Pan's Labyrinth
I have to say I'm not impressed, and honestly, the movie was a flat out disappointment. I gave it 2/5 on netflix. I went in expecting the movie to be an Alice in Wonderland/Wizard of Oz type story of wonder and adventure. Instead it's a canned war film slash fantasy story; the plot has no clue what it wants to be and very rarely is either plot strand interesting. Oh, so you have to do a fetch quest to open the gate to the labyrinth? What is this - a point and click adventure game? The characters are two-dimensional: raging military guy who's dead set on having a son, boring spy lady, boring kid character who's annoying...honestly, the only character I liked was the mother. The film tries too damn hard to evoke emotion and be shocking for the sake of it, attempting to tell an imaginary tale of an imaginary world, when just about every thing in the film is sterile and canned.
From a technical standpoint, it's pretty solid, but the editing drives me insane. If I had to count how many times I had to sit through a transitional shot where they close-in on the trunk of a tree and cut to another scene, I'd lose my mind.
An ultimately shallow and unfulfilling film that is the equivalent of Alice in Wonderland if Alice was stuck in the room with the talking doorknob the whole story rather than exploring Wonderland. It has no clue what it wants to be: WWII film, kid's fantasy, dark fantasy, or a civil war. These mixed plot strands are not complimentary and help create a disconnect between the viewer and the story. To be blunt, the story is balls.
