As Wikipedia recites, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a British-American-Belgian dark fantasy adventure drama film.
This really seems to sum it all up: the movie has just too freakish much going on and yet it doesn’t seem to be enough. As we said for Alice in Wonderland, it just doesn’t have enough of what you would expect from Burton and yet it does have way too much of what you wouldn’t want from him.
Don’t get me wrong, the concept is amazing. Nothing new, since it has elements of lots of these novels for “young adults”: you have the campus for gifted children (Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and X-men before that), you have the shape-shifting villain, you have time tangles, you have protectors and demi-gods, and a very special boy who doesn’t feel that special at first but then realizes he really really is the most special of them all.
Visually, the movie is a grand sarabande that seems to jump out from a nightmare by Francis Bacon and is highly enthralling. Eva Green is as beautiful as you can dream of (see Penny Dreadful without Vanessa’s fragility), and the war setting works perfectly for these kind of fantastic stories, as we already saw for Narnia: it creates an intimate immediate parallel between a conflct we know, and we consider to be immense, and yet another supernatural conflict upon which the human war seems to fade away, a pale shade in comparison to the forces that are struggling to take over.
Still, the movie oddly fails in chilling you. And it’s rather strange, considering you have people who devour the eyes of children in order to regain their humanity, and children who survive stuck in a time loop, segregated from the outer world, living the same day over and over again, and it’s unclear wherher it is to protect them from the world or the world from them. There was enough to go on and to create some really dark and really compelling fairy tale, as Burton used to be able to do. Unfortunately, that Burton seems to be long gone. With an urge to please and not to disturb, his latest works are Disney and this movie makes no exception.
You’ve got the body of a boy with no eyes upstairs, right. And another boy brings broken dolls to life with organs from animals. Miss Peregrine shoots the same monster every day with a cross bow and every night a bomb falls on the school killing everybody. This is where the movie is at its peak. Then, unfortunately, it fades away with a buffoonesque villain by Samuel L. Jackson, quite embarassing, and the main struggle seems to be comic relief for what was built before, in quite an anticlimatic way.
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