A review requested by Jack, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.

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The NeverEnding Story comes attached to a very important fun fact: it was, at the time of its release in 1984, the most expensive film ever made in the history of the German film industry (East, West, or unified), and by an extravagant margin: at DM 60 million, it was almost twice the budget of the previous record-holder, 1981's Das Boot. And even more than that, it is often described (I do not know on what authority, but it at least passes the smell test) as the costliest movie ever made outside of the U.S.A. or U.S.S.R. up to that point in time. And it's not even one of those "expensive by the standards of a local film industry": DM 60 million was around $25 million at the time, not a ton of money, but enough to make The NeverEnding Story on par with the most expensive Hollywood productions of the same year (all of them dwarfed by the most expensive production of 1983, Return of the Jedi, but let's be reasonable, you can't just comparing things to Star Wars pictures, like that's a fair fight).

This means, in effect, that The NeverEnding Story is one of the first, maybe even the first example of what has become an intermittent experiment over the subsequent decades: an attempt by a national film industry to make a Hollywood-scale blockbuster and so try to get out from under the bullying swagger of Hollywood cultural dominance. Until China in the 2010s, none of these experiments ever really took hold, but there's always something endless fascinating to me about seeing how filmmakers of all nations attempt to put their own stamp on American cinematic junk food. The NeverEnding Story is all the more fascinating still because A) the filmmakers are doing this with exceptional self-awareness, filming the movie in English with a largely American-born cast, so the finished product was ready for international export to all the places that American films got distributed, and B) it was an unmixed success. The film made an awful lot of money all over the world, earned two underperforming sequels, and I assume it's what got director Wolfgang Petersen work in Hollywood starting immediately thereafter. And it became something of a generational touchstone, while still having the slightly obscure quality of a cult film.

All of these things are true despite - or heck, let's not be cynical, maybe because - The NeverEnding Story is an incredibly weird, borderline dysfunctional movie. One of the people who believed this intensely was Michael Ende, who wrote the1979 novel upon which the film was based, and who was quite enraged at what Petersen and company made out of his story (or, to be precise, the first half of his story, which was one of the points of contention). But authors get pissed off at adaptations of their work all the time, and we needn't agree with Ende's complete dismissal of the film to recognise that this is just some peculiar, peculiar stuff. The NeverEnding Story is barely interested in storytelling and isn't at all interested in world-building, but instead presents its fantasy world as a series of vivid sketches of scnes, not even really going to the work of connecting them with ellipses, let alone with actual connections. It has some of the most legitimately dreamlike narrative progression of any film I can name, with the place that we are right now, right here coming across as so captivating and vivid that the attempt to figure out how we actually arrived right here when where we just were seems awfully, even irreconcilably different. And this despite the script, adapted by Petersen & Herman Weigel, not actually presenting itself as especially dreamy. Otherworldly and even hallucinatory, but not dreamy.

The whole thing is an act of metafiction, as was, I believe, the novel: ten-year-old Bastian (Barret Oliver) is a social outcast living with an emotionally unavailable widower father (Gerald McRaney). As a small, bookish, shy child, he's a natural target for bullies, and on the day we meet him, Bastian flees his current tormentors by ducking into an antiquarian bookshop. Here, the ill-tempered proprietor, Coreander (Thomas Hill), makes a big show of being irritated by the interruption, and a bigger show of insisting that Bastian should absolutely not even think about reading the volume Coreander has in front of him, since it's not "safe". Having thus successfully piqued the boy's interest, Coreander leaves so that Bastian can "steal" it, hiding in the attic at school to read it.

The book is The NeverEnding Story, a fantasy about a world called Fantasia, which when we meet it is in a terrible, terrible state: all four corners of the land have recently begun degrading into absolutely nothing. Not destroyed wastelands, not empty space: literally Nothing. And this Nothing seems to be either caused by or is causing the sickness of Fantasia's empress. According to legend only a warrior from the hunters on the plains, a teenage boy named Atreyu (Noah Hathaway), can locate the cure for the empress, and without having any other real ideas of what the hell to do, the imperial counsel sends Atreyu on a quest. In retaliation, the Nothing, or whatever force is driving the Nothing, sends its own champion to find and slay Atreyu, a large and vicious wolf-like creature with bright green eyes called the Gmork (one of three puppeteered creatures in the film voiced by Alan Oppenheimer).

