This is a 1981 fantasy movie by Terry Gilliam, and it is extremely that, for better and (mostly) worse.

This is the era when fantasies could never quite be serious, and so this is not. It has a kid for a protagonist simply because fantasy movies of the time were all viewed as kidstuff, and its tone is quasi-comedic.

I say “quasi-comedic” because it’s never actually funny, and I’m not sure how much it’s trying to be. It’s shaped like a comedy, it actually feels a lot like Monty Python tonally, it’s just… not actually funny. It tops out at “amiable.” I was heartened here to read Roger Ebert’s contemporaneous review, which expresses some of the same ambivalence about this; his conclusion is that this is a movie made for children, and… I kinda buy it, honestly. Possibly if I’d seen this when I was in elementary school, this would be one of the formative movies of my life.

But I didn’t, I saw it for the first time as an adult. And as an adult, I have to notice that the plot is just a sequence of random “and then that happened” events, featuring a walk through history’s greatest hits (Napoleon! Ancient Greece! Robin Hood! The Titanic!). I have to notice that the film’s big name stars are all just in little cameos in those episodes (the funniest of which is Sean Connery as a Greek king, following the iron law that he can play any European ethnicity except Scottish). I have to notice that the sets and visual style all feel extremely conventional and straightforward (though it’s interesting that Ebert thought the visual style of the settings was a particular strength — this might be a situation where the bar for fantasy has been raised quite a bit since then). And I especially have to notice the very stupid ending, with a literal deus ex machina followed by an extended “it was all just a dream… OR WAS IT?” denouement.

As a time capsule, the movie worked for me, giving me a little nostalgic hit of something I don’t have any actual nostalgia for (though I’ve watched a number of things that have been influenced by this — or even “played” in some cases, as Ultima II straight up rips the time doors from here). As a movie taken in its own right, though… I think, alas, that the genre has moved on, and this is of interest only as a fossil.