SPOILERS ARE THE GREATEST POWER IN THE UNIVERSE BESIDES LOVE
Lucasfilm made more Willow. That’s incredible.
The original Willow movie came out in 1988. Public Internet? Nope. Cable TV? Still kind of new and cool. MTV? Still showing videos. Grunge music? Not yet. Same-sex marriage? Decades away. Last Star Wars movie had come out five years prior and the next Star Wars movie wouldn’t be out for another eleven. US President? Ronald Reagan. British Prime Minister? Margaret Thatcher. Apartheid had not yet been ended in South Africa. Cell phones? Sometimes you’d see a car phone in a movie that was the size of a newborn baby.
The point is, Willow came out a long, long time ago. It was not, upon release, a smash hit. It’s life after its theatrical release was mostly as a cult classic, fondly remembered by some, a middle-of-the-road fantasy movie beloved by die hards. Which is why it’s so crazy that my Gen X cohort (and our disposable income) has rescued Willow from his cultural void like streaming sorcerers.
You might say, but Matt, the streaming Content Wars dictate that all Intellectual Property be brought forth to feed the Content Eaters, but I say to you no. They are making enough Star Wars and Marvel to feed us all forever. They did not have to make Willow. They chose to make Willow. For me. For us. How great. (Well sort of for us, we’ll get to that later.)
To prepare for the new series, I rewatched Willow (1988). It was even better than I remembered. It’s got the look and feel of a big budget film of the era, made up mostly of what can be captured in camera, with a few showy moments courtesy of ILM. It’s misty and muddy and hardscrabble and fun. It’s derivative of other stories, but that’s true of almost all my favorite things. It’s got two particularly effective performances: Warwick Davis is utterly genuine and sweet, so easy to root for. And Val Kilmer is just such a movie star in the role of Madmartigan. It’s easy to forget how brightly Kilmer shone on the big screen. He is electric in the original Willow.
Plus, the movie flies by. When it was released, it was criticized for a slow pace. Now, compared to the three-hour bladder-testers that are the norm, or the 10 episode 45 minute per episode story-arcs we receive on streaming platforms, Willow seems to sprint from plot point to plot point.
That’s what I brought in with me to the now completed first season of Willow. Nostalgia, gratefulness and not terribly clear expectations. Now that the first season (or first Volume according to the after credits scene) is entirely available, I have a lot of thoughts.
I think right off the bat, the series looks incredible. While the original film felt misty and caked with mud, this gleams with digital beauty. The journey feels longer, more involved, and taking our characters through sparkling forests, rocky promontories, caverns filled with sardonic trolls, dungeons hiding Christian Slater, haunted castles, a shattered sea that goes all the way to the edge of the world, royal halls, gentle grassy homes and titanic abandoned cities. I say this often but it bears repeating: to get this level of fantasy production when I was a kid, you’d have to imagine it yourself. Even feature films didn’t look like this, let alone series that were released just for subscribers.
As immense as it is, though, it becomes clear that there is an upside and a downside of working with very little source material. Most Disney+ shows that are expanding on a pre-existing universe have quite a lot of stuff to play with. Star Wars has decades of story, Marvel has even more if you think about it as being grounded in the comics. Willow (2022) is the sequel to Willow (1988) and that’s it, really.
That makes the series feel simultaneously untethered and hamstrung. On one hand, the series is free to invent quite a lot, it’s not boxed in by other writer’s ideas and choices and carved out areas of canon. That makes this world feel fresh and surprising, even when using familiar tropes.
It also means that, for the characters, there are only a few things the writers know for sure, and in order to ground us in those characters, they stick to them pretty closely. For example, even though it’s been decades since Willow saved the infant Elora Danan from the evil Queen Bavmorda, Willow (2022) seems to have frozen his disappearing pig trick as the defining fact of his life. He did not use great magic to win his greatest battle, and that single fact was seemingly used to spin out the character of Willow Ufgood we now see in the series.
Willow himself, therefore, is given what I might call the The Last Jedi Lite treatment. When we find him, we find a man who is older, less confident, who feels uncertain of himself, who is not quite the hero we expect. He is surprisingly eager to turn back, again and again.
Of course, he does show up for our leads and step in at the last minute, just like Luke Skywalker does on Crait, and that’s a lovely moment. It’s hard for Willow Ufgood to have the same weightiness of Luke Skywalker, of course, hero of many people’s childhoods for almost 40 years. Basically, when Willow doesn’t decide to leap over the waterfall in the season finale, it seems obvious he will appear at the last minute. The series is, after all, called Willow. He’s not going to just head home, is he?
This is what I wrestled with: it’s a tonal tangle and some of the story beats seem to happen haphazardly. There’s nothing really wrong with the story, per se, it just unfolds in a way that felt unsteady to me at times. Madmartigan’s daughter Kit (played by Ruby Cruz) seems to have kissed her protector Jade, the always awesome Erin Kellyman, early in the series. Then, later in the series, they kiss as if they’ve never kissed before. Did I miss a beat? Misunderstand their relationship?
This happens quite a lot. We’re told characters have a deep connection but don’t watch it play out for very long. Willow and Sorcha? Barely speaking. Jade and her mentor? A tearful connection that we’re told more about than shown. There’s a whole subplot about a cuirass that seems to be built towards Kit putting on the armor at the end, but I have to say, I didn’t completely follow it. Boorman stole it, or he is a thief, or a loyal friend, or he was Madmartigan’s friend or betrayer or I don’t exactly know. The armor looks great though. At some point the characters turn to stone and then they aren’t stone anymore. We learn Jade is actually a part of a tribe of marauders that don’t seem very maraud-y, and that is supposed to be a kind of betrayal or lie she’s uncovered. Then, it’s on to the next bit, a fact that doesn’t reassert itself by the time we get to the end.
