Since Alice
in Wonderland (2010), Tim Burton’s gothic style hasn’t hit a home
run in a while. But this movie, which may not be a huge financial success, at
least broke even and was a good effort by the director.
The movie has a
lot of questionable characters, many loose ends, and more of an anticlimactic
narrative style. But the cinematic art, CGI, and cinematography are in a class
of their own, making up big time for the flaws the movie presents.
Miss Peregrine's
Home for Peculiar Children is a dark fantasy movie based on the 2011 book
of the same name by Ransom Riggs. This dark adventure movie will warm your eyes
with entertainment as Tim Burton weaves the story well enough that you won’t
notice the drops in excitement or the long waits before something thrilling
happens again.
When it comes to
the characters in this movie, I’ll have to say there were many that kept my
eyes intrigued. Eva Green, as always, dominates the screen with her style. She
has a gothic queen aura that fits her role perfectly.
To get a feel of her gothic presence, there’s another Burton film she was
in, Dark Shadows (2012) (although I’d strongly advise against seeing
it), and her role as a spiritualist in the now-cancelled TV series Penny
Dreadful.
Whether the
movie did justice to the book, I can’t say—I haven’t read it. What I do know is
that the movie did a good job, especially with the child actors. Three of them
I’ve seen in other films, while the rest were new to me.
The movie did have some weak fight scenes when the children had to step up to
save their caregivers. However, there was an awesome scene towards the end when
one of the peculiar children raised an army of fighting skeletons to take down
huge, monstrous creatures.
Altogether, I’d
say this movie is well-packaged to deliver all forms of entertainment to the
viewer.
The movie plot
centers around a grandfather and his grandson. He tells the child many stories
about monsters and his wonderful adventures where he met peculiar children, all
under the care of Miss Peregrine. Now grown up, the grandson believes his
grandpa was hallucinating all those years.
One day, as a
teenager, Jacob is on his way to visit his grandpa when he gets a call from
him. His grandpa is acting out, claiming the monster is coming for him. Jacob
asks his grandpa, Abe, if he’s taken his medicine, a question Abe brushes
aside. When Jacob arrives, he finds the house in disarray and soon spots his
grandpa on the ground in the woods, away from his home, with his eyes plucked
out.
In his dying
breath, his grandpa asks him to find Miss Peregrine (played by Eva Green, who
resides in Wales) and warn her that they are coming for her and the children.
Jacob convinces
his therapist and parents to let him go to Wales with his father to get
closure. When he gets there and locates the home his grandpa always talked
about, Jacob finds it was destroyed in 1943 during World War II.
But he soon
discovers small children and even teenagers like him, who claim they’ve come to
take him to Miss Peregrine and their home. He follows them and discovers a home
that looks similar to the one he saw earlier, destroyed. He realizes he’s
stepped into a time loop and is no longer in 2016 but back in 1943.
He soon meets
Miss Peregrine and learns about the horror and evil that plague the peculiar
children—and his place among them.
A good movie—one I enjoyed every moment of. Dark enough to remain captivating, with beautiful cinematic art to keep you entertained.
0 comments:
Post a Comment