Thursday, October 1, 2009

Pan's Labyrinth Movie Review

All Hale Pan’s Labyrinth!
The mystery that lies beneath the metaphors of this film is absolutely mind boggling! The deep forests and the doors made with chalk that leads into a completely other realm: it is hard to know where to begin. Although there are a few gory scenes, the film is so good that the subtitles do not even matter!
The director’s choice of actors is so spot-on that you suddenly get caught inside the movie and forget that you are actually in a room. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) plays the innocent little girl that explores her surroundings and finds herself in danger both at home and on her adventures. Her father, Captain Vidal (Sergi López) is the protagonist and seems to hurt anybody that crosses his path. The faun (Doug Jones) is played so accurately and he gives the immediate feeling that he cannot be trusted- like the myth of all fauns.
The believability makes you wonder if there could be something like this story in the woods somewhere in the world. If someone were to ask me a question of who was the best actor, I wouldn’t be able to answer that. Each and every person who portrayed their character exactly how they should have. Not once did I wonder about their real-life persona. The director, Guillermo del Torro, deserves as many awards that is humanly possible for creating such a terrific film and putting in the time and effort to get every detail just right. If I had the opportunity, I would select “Pan’s Labyrinth” as the greatest movie all around! The movie at first was a little hard to follow, getting everything started but it was the moments where I had to stop watching it when the class was over that made me more disappointed. Never did I lose track of the premise.
When it comes to special effects, I can get quite knit-picky but overall, they were very well done. Del Torro's detail was so specific to every scene. Down to the pieces of the moss-covered trees which caught my attention even more. The colors of the film get quite dingy until the end when suddenly, the screen explodes with colors of reds, golds, and whites.
The overall lasting impression on me was certainly a good one. In the end, I remember the film as exhilarating and not as “the crappy Spanish film that I watched in my English class”. At the very end of the movie, I remember paying so much attention to the film, I snapped out of my trance and looked around the classroom, realizing that everyone else was dead quiet and in the same trance-like state as I was. In all honesty, it was not a film I was necessarily looking forward to seeing, until my after-thought made me come to a screeching halt of thinking that this may be one of my favorite movies, no matter what language it was filmed in.
Word Count: 500

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