YMMV / Legend (1985)

• Awesome Music: The Tangerine Dream score. Especially the...oh, to hell with it, the whole thing. If righteousness and beauty had a transcription in music, for instance, it would be the unicorn theme. The original score by Jerry Goldsmith is pretty awesome too. Because, well, it's Jerry Goldsmith. Even so, Goldsmith was so upset by Scott's rejection of his score that he never spoke to the director ever since and up to his passing.
• Angel/Devil Shipping: Lili and Darkness is a popular pairing. He is implied to be the son of Satan and he is attracted to her because her soul is pure. Just contrast his appearance as the literal devil and her as an angelic young woman.
• Angst? What Angst?: Invoked by Jack when the faerie folk throw a little party in honor of Jack's love of Lili. He questions them why they would suddenly decide to when the world is threatened. Gump replies that while things are very grave, they have to celebrate something good left in the world.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Well, there's plenty of weirdness on display throughout the film, but during Lili's dance with the animate black dress, an evil-looking cherub comes to life on the tabletop. Lili doesn't notice it, it doesn't intervene in any way, and once the sequence is done, it's never brought up again.
• Broken Base: Over the score. As discussed here and here.
• Critical Dissonance: The film was not well-received by critics and has a "Rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 38% critic score. Audiences liked it far better, especially with the release of the Re-Cut, and today it's considered to be a Cult Classic. It helps that most of the people who grew up watching the film are now adults with a sense of nostalgia towards it, and therefore look upon it fondly.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Darkness. Despite being a monster with cloven hoofs and a goat's face, his love for Lili is genuine, if twisted, leading to this trope. Being played by Tim Curry is also a reason.
• Evil Is Cool: As you can tell from his other mentions on this page, Darkness has quite the fandom for being such a magnificently imposing and scary villain.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Lili/Darkness is actually quite popular, despite Lili's canon love interest being Jack. You can find a lot of fan fiction dedicated to this pairing.
• Fridge Horror: In the U.S. Re-Cut, it's implied that Jack and Lili have sex. Which is fine until you remember the goblins are following them and tracking their every move.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The entire film (plot and story) is The Legend of Zelda a whole year before the video game was released in Japan (and two years before Zelda was released in North America):
    • A young boy armed with a sword and shield (and a little help from fairies) goes on a quest through forests to battle monsters and enter an underground dungeon to save a princess from a darkness-loving demon king. All while preventing the same demon king from obtaining/destroying a sacred object to conquer the world.
  • Blunder wears what looks like a Dovahkiin helmet.
  • The movements of the sun and moon are controlled by a pair of unicorns.
    • Speaking of My Little Pony, the plot of the first of the My Little Pony TV Specials involves a Satanic archetype who seeks to bring about The Night That Never Ends by kidnapping magical horses. In Legend, the plot involves... a Satanic archetype who seeks to bring about The Night That Never Ends by kidnapping magical horses.
  • The Lord of Darkness makes his first appearance by walking through a mirror. This was the climax of John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness just two years later.
  • The mere fact that one of the characters is named Gump.
• Improved by the Re-Cut: The Director's Cut adds 25 minutes of material and retains Jerry Goldsmith's score.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many people don't care about Tom Cruise and Mia Sara, and just want to see Tim Curry ham it up as Darkness, and the other faeries and goblins, too.
• Magnificent Bastard: The Lord of Darkness seeks to erase all light from the world and usher in a realm of night he can rule forever. A surprisingly soulful, intelligent devil, Darkness uses dreams to influence mankind itself, introducing himself to Princess Lili with sincerity and charm after he uses her innocence to have his goblin servitors bait a trap for the unicorns. Surprised at his own love for Lili and her purity, Darkness uses his charisma and seductive persona to try to sway her to marry him and give in to darkness, even spending his last moments boasting that he lives on in every man and can never truly be vanquished.
• Memetic Mutation: Even now, the evil seed of what you've done germinates within you...
• Mis-blamed: The film has a very true connection to Brazil; both are big-budget fantasy films from visionary directors, from the same producer (Arnon Milchan) for the same studio (Universal), released in the same year (1985), and both films were subject to scrutiny from the same executive (Sid Sheinberg) who demanded the director to make changes to the film before its release for commercial reasons. Because of this, fans blamed Sheinberg for the decision to replace Jerry Goldsmith's score with Tangerine Dream's for the American release, which Ridley Scott denies. Scott later admitted that the music change was his responsibility, because he was anxious after failed test screenings, and this stress led him to confide in Sheinberg, whom he firmly believed was helping him save the film. It didn't help that Blade Runner was not a box office success when it was first released, which probably made Scott very nervous about being unemployed.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • That's Robert Picardo playing Meg Mucklebones.
  • Blix and Gump have the future voice of Beebee Bluff.
• Signature Scene: The waltz where the black dress dances with and then fuses itself onto Princess Lili.
• Spiritual Successor: Some critics have characterized the film as a pseudo-companion piece to Ridley Scott's own Blade Runner (released the previous year), which was also envisioned as a lavishly produced artistic elevation of classic genre fiction taking place in a highly immersive, lovingly rendered world—the key difference being that Legend is an homage to classic fantasy rather than classic science-fiction. Although as Bob Chipman notes in his retrospective on the film, the two ultimately wound up having very different legacies: while both are Cult Classics, Blade Runner ultimately ended up being most remembered for its story and themes, while Legend is mostly remembered as a showcase for its set-pieces and special effects; its lack of success at the box office is often attributed to the fact that its plot feels perfunctory at best.

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