Well, children, here's my first movie review--are you ready? Here goes.Recently I had the opportunity to rent a movie of my choice. The kind, obese, balding man found some extra change between his couch cushions and in his belly button, and had just enough to rent two movies--"Girls Gone Wild" for him, and whatever I wanted for me. Well, I have heard nothing but rave reviews full of praise and worship for Guillermo del Torro's "El Labertino del Fauno" (aka "Pan's Labyrinth".) In fact, it has a rating of 96 on Rotten Tomatoes--if that's not a miracle in and of itself, I don't know what is.
Because the movie takes place during the Spanish civil war, I assumed there would be a little bit of blood and death involved. Boy, was I in for a surprise...
There's a fine line between being a director who artfully weaves the horrors of war throughout a captivating story and a Sadist who throws buckets of blood at the camera. Del Torro not only crosses this line, he leaps over it and, with machine gun in hand, fires at every living creature on the other side.
After del Torro's villian, Capitán Vidal, smashes a man's face in with a broken bottle, I was both disgusted, disturbed, and emotionally scarred. After several bullet-filled bodies fell to the ground, I was upset and sorry to see them go. After several of Ofelia's fairy friends get their heads bitten off, computer-animated guts spilling everywhere, I wondered if it was entirely necessary. When Mercedes rips open the Captain's mouth and starts stabbing him repeatedly with a kitchen knife, I was...almost indifferent. Seriously. If the happiest moment of your film is when one character sticks a knife into another...you may want to consider ammending the script...
Save for the excessive violence, the movie might have been good--except for the fact that I felt I had seen it a million times before. Every element of the story seemed to steal from another story which previously existed. When Ofelia and the faun first meet, it struck me as a macabre distortion of Lucy and Tumnus meeting in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe". When Ofelia is left as, essentially, an orphan with an evil step-parent, it seemed to mimick "Cinderella". And the whole sub-plot about the protagonist going on an epic quest to complete several tasks...just seems extremely overdone to me.
So, there may have been a real message in this film...fantastical escapism in the face of a harsh and bitter reality, yadda yadda. The death of innocence and birth of hopelessness manifest in the tumultuous, power-hungry society of this earth, yadda yadda yadda. Whatever. I still hated it.
If I wanted this sort of entertainment, I would've just spent the evening at a slaughterhouse.
That's all. See you next time, my pretties.
-Molly Magritte
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