I tMiss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children (12A.)
Directed by Tim Burton.
Starring Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Ella Purnell, Samuel L. Jackson, Allison Janney, Terence Stamp and Judi Dench. 127 mins.
This is a film that is about people who are stuck in a time loop, a cosy little bubble, where they get to happily and successfully repeat the same party tricks and idiosyncrasies over and over again, untouched by the outside world. A mildly cynical person might suggest that this is a perfect subject for a Tim Burton film, a man who has been peddling much the same dark visions throughout a thirty-year directing career. A very cynical person might suggest that that would be to vastly over estimate the quality of his film making for the last decade and a half, most of which has been dark shadows of the stuff that made him famous.
I imagine the posters and pre-publicity have left you underwhelmed and wary. It all seems so bland and generic: an adaptation of YA bestseller and a plot that sucks up elements of Harry Potter and X-Men with a touch of Mary Poppins. (Ah, the Young Adults with their capricious and wide ranging tastes in literature exclusively about special groups of isolated youngsters who are better than the rest of society.) This one has Eva Green as the matron of an institution for differently super abilitied children (invisible, floating, human beehive, etc) on a Welsh island that exist in a continual loop of the last 24 hours before it was bombed in 1943.
Yet, despite everything, this is a film to remind you why you once loved Tim Burton films. He seems to have rediscovered his inner disturbed child. This is an intensely macabre and ghoulish film. There is eye eating and monsters and corpse reanimation. It prangs the perimeter of that 12A rating and I'm sure that many parents will be mightily put out by it. And when it isn't nasty, it is melancholic, and occasionally quite touchingly so. It's heavy on CGI but bits of it are beautifully done, particularly an underwater sequence in a sunken liner on the ocean floor.
The film starts in a very unusual way – with an opening credit sequence. Most films contrive to have some big attention grabbing opening these days but this just starts at the beginning. And from there it simply proceeds to tell its story, in a sensible and unflustered manner. There are action bits, but they are saved for the end, where they belong. I think we have to explore the possibility that this is an approach unlikely to excite a mass audience and that this is not going to be the start of a lucrative series.
Samuel L Jackson plays the villain, a role he done so often he could do it with his eyes closed, but doesn't. He does it with feeling and Burton gets to dress him like Beetlejuice, or Christopher Walken in Batman Returns. Elsewhere though I'd say that the films suffers a little from the interchangeability of child actors: they're all good, but they are all just like each other.
The other major problem is that there is a plot point to do with the time loops that the script just can't explain. Apparently this all makes sense in the book but in the film it is an out of the blue announcement that if such and such happens they all die, but if this and this happens somebody will live, and you just want to stop the film and ask for them to go through that equation once again, showing all their workings out.
Directed by Tim Burton.
Starring Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Ella Purnell, Samuel L. Jackson, Allison Janney, Terence Stamp and Judi Dench. 127 mins.
This is a film that is about people who are stuck in a time loop, a cosy little bubble, where they get to happily and successfully repeat the same party tricks and idiosyncrasies over and over again, untouched by the outside world. A mildly cynical person might suggest that this is a perfect subject for a Tim Burton film, a man who has been peddling much the same dark visions throughout a thirty-year directing career. A very cynical person might suggest that that would be to vastly over estimate the quality of his film making for the last decade and a half, most of which has been dark shadows of the stuff that made him famous.
I imagine the posters and pre-publicity have left you underwhelmed and wary. It all seems so bland and generic: an adaptation of YA bestseller and a plot that sucks up elements of Harry Potter and X-Men with a touch of Mary Poppins. (Ah, the Young Adults with their capricious and wide ranging tastes in literature exclusively about special groups of isolated youngsters who are better than the rest of society.) This one has Eva Green as the matron of an institution for differently super abilitied children (invisible, floating, human beehive, etc) on a Welsh island that exist in a continual loop of the last 24 hours before it was bombed in 1943.
Yet, despite everything, this is a film to remind you why you once loved Tim Burton films. He seems to have rediscovered his inner disturbed child. This is an intensely macabre and ghoulish film. There is eye eating and monsters and corpse reanimation. It prangs the perimeter of that 12A rating and I'm sure that many parents will be mightily put out by it. And when it isn't nasty, it is melancholic, and occasionally quite touchingly so. It's heavy on CGI but bits of it are beautifully done, particularly an underwater sequence in a sunken liner on the ocean floor.
The film starts in a very unusual way – with an opening credit sequence. Most films contrive to have some big attention grabbing opening these days but this just starts at the beginning. And from there it simply proceeds to tell its story, in a sensible and unflustered manner. There are action bits, but they are saved for the end, where they belong. I think we have to explore the possibility that this is an approach unlikely to excite a mass audience and that this is not going to be the start of a lucrative series.
Samuel L Jackson plays the villain, a role he done so often he could do it with his eyes closed, but doesn't. He does it with feeling and Burton gets to dress him like Beetlejuice, or Christopher Walken in Batman Returns. Elsewhere though I'd say that the films suffers a little from the interchangeability of child actors: they're all good, but they are all just like each other.
The other major problem is that there is a plot point to do with the time loops that the script just can't explain. Apparently this all makes sense in the book but in the film it is an out of the blue announcement that if such and such happens they all die, but if this and this happens somebody will live, and you just want to stop the film and ask for them to go through that equation once again, showing all their workings out.