The films narrative formlessness and its feeling of dissociation between locations are, in fairness, extremely well-motivated by the plot. A free-standing Nothing that comes along and acts as pure absence, not a force of destruction but a force of negation, is a "villain" well-suited to the elliptical feeling that The NeverEnding Story traffics in, and its barely-coherent, strung-together collection of places ends up feeling uncannily like the remains of a world that has dissolved into fragments. It even salvages some not-quite-right visual effects: though there's no real indication that Petersen and crew were looking for the kind of realistic, physically weighted effects work that dominated the post-Star Wars blockbuster boom in the United States. Whether they were or not, they didn't get there: one of the things that most stuck with me, decades after the one and only time I watched this in my childhood in the late 1980s (or very early 1990s), as a persistent sense of detachment between layers of the image, like Atreyu has not been composited into his fantasy world so much as floated atop it. This is most obvious later in the film, as it moves from the gloomy filtered daylight of a swamp populated by an enormous animatronic turtle into a series of rocky places surrounded seemingly in every direction, above and below, by a starfield; the starfield absolutely refuses to feel like the actual night sky, more like a backdrop that has been painted behind Hathaway. The deeper we go into the plot, and the more the world is transformed into Nothing, in other words, the less it feels like the film elements themselves are cohering.

It creates an unmistakably striking and disorienting feeling; it is a cold, empty, and above all lonely film. And and if I were a national determinist, I'd say that the unfeeling, even anti-human emptiness of basically every location, the feeling of unthinkable cosmic hollowness leaving the living characters like grains of sand blowing across a great stone corpse of the dead earth; I would say that yes, this feels like Germans trying to make a fake American fantasy movie.

That loneliness is, to be clear, exactly what The NeverEnding Story wants and needs; it is a tired, melancholy film about a tired world from which all the spark of imagination has been plucked away. There's the meta-narrative again: this is all about how reading books can stir the child's inner vision and spur them to create entire universes with their mind, and how there is a real problem in the modern electronic world that The Kids These Days have atrophied imaginations. Come to think of it, that too ties in with the strangely underbuilt world; it only makes sense, only feels like a contiguous, real place if you, the viewer, make it do so with the power of your own imagination. But that's all second-order stuff; the first order is that The NeverEnding Story is extremely adept at making the world feel tattered and lost and fading.

I confess that I did not respond to this at all as a child; truth be told, The NeverEnding Story outright disturbed me, and I never forged the nostalgic bond that a bookish, introverted '80s child with love of fantasy movies would surely have been expected to. And so what I see as an adult is not a wonderful explosion of imaginative possibilities, but something sort of prickly and sad and strange. It has its conventional fantasy touches, including a score by Klaus Doldinger that includes some triumphant adventure-movie cues that raise the energy a lot (the film was partially re-scored outside of West Germany by Giorgio Moroder, and at least in the United States, its running time was cut from 101 to 94 minutes; I watched the original full-length, Moroder-free version in preparing this review, and I couldn't tell you at gunpoint how specifically the versions are different). The puppetry is a little stilted and inorganic, and between the Gmork and the giant dog-ferret Luck Dragon, Falkor, two of the film's four most important characters thus come across as not entirely present (you might even be able to argue three of five, and count the stone giant who bookends the movie), but there's also a warm tactility to the creature effects that wins out over the shortcomings in their execution.

But far more of it is alien and strange: the inhuman-looking tower that's home the empress at the end of the universe, and the uncanniness of the empress herself, played by child actor Tami Stronach, but seemingly overdubbed either by Stronach or another performer, so her voice feels like it's radiating throughout the space rather than coming out of her mouth. The film keeps cutting back to Bastian being confused or alarmed by the book, which seems to be aware that he's reading it; the result is that we're not encouraged to buy in to the fantasy world, but keep thinking of it as a fictional construct, something without its own reality, and so the gloss of unreality that comes through the visuals ends up feeling amplified.

It's more to my tastes now than it was in my youth, but this isn't a film that rewards coming to it with an adult sensibility. So I must admit to feeling that it's a bit too remote, forbidding even. But it's got a sharp edge that fantasy movies rarely have, certainly not more in the 1980s than at other times. It feels genuinely abyssal, aware of the horrible reality of Nothing in a way that feels appropriately keyed to the desperately lonely little boy reading, and the only somewhat less lonely slightly older boy who serves as Bastian's (and our) avatar into this world of loss and recovery. It's a distinctly unfriendly movie for something with so much magic, frolicsome music, and cool stuff, basically, and even without loving it, I think there's something fantastically interesting about a film coming from such a commercially-minded place to have that kind of strangely angular vibe.

Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.