Wolfgang Petersen’s The NeverEnding Story arrived in 1984 as a German production shot in English, the director’s first film in the language. It runs 101 minutes. It adapts the first half of Michael Ende’s 1979 novel. It stars Noah Hathaway as the warrior Atreyu and Barret Oliver as Bastian Balthazar Bux, the boy who steals a book and hides in a school attic to read it.
The film has held a place in the memory of a generation. That place is warmer than the film deserves.
Trailer, via Still Watching Netflix.
Bastian Balthazar Bux and the Stolen Book
The setup is the strongest thing in The NeverEnding Story. Bastian is a shy boy living with his widowed father, Barney, played by Gerald McRaney. Barney has heard that his son daydreams in school and tells him to stop. On the way to school, bullies chase Bastian. He escapes into a bookstore and meets the owner, Carl Conrad Coreander.
Coreander is reading a book called The Neverending Story and advises the boy against it. Bastian takes it anyway.
Late for school, he hides in the attic and reads. The book describes Fantasia, a realm being eaten by a force called The Nothing. Messengers go to the Ivory Tower to ask the Childlike Empress for help. They find her ill. Atreyu is given the task of finding a cure, and an amulet called Auryn to guide and protect him.
That is a clean engine for a fantasy film: a reader, a book, a world that needs saving. The NeverEnding Story never gets more than halfway to using it.
Atreyu, Falkor and the Swamps of Sadness
Atreyu’s quest moves through set pieces that the film stages with real weight and almost no connective tissue.
A wolf-like being named Gmork is sent to kill him. Atreyu seeks the advice of Morla, the Ancient One, in the Swamps of Sadness. Crossing the swamp, Atreyu’s horse Artax is overcome by the sadness and sinks. Atreyu goes on alone. Morla, weary and indifferent, is a prisoner of the swamp herself and sends him to the Southern Oracle, ten thousand miles away, rather than helping.
Gmork closes in. Atreyu begins to sink into the swamp and is saved by the Luck Dragon Falkor, who carries him to the home of Urgl and Engywook, two gnomes who live near the gates to the Southern Oracle.
The Artax scene is the one everybody remembers, and it earns the memory. It is the only passage in the film where the sadness is allowed to be sad rather than announced.
A Voice Cast Doing Heavy Lifting
Alan Oppenheimer provides the voices of Falkor, Gmork, Rockbiter and the Narrator. He is doing more tonal work than any single performer on screen, and the film leans on him hard.
The rest of the cast:
- Noah Hathaway as Atreyu
- Barret Oliver as Bastian
- Tami Stronach as The Childlike Empress
- Sydney Bromley as Engywook
- Patricia Hayes as Urgl
- Moses Gunn as Cairon, the Empress’ servant
- Gerald McRaney as Bastian’s Father
- Deep Roy as Teeny Weeny
- Tilo Prückner as Night Hob
The NeverEnding Story was produced by Bernd Eichinger and Dieter Geissler, and written by Petersen with Herman Weigel. It is the first in a film series. The second half of Ende’s book became the rough basis for The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter in 1990. The third film, The NeverEnding Story III in 1994, has an original plot not based on the book.
The Tagline Promises a Hero
The marketing sold this film as an adventure: “A boy who needs a friend finds a world that needs a hero in a land beyond imagination!”
That tagline is accurate about the pitch and generous about the delivery. The NeverEnding Story is a family fantasy with an adventure’s running time and a children’s-book patience. It moves when it wants to and stops when it feels like it.
The film’s critical score sits at 4.9 out of 10, with a Metacritic mark of 49 out of 100. That is a fair reading of what is on the screen. The NeverEnding Story is not a bad film. It is an unfinished one.
What the Adaptation Leaves Behind
Ende’s novel is a book about reading, and the film knows this in its bones without knowing what to do about it. Bastian in the attic is the best idea The NeverEnding Story has. He is a boy who has been told to stop daydreaming, hiding with a stolen book, and the book is about a world that is dying because nobody believes in it anymore.
That is a real thesis. The film states it and then walks away.
A boy who needs a friend finds a world that needs a hero in a land beyond imagination!
The tagline is the thesis in miniature, and it is also the problem. The NeverEnding Story keeps telling us what Fantasia means instead of letting the place mean it. The Nothing is a fine name for a villain and a poor villain, because it has no face, no motive and no scene of its own. Gmork does the actual threatening, and Gmork is on screen for a handful of minutes.
The Limits of 101 Minutes
Petersen adapts half a novel in 101 minutes, and the seams show everywhere. The Southern Oracle is set up as a destination and then functions as a corridor. The Childlike Empress is the object of the entire quest and barely appears. Tami Stronach has almost nothing to play, which is not her fault and is entirely the script’s.
The NeverEnding Story wants the sweep of an epic and keeps the budget of a fable. Some of that works. The practical creature work has a handmade quality that has aged better than the digital effects that replaced it in later decades. Falkor is a goofy, lovable design, and the film is smart enough to let him be goofy.
But handmade only carries a movie so far. The NeverEnding Story has no middle. It has an opening, a swamp, a dragon and a cliffhanger.
What The NeverEnding Story Gets Right
Here is the case for the film, and it is not nothing.
The Artax sequence is genuinely upsetting in a way that children’s films rarely attempt. The attic framing device is clean and sad. Barret Oliver plays Bastian as a boy who is lonely without being pitiable, which is a harder note than it looks. And the central image — a child reading a book that is reading him back — is strong enough to survive a lot of clumsy handling.
That is why the film persists. Not because it is good, but because it is about something.
Our Verdict on The NeverEnding Story
The NeverEnding Story is a 4.9 out of 10. That score is not a dismissal of its place in people’s lives. It is a measurement of the film as a film.
The NeverEnding Story has one great sequence, one great idea and a great deal of filler. It adapts half a book and ends without resolving the half it adapted. It casts a compelling lead and gives him almost no dialogue worth remembering. It builds a world called Fantasia and then describes that world to us instead of letting us live in it.
The NeverEnding Story is worth watching once, for the swamp and for the attic and for Falkor. It is not worth defending as a whole.
The thing worth watching now is not the film. It is the gap between what The NeverEnding Story attempts and what it manages, because that gap is where the sequels came from. The second film drew on the back half of Ende’s novel as a rough basis. The third abandoned the book entirely for an original plot. A franchise built on an unfinished adaptation.
That is the real verdict on The NeverEnding Story: a film that got the premise right and the movie wrong, and has been remembered for the premise ever since.
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