Lisa Muñoz
I love fantasy, unlike my family. But to mix it in with an every day life scenario, it has to be done right. In the case of Pan's Labyrinth, the beautiful combination of the real war-torn world and the fantasy world worked spot on throughout the whole film.In this movie, the gaps of the fantasy world aren't really filled out properly. It presents itself as a world where demons and angels are fighting some kind of war. But the rules aren't very clear. This is made evident by the fact that the book is incredibly long and covers too much ground for it to be made in a film (Martin Scorsese himself deemed it unfilmable) The other, albeit much milder, problem I have with the movie is Will Smith as Lucifer. Now don't get me wrong, I LOVE Will Smith, but this just doesn't work. To play the devil, an actor has to have two things: Irresistible charm and the ability to terrify the wits out of you. Smith definitely has the first, but not so much the second. It unfortunately ends up being too sickly sweet and clichèd for my liking.
Filipe Neto
I'm another person who saw the movie and did not read the book or never heard of it. In fact, I don't even know if it was translated to my mother tongue. But I liked the movie. He has an implicit idea that love is a magical feeling that overcomes barriers. We can find it in literature and almost all poetry, where impossible lovers abound, with more or less tragic consequences. So the idea of this film is not new, but almost always works well in movies. Therefore, I think the script is good, although its far from being brilliant.The major flaw of the script is that those, who don't know anything about the movie and start watching it, will thing, in the first minutes, which is seeing a period drama. These audiences will feel very confused at the sudden revelation of fantastic elements, something that they probably would not be waiting because the film was not immediately clear about that. I felt it the first time I saw, and I just really enjoyed it in the second time I saw it.The main roles are embodied by Colin Farrell (as the good guy, Peter Lake), Jessica Brown Findlay (in the role of the young, rich and sick Beverly Penn) and Russell Crowe (as the evil Perly Soames). Will Smith also makes a small but important role, as the Judge, in a clear reference to the Devil. About the actors work, I think it was regular. The biggest applause goes to Crowe, who did a convincing job as a villain. Jessica Findlay never seemed me passionate enough, her character is almost as cold as the ice of winter scenery. She looked like a rich girl who want to escape her gilded cage and enjoy an adventure. Farrell, in turn, despite seemed more passionate, failed in interpretation. It seemed too kind to be a thief in search of redemption through love, and his acting was theatrical and inauthentic.Anyway, the film is quite reasonable. Far from brilliance, it entertains the audience and bring us a beautiful love story in a fantasy film that, in a counter to gender itself, dispenses with most of the special effects to privilege the story. Not everything is good in this movie, but it's not necessarily a bad film.
matthiaspaschke
... but they didn't bring it up in the movie! This movie lacks background telling. The relationship between Peter Lake and his mentor had to be more described (10 minutes should be enough). The game of good and evil and its protagonists had to be more described in detail. A - simple - further boost in story telling would be achieved by adding some more scenes with Will Smith at the beginning and the end of the movie. Another rule for good movies: Don't waste many good well known actors (John Hurt and Graham Green) as side kicks with too few movie scenes - summing up only to merely seconds or some minutes of movie time. Don't construct one and a half love stories. The half one is by far too much.
