Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children will now forever hold a special place in my critical heart. This is a fascinating film, one of the very worst of the year, but it contains such scenes that I will never forget seeing...so that’s weird. This doesn’t actually happen that often because, well, there’s usually a correlation between great scenes and a pretty darn good movie, but every once in awhile a movie actually comes up that is as a whole really, really bad, but contains such mind-meltingly amazing moments that it’s hard to recognize just how bad the movie actually is. It gets even more difficult when a director like Tim Burton is helming the whole enterprise because Burton, while not always great has always been genuinely unique and informed by large melodramatic emotions that are sumptuous to take in. That’s the reason why Miss Peregrine can be a really godawful movie, but also awesome. The largest problem is there’s not actually much of a plot. The internal mythology of the entire world is the only thing that builds a sequence of events here. Characters don’t naturally evolve or convincingly emote or fight, instead, the world gets explained by characters who are fully formed and never truly explored. Yes, the fact that each character is fully formed as they come into the story is a good thing, but that’s less through dialogue and more through stylistic touches, and that part is most likely attributed to the savior of this garbage fire: Tim Burton. Burton’s genuine talent as a filmmaker is the only thing that saves sections of this movie, as the entire mythology of the piece is informed with a blend of complex emotions. The house that the titular Miss Peregrine and the children live in is located in a time-loop, aka a fixed day that Miss Peregrine rewinds each night. The day happens to be one in which a bomb was dropped on the house that the children lived in killing all of them. Now, if that sounds like a frustratingly over thought piece of prose, it is, but the way that Burton spins his imagery around it is beautiful, almost informing the impending bomb with all the historical value of all the lives taken by them. His morbid, but creative style is just the thing to do that too. The use of music combined with gas mask-wearing children is typical Burton, and it’s great to see his style come out through this. All this said his application to more of the real world as it is in the present day doesn’t feel correct at all...that is until Burton pulls out the rock music, and the CGI monsters and skeletons fighting each other in an amusement park. Once this scene hits it’s hard not to be swept up in the propulsive action that Burton puts on screen, even if it does feel very small scale. It’s hard to believe that he has even put some of these images on the screen, and the effect is truly breathtaking in its absurdity. But these small flashes of absolute amazingness cannot save what is still ultimately a drab no-stakes mess. The actors even feel a bit off. Asa Butterfield, acts somewhat whiny and just unsympathetically as a lead, and Eva Green is boring, something I’d never thought was possible. The only one that comes out of this without truly embarrassing himself is Samuel L. Jackson, who is so pitch perfect but underutilized as the villain that it’s almost fascinating. But then again, Miss Peregrine’s is a truly awful picture, awkward in all moments, awesome in some. Tim Burton looked like he was ready to make good movies again after the excellent, Big Eyes, but that isn’t quite the case. Burton puts some mind-blowingly entertaining stuff on screen for this film, but it’s just a dull adventure to be had. Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children gets a 4.5 out of 10.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |