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Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Pan's Labyrinth
Current Mood: CC is listening to: Moomba--Richard Elliott (Chill Factor)
Steve and I watched Pan's Labyrinth a few days ago. I've been meaning to see it for quite some time.
Pan's Labyrinth has a 96% rating from Rotten Tomatoes, which is impressive. You don't usually see such a high rating from that site. Even Steve, after the movie was over, said it was "very well put together."
What did I think about it? To be honest, I'm not really sure. I had a lot of questions after the movie. Questions like, why did the director want this movie to have an R rating? I understand that they wanted to establish that the stepfather was very sinister, but we really didn't need to see him bash a man's face in with a bottle. I also don't see how the stepfather's cheek being sliced halfway up to his ear helped propel the story. The only reason I could think of--and if this was true, then it'd be a noble (albeit undervaluing) reason--was that Del Toro didn't think younger people would understand the subtleties of the events, that they would take the story too literally. And the only way he could make sure children wouldn't be allowed to watch the film was to throw in a lot of gratuitous violence. But like I said, there's no way for me to be sure that was his motive. For all we know he did it just because he likes special effects.
Another question is: at the child-eater's lair, Ophelia needed to use her key to open one of three wooden lockers. She chose to ignore her fairy guides (who kept pointing to the middle locker) and used it to open the first locker (a dagger was in it). We don't know what she was supposed to get from the middle locker, and what the consequence was for opening the first locker instead. We know the faun chews her out for eating food at the child-eater's lair (because he warned her not to), but nothing about opening the wrong locker.
My biggest question is: was the fairy world real, or just in the head of a little girl who wanted to escape what she was going through? I can't figure it out, because there were scenes where you could tell that it was all in her head, and yet there were things that adults experienced as a result of her fairy-world interactions, which would make it real.
It was a nice movie, great makeup on the faun, and cool job with the child-eater, but there were a few too many unanswered questions for me :-). It's definitely worth seeing, though :-).
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