If you haven’t watched Pan’s Labyrinth yet, go watch it! I enjoyed it despite it not being what I thought it was. A few weeks ago, I thought I heard a radio advertisement for it, saying it was full of horror and something you won’t forget, followed by some quote from Stephen King, so I thought that Pan’s Labyrinth was going to be a horror movie or at least a little bit scary.

I wouldn’t say the movie is scary even though there are some gruesome parts that I found hard to sit through. The movie is more like a fairy tale weaved into a realistic story about post-war fascist Spain. It’s surprising how well the fantasy and real world in the movie mesh together. The fantasy creatures were completely believable even contrasted with the dark realism of human characters in the real world.

I noticed that there were a lot of allusions to Alice in Wonderland throughout the movie. The fairies reminded me of the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, and then there was the stopwatch that the Captain kept checking, which reminded me of the rabbit constantly checking his watch and fearing that he would be late. Then there’s the whole magical door thing, and the Faun reminded me of the Cheshire cat. It makes me wonder if the writer was trying to write another version of Alice in Wonderland.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Things I Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.