After 3 decades, ‘Willow’ back as series and better than ever
“Willow” is a series-long sequel to the 1988 fantasy film in which an aspiring sorcerer (Warwick Davis in the title role) from a race of little people sets off to deliver a human baby, found like Moses in the bulrushes, into responsible large-people care. The series is fantasy as I like it best — funny, fun and just a little frightening, sometimes serious but never self-serious.
In the timeline of the series, “200 moons” have passed, or 16.66666 years, according to my calculator. Which makes all the younger characters teenagers, including Elora Danan, the baby whose safety is the main business of the movie and whose grown-up identity is revealed at the end of the series’ first episode. As to returning players Davis and Joanne Whalley as Sorsha — daughter of the movie’s evil sorceress/ queen and now a queen herself — time has been kind to them. Val Kilmer’s Madmartigan, the rogueturned-hero Han Solo of the piece — who, we learn from opening narration, later married Sorsha and is the father of her teenage twins, Kit (Ruby Cruz) and Airk (Dempsey Bryk) — left a decade earlier in search of a magic breastplate and never returned.
Kit, who dreams of life beyond the horizon, is betrothed for political reasons to Graydon (Tony Revolori), a nerdish prince from a neighboring kingdom, but would rather be crossing swords with Jade (Erin Kellyman), her best friend who is set to become the kingdom’s first female knight. Before the wedding can take place, a mystic fog full of monsters descends
upon the palace, and Airk is kidnapped. A quest is organized, in which our young heroes set off to find him. They are accompanied by a couple of adult chaperones — notably Boorman (Amar ChadhaPatel), a thief sprung from the dungeon, who has history with Sorsha and
Madmartigan and knows the territory outside “the barrier,” a magical force field protecting the peaceable kingdoms from the less peaceable.
As in most any sequel to an adventure that ends happily, a new evil is rising, or an old evil is rising again, and both Sorsha and Willow can feel it coming. Because every fellowship needs a sorcerer, the party is sent to find Willow, who has gained stature in his community but nevertheless feels something of a fraud. He may not be much of a wizard — he is something of a wizard — but cleverness is more attractive than just waving a wand.
The series was developed by Jonathan Kasdan, who, born in 1979, would be just the age to have had “Willow” strongly imprinted on his brain. Kasdan has wrapped the swords and sorcery in “Willow” around a teen dramedy, with characters just starting to figure out
their lives and their love lives — and who will make mistakes in either case, keeping things open for further seasons.
“Willow” is perhaps not the first, or second, or even third property one would have expected to see revived, so expensively and at such length. Leaving out the question of whether the show is “better” than the movie, the series goes to more — and more interesting — places, with fuller characterizations, less predictable plot lines and sharper jokes.
As in the film, Davis is paramount, and he’s in a more complex role now, a mentor who still has a thing or two to learn, a grown-up herding teens twice his size. The actor was 18 when the movie was released, and like his character, has developed since; his comic chops are especially well-honed. The younger characters are lively and appealing, not the least because they can be a little impertinent; as much as they might seem forged according to type, the actors make them into individuals. Everyone pulls their weight.
Sequels are often a matter of diminishing returns, but “Willow” pays dividends.