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Customer Reviews of The Dark Crystal

The novelization FAR surpasses the movie....
The movie, admittedly was a visual treat, special effects wizardardy with Henson's puppets...but to say that it lacked character devlopment, feeling, emotion and a soul is perhaps ultimate understatement of all time! Badly written Valentine cards in the children's section of your local Wal-mart have more passion! And I must repectfully disagree with my dear fellow reviewers: one does not even NEED this movie to enjoy this fine adaption. <
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> Firstly, one of the novel's greatest strengths is the character devlopment that was completly missing from the movie; <
>especially amoung the principal badies, the Skeksis, who have taken the ultimate precation in securing their eternal existance and their iron fisted rule of their empire by ordering an all out genocide on the their homeworld's elven race [ a prophecy says this race will end their rule and their lives } Whereas the movie was content to merely present these villians as bellowing, growling, bird brained buzzards who could barely string together articulate sentences; the novel gives us devious , intelligent, crafty schemers; always looking for an angle to pursue their own agendas. And they often seem to be pairing off or forming little triads of allies, everyone with their eye on the ultimate prize: the throne of the Emperor. And best of all is the paranoia of the formentioned Emperor who is also the General of the Skeksis army of giant beetle/crabs the Garthim. As the expression goes, he not only has to grow eyes in the back of his head but the sides as well! A humorous thought is revealed late in the story as the Emperor is so fed up with potential treachery coming from every which way, he seriously considers instructing the Garthim army HE CREATED; to murder certain members of his own race. <
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> Other relationsships, such as the one between the two elves, or Gelflings, as they are called, aren't quite as interesting, but still; Smith fleshes out these characters so well, that you don't picture them as wax like puppets, but rather real people , like " The Lord of the Rings " . Which is good, because i always thought those two roles should have been cast to human actors; using puppets for the elves was a HORRID idea. <
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> In any case, my advice: forget the movie: just get the book!

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Pretty poorly-written novel for a fantastic film
I recently got my hands on a used copy of this book as I am an avid fan of The Dark Crystal. I have to say that I was disappointed. This book delivers on some fronts but lacks in others.

It does have some good points. Probably the best part of this book is how it details the thoughts and political machinations of the various Skekses. We get into their minds and can tell just how they're trying to undermine each other's power and how they detest each other. We get some great insight on this front.

However, the book lacks on almost every other front. Often we get vivid description of events that aren't pivotal, but many events that are come across as sparse and rushed. The shocking thing is that the Skekses are better developed than the gelflings. Their scenes come alive, but the scenes with Jen and Kira are often flat and dull. The ending was awful. I wasn't expecting a big explanation of the urSkeks, but Smith rushed it horrendously. We get about a page or two between the healing of the Crystal and the last sentence.

All in all, get this book if you're a big fan, but don't expect too much out of it. It feels like a late draft that got rushed into production due to time constraints. The movie was MUCH better than this poorly-written novel.

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An excellent companion to the movie
"The Dark Crystal" is only whole as a story when the movie and the novel are brought together. The movie is a beautiful piece of art that exemplifies the works of Jim Henson, Frank Ozz, and Gary Kurtz at its most ambitious. The movie clearly and dramatically depicts the events of the story in a beautiful and vibrant living world that, to this day, after more than 20 years, is still convincing and immersive as well as unearthly. While the movie provides spectacle and drama for the events in the story, the novel is where the feelings and thoughts behind those events are revealed.

The Dark Crystal's inner beauty and deepest meaning pivots on the experiences and thoughts of the two Gelfling Jen and Kira. Sadly, the script for these two characters is, like other aspects of the movie's composition, too often relentlessly pared down to the essentials for propelling the plot. The Novel provides valuable and, often, touching insight into the thoughts and feelings of all characters, but, most particularly, the two Gelfling. With that insight, several otherwise peculiar or seemingly insignificant events- such as the Gelfling Song during the Black River sequence or the scenes in the pod village before the Garthim attack- become much more poignant. Also, in the novel, the plot is, at many places, propelled more convincingly than in the movie- a particular instance being the sequence at the Wall of Destiny in the Gelfling Ruins where Jen and Kira understand at last exactly what they are supposed to do.

Unfortunately, as a literary work, the novel cannot really stand alone. It is a visually weak work that fails to generate a convincing physical universe for the events of it's story. Pseudoscience and philosophical musings choke the earlier passages of this work, preventing it from really hooking the attention of the typical reader and the actual ending of the novel is surprisingly weak and un-insightful- readers expecting to get an understanding of who the urSkeks were or how and why they came will be disappointed.

The novel feels rushed both in terms of it's relatively short duration (some 180 pages) and in it's sometimes formulaic diction that one comes to expect from contract work as opposed to a novel springing forth from within. I don't mean to imply the novel was a hack job, but it clearly was a job made to order with the attendant struggle of the author with imposed constraints and with ideas that are not really the author's own. In all, this novel suffers from the sort of problems one expects a novelisation to suffer from- it is an effort to literarily reconstitute a movie screenplay- it is not a rich original from which the movie screenplay was rendered. It does not contain numerous episodes or ideas eliminated from the movie- it is merely an amplification and expansion of what the movie depicted. Seen in that context, it does a fine job and the choice by the author to expend words on developing characters rather than setting scenes is very appropriate.

In closing, the novel is WELL above average when seen for what it is, the complement to the movie. Like the crystal and shard in the story, the movie and the novel together to make a greater and more beautiful whole, whereas alone, the novel, in particular, is sadly undone.