Review of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016) by Dawdlingpoet — 28 Nov 2021

I'd hoped this may be a more family friendly Tim Burton film and I had considered buying it on disk but it was shown on TV and sadly it wasn't a film I felt especially compelled to concentrate on, or otherwise at all engrossed in. At first I was interested because I like Asa Butterfield as an actor and I won't deny there are certainly good visual effects/CGI but it seemed just too, well, as the title suggests, peculiar! I suppose I was warned lol I just couldn't quite get my head around all the plot details - the plot narrative didn't seem especially clear and I lost interest in why certain things were happening. It was a bit too much for me personally I guess. There are some mildly creepy moments, although nothing especially scared me as such but its more a case that it was too much eccentricity at once and I felt confused about the chronology and things, let alone what had happened to to the main characters dad and all the talk about different time loops and things just confused me further. I imagine that if I'd seen this in the cinema, it may have been a bit more absorbing and I might have appreciated it more but watching this at home, I did feel I really lost interest certainly mid way to 3/4 of the way through.

Also, I was somewhat surprised to see Dame Judi Dench present in this film, who I guess I wouldn't have thought as an obvious choice of actor for a Tim Burton film but, there you go. Also present is Samuel L Jackson - his character, Barron, is one of the perhaps more cool, or fun, characters and Chris O'Dowd plays Jakes dad, Frank. I quite liked certainly the first half hour or so of the film, it just (like other Tim Burton films) got a bit too complicated not long after that and I realised, certainly after an hour or so, that I didn't really understand why things were going on and lost a lot of my interest in it. I ended up switching it off before the end as I was lost in terms of the context of the plot and so on. Overall, unsurprisingly, I wouldn't recommend this film, no.