters.
- Rings of Power, same sin: it isn't Tolkien, it is a fan fiction with some actors cosplaying Tolkien characters that, at its center, portrays a very silly, very boring, romantic story between the female protagonist and the male villain. Teenage good, if the villain was no other than Sauron, AKA "The Lord of the Rings".
- Andor, that I too consider good, is, from an objective POV, just decent. Decent enough in this time and space to stand out compared to the endless list of monstrosities that Disney recently produced especially the Star Wars themed ones, but certainly not a masterpiece, as many have called it.
- Willow: lets' not talk about it. A mediocre movie from the late 80s that has gained a cult status only because, IMO, the video game was reaaaalllyyy good, that had only one reason to be re-adapted to modern times: scrape the bottom of the barrel. It is so bad that you can actually feel sorry for he people who worked at making it.
Sometimes an artist is so influential that to go back to discover them for the first time, from a modern perspective, they can sound cliche ... when in fact they invented the cliches. Right?
I have chatted with coworkers after "The Lord of the Rings" films came out who had not read Tolkien but after seeing the movies thought that the story was fairly derivative. Maybe not such a surprising take if you allow that nearly all fantasy since Tolkien has been so heavily influenced by him that his fingerprints are everywhere — in D&D, films like "Willow", etc.
I remember hearing Raydio's hit "Jack and Jill" [1] back in 1978 when it came out (I was 14 years old) and it was probably the first synthesizer I had ever heard in a song. I cannot even describe to you how alien and wonderful that sounded when I first heard it. Electronics in music would become so mainstream of course that it is hard to "shock my ears" any longer and even harder for someone used to it to go back and hear this song from over 40 years the way my "virgin ears" heard it.
[1] https://youtu.be/43OVNx4EXQg
>but when he says a movie is good he has never been wrong
I have a crazy anecdote like that too. My severely (barely verbal, had his own barely intelligible language) step brother would watch like a grand total of two movies on repeat. So many times that for a decade afterward you could say a single line from either movie, and I could finish the script for you.
Those two movies? Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Willow.
After a couple of decades of a break from being forced to watch them I finally did, and they're exemplary.
WFRR is objectively incredible: https://medium.com/labjorfaap/who-framed-roger-rabbit-bumping-the-lamp-e72a5c22b354 as a production, and as work of art.
And Willow is one of the best fantasy epics ever made, IMHO.
He was maybe ~6 when WFRR came out on VHS could already spot a good movie. He's probably still mentally a poorly functioning 6 despite being 36 now, but there's a lot more to him than his obsession with Christmas. :)
I feel like in the years to come we're going to learn a lot from and benefit greatly from autistic folks. (I also might be one.)
> Digital morphing was introduced to the public in that film.
As someone who grew up watching Willow (1988), I beg to differ... Note the box office was about 1/4 that of Terminator 2, so you could say it reached the public pretty well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKzbsDG58pc