@Ruin Explorer i apologize for my manner toward you. I find the particular type of criticism you have used in this thread...objectionable, on multiple levels, but I went a bit far toward personal territory over it, and that was unnecessary.
Also you’re wrong and Legend kicks ass and the pacing is exactly right for a dark fairy tale you absolute maniac!
Jokes aside, though, Dark Crystal is overrated, Labyrinth is rated roughly where it should be, and Legend deserves to be side by side with them, at least.
Neither critical reviews nor aggregated audience ratings can be relied upon as authoritive. Neither can win an argument about quality.
Also it’s wild to suggest there isn’t a plot. It’s not even a hard plot to follow. I rewatched it, probably for the 6th or 7th time in my life, and it still holds up, including to someone who generally doesn’t rewatch things if I suspect they won’t hold up, because nostalgia does not, ever, salvage bad media for me. The old He-Man cartoons are terrible, no matter how much I loved them as a kid. Unwatchable as an adult. Legend, OTOH, has only gotten better.
Dark Crystal is
somewhat overrated I agree, but that's only because people act like it's
totally amazing when it's in fact really good. Labyrinth is amazing. You've convinced me to give Legend one more chance. Well, you and being reminded once more that it has a Tangerine Dream soundtrack, so like, what's the worst that can happen? I spend a couple of hours listening to Tangerine Dream? Oh no! Apparently it's on Prime right now so maybe in the next few weeks!
Re: audience reviews I've never found them helpful myself because they reliably bear little relationship to the actual quality or enjoyable-ness of the movie/book/game in my experience. They're more interesting in telling you about the audience than the subject. One particular thing of interest to me is this unnamed but somewhat reliable effect, where, when a movie/book/game is read/watched/played by an niche audience, it tends to get a very high rating, but the same thing then "goes big", the rating drops abruptly because the larger audience isn't as appreciative. The reasons can be complex - like something can be niche because it borders on a sexual fetish and the larger audience isn't into that, or it can be niche because it involves complex ideas and might be boring for a larger audience, or it might have a specific style appreciated by, say, film students, but not say "most people". This can cut both ways too - sometimes one is part of the "larger audience" and not appreciative!
Critics aren't perfect, even in aggregate - well-illustrated by the Orville flip-flop you point out (I found it kind of boring myself, like, fanfic for TNG but without the wonderful actors), and obviously there are countless examples where individual critics completely dropped the ball on stuff, but they're a hell of a lot more reliable in my experience.
Everyone knew GotG was "Marvel in Space" before they went in to see the film.
Before you can tell the audience "It's Dungeons & Dragons with magic trains" you first have to establish your baseline Dungeons & Dragons.
This is missing the point. You don't need to mention the trains. You don't need to "establish baseline Dungeons & Dragons", because there is no such thing at this point in history.
People see trains as a "thing from the past". Normal people are not surprised when thinks like steam-style trains, airships, cannons, complex clocks and machines, and so on turn up in fantasy. You have to get into the 20th century before people even start being mildly surprised, and even then, they usually just accept it. Even robots are fine, so long as they look sufficiently "steam age" and emit steam or magic. For you, as a world-builder or whatever maybe it's a huge deal if there are trains or not. For the audience of a fantasy movie in 2021? No.
You seem to be stuck on the idea of how the audience was in like, 1990. This is over 30 years later. Most of the audience grew up with games and shows (esp. anime and so on) and books full of steampunk and magitech, even if they didn't think about it. Anime and Japanese games particularly have been absolutely chock-full of this stuff since the early 1990s. You may have zero interest in that stuff. Cool. But most people under 40, especially under 30, are going to have significant exposure to it. Airships and steam-style trains, despite IRL, being quite recent (even still existing), have become this sort of fantastic thing or a thing that can happily exist in a fantastic universe. Trams, funiculars and stuff are sort of there too.
Not everything is - cars, rapid-firing firearms (that aren't revolvers/gatling guns), tanks that aren't incredibly primitive, streamlined flying machines (as opposed to Leonardo Da Vinci-esque ones), and so on do tend to not work as well for audiences, but even a lot of those can work in the right circumstances. Netflix is doing a fantasy TV show right now (Shadow and Bone) which, in the books, is technologically in about 1890, with some elements even more modern (automatic weapons and a tank marginally better than most WW1 tanks are in one part), but I think to the audience, it's just going to see like "Fantasy set in the past" (it comes out in April).
I do accept that this is a thing that's changed, to be clear. If you'd put trains in a fantasy movie in 1992 or whatever, people would have been annoyed/confused. Airships likewise. But airships are absolutely "standard fantasy" now, as are steam-style trains. What audiences accept changes over time.
www.comicbookmovie.com
www.enworld.org
