Pan's Labyrinth

There was a lot I liked about this movie, but there was a lot that I didn't like as well.

I feel like this movie is supposed to be about a little girl trying to make sense of a world that has fallen apart all around her. Her only means to cope with it is to flee into a fairy tale world that comes with a promise of deliverance from her hellish existence. I feel that the story went to such extreme measures to illustrate just how crappy Spain was in 1944 that it was not only not a kids movie, but became an atrocities of war movie instead. I can understand the need to illustrate just how brutal the world was that Ofelia was so desperate to escape, but I felt that it was out of proportion with the rest of the movie. Rather than viewing the world through the eyes of a scared little girl desperately looking to the fairy tales she loves so much for answers, you see the world through the eyes of a scared little boy in a Captain's body who hates the world and everyone in it almost as much as he hates himself. And rather than occasionally breaking out of the fairy tale world for a reminder of why the real world sucks so much, I felt that it occasionally went back to the fairy tale world (guy who eats kids and all) just to give you a break from the harshness of the real world. In the end, the excessive graphic violence was so distracting to me that I wasn't able to focus on the rest of the story, and it spoiled for me what could have been a very clever and delightfully dark movie.

So what was good about it? Everything else. The writing was very good, although there were several parts that I would have done away with in order to spend more time focused on Ofelia's part of the story. The characters were all interesting, and very well acted. My favorite was the Faun. He had this twitchiness to him that made you twitchy whenever he was on the screen, and yet he had an incredible gracefulness as well. Even though the whole movie was in Spanish, something about him speaking in Spanish gave him an added measure of sinister, but also much more elegance, both of which are important in a mythical figure of questionable intentions. The Pale Man was creepy in every way, and was scariest when he was just sitting there not moving... yet. Of all the characters in this story who died, I was most sad to see the doctor go. The cinematography was very well done. The special effects were awesome, especially the fairy tale stuff. The graphic violence special effects were very well done, but I still think that they were too much and too often.

I wish I could have loved this movie. Almost everything about it is exceptionally well done, but there were just too many parts that either distracted me away from what was supposed to be the story, or which I feel threw it out of balance. I'm very tempted to watch it again with the director's commentary, just to see what it is that I missed that everyone else in the world didn't.