DailyView: Day 252, Movie 353

I wanted to take a break away from Hitchcock for awhile during the DailyView so was looking for something just fun to spend some time with tonight.

Unfortunately, what I found myself watching was the Star Wars TV movie, Ewoks: The Battle for Endor.

Not quite the “fun” I was thinking about. It started with a little girl Cindel (Aubree Miller) running from a group of Marauders who had slaughtered her family. She and Wicket (Warwick Davis) escaped the villains and met a creature named Teek. Teek took them back to his place where he lived with Noa (Wilford Brimley), a grumpy human who had been stranded on Endor for years.

The Marauders were led by King Terak (Carel Struycken) and the witch Charal (Siân Phillips). They were after a power source that they believed would give them amazing power.

I have to say, there were some dark moments in this movie for kids. The battle at the very beginning saw several deaths and the conclusion was brutal and, at times, scary. Other times I was rolling my eyes, very hard.

For a TV movie in the 80s, the effects were okay. Most of the effects were practical and they were fine, but the other effects were Land of the Lost level (well, a little better but you get the idea). Fortunately, they kept those effects to the minimum.

I did like Wilford Brimley’s character, but the little girl was not the greatest actor in the world. She was cute. That was about it. Wicket could now talk English, which I do not believe that he could do in Return of the Jedi. Now I have not watched the first Ewok movie so maybe he learned it there.

There were enough okay about this movie to keep me from hating it. It is clearly directed toward little kids who want a nice stuffed Ewok toy. I’ll never watch it again though.