With Boorman, Kit, Jade and Prince MacGuffin/Airk, you can feel the series splitting up Val Kilmer into in four characters to make up for this loss of his presence one. He looms large, his absence felt, but I wasn’t quite sure how he worked. Why he was suddenly able to talk to his daughter as she made her sinister choice? Is he a force ghost? What’s the deal?
And of course, there is Elora Danan. I was surprised to see what could have been quite a mystery resolved at the outset of the season, but I get it, the story wasn’t “Who is Elora?” the story was “What will Elora do?” I have to admit, her character became hazier and hazier to me. She was prophesied to bring about the defeat of Bavmorda, but of course, Bavmorda has basically been defeated. So, is she the savior against the darkness? Is she going to die? Is she going to become an evil leader? I realize I’m supposed to be asking these questions as the series concludes but again, her central thrust was diffuse. Here is a girl that works in the kitchen that discovers she’s the most powerful and important person in the entirety of this story. Finding Airk, learning magic, it all felt like a teenager sneaking out to avoid her homework. She meets Willow, the Nelwyn who saved her life as an infant, and I would say her primary experience with him is… exasperation? She smiles at him sometimes, but I didn’t sense they were bonded for life.
In Star Wars, characters fall in love with each other instantly. Friendships are formed after one or two moments of peril and those bonds feel genuine and rich right away. In The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship and the friendship of the characters is what makes them so moving. Even The Mandalorian makes you feel like Mando would die for that baby, and you feel it even though Din Djarin has no face and The Child doesn’t speak.
So far, in Willow, the characters haven’t quite hit that mark. They come together in moments that feel arbitrary for the story, but certainly feel like human beings who could take or leave one another most of the time. So, it’s a little harder to invest in their success, as they don’t seem terribly invested in the success of one another.
I think Graydon embodies almost all the story issues in one place. He is played by the most watchable actor of them all, Tony Revolori, who is clearly just incredible at what he does. But by the time he is (seemingly) killed at the end of the season, does anyone remember he was supposed to marry Kit? She should be the person who is going on the biggest journey with him, but instead it’s Elora, who seems to like him well enough but never quite fall in love with him. His backstory is that he was possessed somehow and killed his brother, and he is also a sorcerer on his own, and he is also a prince that is betrothed to someone who is not into men, let alone him. That’s a lot of stuff to parse. One piece of that would be enough to construct a season long arc with a resolution, but instead we get all of it, and none of it particularly plays into the moment where he tries to defend Elora, fails, and the sentiment upon his death is the rather generic “He will be remembered as brave.”
There is also the matter of the extremely modern music and dialogue. Folks, there is a defense for this, and I would find it in Pablo Hidalgo’s musings about Star Wars. Essentially, he intimates that we should assume that what we’re watching is an English translation of something far away, which accounts for idioms showing up like “Sitting ducks!” and “I’ll see you in hell!” Willow the series seems to have this balance a little off, occasionally undermining moments that should play well with lines like “He’s eternal, bitch!” Still, I understand what they’re going for. These characters aren’t supposed to feel stodgy and as if they live in fantasy world. The people of Tir Asleen, they’re just like us.
The music is another story. Music is like the set, it helps create the world in which the characters live. Imagine Indiana Jones scored by Danny Elfman. It’s a whole different movie. The musical choices here sometimes made me wonder how it would have felt to watch Darth Vader throw the Emperor to his (first) death to the tune of Paint It Black. Hearing Black Hole Sun play in Willow felt like watching Airk wearing Nikes.
What I sensed with all this, really, is that even though Gen X rescued Willow from obscurity, this series is aimed at a different audience. The contemporary music, comedic voice and young leads all seem to be trying to distinguish it from other franchises and make it palatable for teens.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, it’s an approach that makes sense if you’re not trying to please just, you know, me. I just had to adjust my expectations as the series played out. And the story issues seem to stem from an overabundance of ideas. They’ve clearly left themselves a lot of runway to tell a bold story and left the characters with plenty of maturing to do. If they are able to give us three full volumes that treat Willow (1988) as a prologue, I’m intrigued to see where it goes and how the characters will grow. After all, Ahsoka Tano wasn’t all that easy to take when she debuted. Now she’s one of the most recognizable and fleshed out characters in all of Star Wars. Perhaps we’ll see Kit, Jade and Elora make that journey too.
That’s really the most exciting part of watching this new version of Willow. It’s a true sequel. As a Star Wars fan, looking backwards, filling in the story, is a part of the experience. Empty space between stories? Let’s wander down that path, see what happens between or before. Rarely are we at the very end of the timeline, looking ahead to what’s next.
Willow’s series on Disney+ forges ahead. Every episode is about doling out new information. We don’t know who many of the characters are and what they will do and that’s refreshing. As simple as that seems from a storytelling perspective, it happens less than it should. Even Marvel stories, which seem to move the story forward propulsively, have been known to put stories out of order (Captain Marvel is earlier in the timeline than Captain America, for example), but even so? They are based largely on preexisting material. If you’ve read a few comics, you know what’s coming.
I have no idea what’s to come for the Daikinis and Nelwyns, for Elora and Kit, for Willow and Sorcha. Our view of the Wyrm’s massive form, of the dreaded future that may be coming, leaves so much to discover and wonder about. Imperfections aside, it’s still remarkable to be in this world again. They’ve set the stage for a whole new adventure. Here’s hoping that Volume 2 builds on what’s working to make something a little more legible, just as beautiful, and no less magical.