Movie Review – The NeverEnding Story

The NeverEnding Story (1984)
Written by Wolfgang Petersen and Herman Weigel
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen

This movie is a formative piece of many of my peers’ childhoods. I think I saw it twice as a kid. I remembered parts of it vividly, but The NeverEnding Story was never a picture I sought out or felt a strong connection with. That is odd because I was also a child who spent much time alone and read many books. You would think much of the story would resonate, but it did not. I think revisiting the movie as an adult made me appreciate it more, though I could see the weak points more vividly now, too.

Bastian (Barret Oliver) is a ten-year-old boy mourning the recent passing of his mother. It doesn’t help that his father (Gerald McRaney) has been quite cold about it and admonishes his son’s interest in fantasy. After outrunning a group of bullies on the way to school one morning, Bastian comes across a used bookstore and tome titled The NeverEnding Story. Despite warnings from the owner, Bastian snatches the book and hides in the school’s attic as he becomes immersed in the story within. A force named The Nothing is destroying the land of Fantasia. Only the young hero Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) has a chance to fight back against the total obliteration of the world. 

The NeverEnding Story has some lovely elements. The world is interesting and the practical effects behind it aren’t bad. I don’t think it can match ILM’s level of work for Lucasfilm and other productions at the time or the incredible puppetry Jim Henson was pulling off, but it’s an excellent effort. The Rockbiter, the Luck Dragon, and The Childlike Empress are very memorable characters. There are set pieces that stick with you, like the Palace of the Empress, the Swamp of Sadness, and the Southern Oracle. I can easily see why a child would fall absolutely in love with this movie. It presents very emotionally intense moments of fantasy.

However, the picture has so many storytelling & technical problems, not least, that it ends without a conclusion. Inevitable aimless tedium emerges from the movie as it plays on. Yes, there’s some clever meta-commentary on the line between fiction & reality, but the film never says anything about it. It’s just a thing that happens. I think the two leads are not very good. I can say this because the 1980s had a lot of child actors and there were plenty that didn’t feel charismatically leaden like these two. I get Hathaway was cast because he physically matches the film’s aesthetic, but his performance was dense.

There’s talk about what an AI-generated film would be like. This movie is close to what that would be like at its best. There’s no real sense of the cohesion of the fantasy world, just places our character goes and does things. That’s why the wasted opportunity of Bastian suddenly finding himself a part of the story feels so bad. There was a moment for a seemingly inventive but ultimately generic fantasy film to go down an intriguing path. Instead, it opts for nonsensical whimsy that adds up to very little. I’ve read that this film and the second were both taken from the source novel, and that makes me interested in reading the book to see if all of this is pulled off better on the page.

In an era of ubiquitous fantasy from Lucas, Spielberg, Henson, and the like, The NeverEnding Story does feel like it’s from a lesser tier. The world-building of all these filmmakers culminates in a rich, multi-dimensional world in all their productions. You understand the world, the stakes, and what these characters are about. With the NeverEnding Story, I don’t really understand who Atreyu is. He’s way too broadly archetypal to be someone I care about. He feels like a one-dimensional character in a book, which the film appears to be (unsuccessfully) pushing against. We see how invested Bastian becomes while reading, but I never felt that same connection as an audience member. 

Nothing about the film makes sense, which is worsened by the freeze-frame ending that amounts to “Bastian had many more adventures, and they were awesome. Maybe we’ll make another movie someday.” I see that as an admission by the filmmakers that even they had no idea what to do with this thing. It’s a movie trying to get by on pure aesthetics, and it just can’t. The editing is horribly awkward. Every other character appears to have had their voice redone with ADR (I’m guessing that’s because many of them were German and had heavy accents?). 

I don’t think the movie ever says anything of note about what seemed to be the core theme of grief. I get how The Nothing is meant to symbolize depression or the loss of hope/imagination. How does the film resolve that, though? We never get another scene between Bastian and his dad, so that’s left dangling. The bully situation doesn’t feel wholly resolved either. Bastian rides the Luck Dragon through the city and terrorizes his bullies, and then we get the freeze frame. The people who made this movie were earnest and wanted to tell a great kids’ story. However, they made a lot of pretty-looking sequences without substance to support them.