J was unsurprised when I insisted on seeing this movie on Friday night. As I am a huge fan of folk/fairy tales and legends, watching this movie was an absolute must and I had a great time spending two hours dissecting the source material.
Guillermo del Toro borrows from British, Greek, Roman, Danish, German and Christian mythology* to weave together a story almost unbearably brutal, so violent in places that I had to turn my head away from the screen and wait for J to tell me when it was OK to look again. Characters are struck, beaten to death, tortured and shot. One scene shows the amputation of a man's leg.
In Ofelia's (Ophelia) fantasy world the creatures are strange, the fairies are not pretty and there are monsters everywhere, a mirror reflection of her real life. She must face fantastical creatures including a giant toad and the Pale Man, a horrible creature who sees through eyes in his hands.
The two most significant complaints about the movie are that it is not appropriate for children and that it was too derivative. The underlying assumptions of these complaints is that the only appropriate audience for mythology is children and all forms of fantasy must be purely original. If that is the case, then I should turn in my Harry Potter, my Hans Christian Anderson and my collection of tales from the Brother's Grimm and immerse myself in Disney cartoons until I choke.
*Mythology in the all-inclusive, generic sense of the word.
A really great date flick, obviously. :o)
ReplyDeleteI think I may break down and treat myself to seeing this movie.
You've reminded me that I read Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment in school, then reread The Little Mermaid* -- a story that'd caused me nightmares as a little kid -- with horrified fascination, then sitting through the Disney adaptation enjoying the music but at a loss to name all the conflicting emotions the bizarre juxtaposition evoked.
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*And don't even get me started on The Steadfast Tin Soldier -- that's more than I care to deal with during working hours.