The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance | Trailer | Netflix

[Imaculata]

I have mixed feelings about it. It looks fantastic and the nostalgia is there, but it also feels a bit padded out, and the mouth movements occasionally look a bit off (the sock-puppet effect). I wish their mouths could emote as well as their eyes.

The whole creation of the Skeksis is confusing to me. According to the show, the Skeksis corrupted and cracked the crystal. But wasn't the cracking of the crystal what created the Skeksis in the first place? After all, healing the crystal (as shown in the movie) merges the Mystics and Skeksis back into one creature. Supposedly the crystal is now tied directly to all life on Thra, and yet the Skeksis are also bound to this crystal, despite them not originating from Thra? This is all so convoluted.

At the start of the show, we are shown how the Skeksis abuse the crystal to prolong their own life, and then later on in the show this apparently no longer works, and so they start draining Gelflings for essence. But at the start of the movie they are still using the Crystal to prolong their life AND they are draining lifeforms for essence. So which is it? How does this all work?

The show has way too much dream-fasting and talking about uniting the Gelfling clans. It becomes tiresome due to how often they repeat the same dialogue in numerous scenes. I also feel that the way the Gelflings are now militarised (they have weapons and armor!) is in conflict with how peaceful and innocent the Gelflings are portrayed in the movie. This lord of the rings style resistance feels like it doesn't fit this universe very well. The importance of Aughra also comes out of left field.

But the show looks wonderful. It's remarkable what they were able to do, and how they combine the puppetry with CGI. Occasionally you can clearly tell what is CGI, but when they use the CGI to hide puppetry and add backdrops it all looks great. My only pet peeve is with fake dirt and grime being put on the camera lens, which just looks jarring. They do it a couple of times during action scenes and it just annoys me. I'm not sure if they used CGI to add eye blinking and Skeksis-tongue movements. If they did, they did it well.

Something that stands out in this show, is what they do with the movements of the characters. The quick insert shots of feet help sell the illusion that the characters have feet. They also do some very complex things with the manipulation of the hands. In the movie they would often cut to a shot of an actors' hands, which was a bit jarring. In the show they never do this, and given the complex things that the puppets have to do with their hands, it is quite an accomplishment. I think some of these scenes probably required very specific gimmicks for what is a merely a shot of a few seconds. Shots of a Gelfling picking something up, or placing an object down gently, are incredibly difficult to do with puppets. But they do it all with actual puppetry.

Overall I enjoyed the show. But it's just okay.

 

[Aldarc]

The whole creation of the Skeksis is confusing to me. According to the show, the Skeksis corrupted and cracked the crystal. But wasn't the cracking of the crystal what created the Skeksis in the first place? After all, healing the crystal (as shown in the movie) merges the Mystics and Skeksis back into one creature. Supposedly the crystal is now tied directly to all life on Thra, and yet the Skeksis are also bound to this crystal, despite them not originating from Thra? This is all so convoluted.

No, and admittedly the opening narration of the film (and TV series) is misleading. If you watch the film again, you can notice that the crystal shard shows Jen a brief vision of a skeksis breaking the Crystal of Truth. So the skeksis and urRu would have split prior to that point.

The urSkeks were political exiles from their planet who were banished due to their own inner imbalance. (The sources are vague on the details.) On Thra, the urSkeks hoped to utilize the Crystal of Truth for the next Great Conjunction to purge themselves of their inner darkness and return to their homeworld, which also supposedly had a Crystal of Truth of its own. But the sorrow of one of their number* caused this ritual to fail, and instead the Crystal of Truth split them into the Skeksis and urRu. In the midst of this confusion and rage at their new selves, one of the skeksis cracked the crystal, and two pairs of skeksis/urRu also apparently died in this time.

* One of the gelflings who had been invited to the Great Conjunction was a bard who had secretly heard one of the urSkeks sing a sad song on a small island in the ocean years before. When the gelfling played this song at the Castle, it apparently had triggered a resurfacing of anger, nostalgia, and sorrow among that one urSkek. Since this urSkek was singing, some have speculated that this unnamed urSkek may have been SilSol, who split to become urSol the Chanter and SkekSil the Chamberlain.

At the start of the show, we are shown how the Skeksis abuse the crystal to prolong their own life, and then later on in the show this apparently no longer works, and so they start draining Gelflings for essence. But at the start of the movie they are still using the Crystal to prolong their life AND they are draining lifeforms for essence. So which is it? How does this all work?

The ritual of the sun gives some life but not as much anymore. I also think that the skeksis are creatures of habit who are numbly performing their rituals, much as urRu are said to be doing the same. So the answer is both.

I also feel that the way the Gelflings are now militarised (they have weapons and armor!) is in conflict with how peaceful and innocent the Gelflings are portrayed in the movie. This lord of the rings style resistance feels like it doesn't fit this universe very well. The importance of Aughra also comes out of left field.

The two gelflings in the movie were raised by urRu and Podlings, neither of whom are militaristic. So Jen and Kira do not exactly show a normative sense of how gelflings were prior to the Garthim Wars. The militarization of the gelflings is congruent with what we see in the prequel comic Creation Myths, which shows the initial formation of the Alliance of the Crystal between the skeksis and gelflings.