Movie Reviews - Ryan Ward PANS Pan's Labryinth

Why do people think Guillermo Del Toro is a good director? Is it the foreign mystique conjured by his name? “Guillermo Del Toro, wow that name sounds pretty cool, this guy must be an amazing filmmaker, definitely an auteur with a name like that, wowee!” This guy is the same guy who brought us B-Films like Mimic starring post academy award (and I’m talkin’ way way post academy award) Mira Sorvino and Blade II, not to mention the unbelievably disappointing Hellboy. So why do we suddenly treat this guy with such reverence? I mean this thing was nominated for what, like 3 academy awards? Again why?

I feel about this film exactly the same way I felt about Hellboy, cool idea, tons of potential to be a very cool film, poorly executed. This guy just cannot write a compelling story. And what we are left with a bunch of undeveloped characters lacking real goals, trudging through extremely slow pointless scenes full of awkward dialogue in a setting that is just as arbitrary and vague. Then he throws in a bunch of visual and make-up effects to make it look “fantasy”, sets the main character onto these pointless tasks which I swear are just excuses for him to play out these weird again, “fantasy” scenes he has dreamed up in his head, and then tries to pass off a bunch of blue tinted shots for good cinematography, which of course the Academy eats up. I swear to god this guy dreams up a few images or scenes he wants to create and then just tries to tie them up with some loose story and there that’s your movie.

This film is set in 1944 fascist Spain after Franco’s victory in a rural area in the North where there happens to be an ancient Labyrinth, why? We don’t know. There is an ongoing struggle between the army and a band of Spanish rebels. What is the connection between this struggle and the fairy tale struggle (the tests) that the young girl Ofelia is set onto by the fawn? We don’t know. Who is the fawn and what does he want? It’s never established. Why the three specific tasks he sets Ofelia onto? We don’t know. Why is there a toad living in the roots of an old fig tree? And why should we care about an old fig tree anyways? What does an old fig tree have to do with a Labyrinth? (Now you just think I’m making stuff up, but this is actually in the movie believe it or not).

And the worst part about this thing is that, for some reason, it keeps you watching, either because it has been so built up by the brainwashed people you know who believe in the hype, telling you how “amazing” it is. Or maybe just because you are praying, like in a bad M. Night Shyamalan movie (Signs, The Village, Lady In The Water, take your pick), that it will all tie up and connect in some brilliant and profound way in an amazing and totally unseen climax. Of course this doesn’t happen. All that happens is the sequence of pointless events play themselves out in an equally pointless and doubly frustrating way. There are tons of pointless deaths, a million pointless and utterly revolting gross out scenes (one where we are forced to watch the Spanish captain sew up his gashed face for what seems like five minutes). There is no climax to speak of, and then there is an awful ending scene complete with a facile intelligence insulting moral about the nobility of being willing to spill your own blood before the blood of an innocent. Coincidentally this is the film’s tag line, “Innocence Has a Power Evil Cannot Imagine.”

Total drek.½ a star out of 5

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