Review of Pan's Labyrinth (2006) by Torion O — 01 Feb 2016

So this has 95%... How? There're so many problems with it, but I guess it scrapes by and is still a decent movie.

The acting is good, the characters are good, and the visuals are also very good. How then, does this only get three stars? The plot/story is incredibly poor. Don't get me wrong, I love the basic fairy-tale-esque introduction, and then the trials this little girl has to go through, but the movie just... never spends enough time on those parts. The sinister faun is cool and all, but really the parts where fantasy takes hold are the most intriguing. If only those scenes, especially the dining hall with that creepy monster thing, were played out more it could have been a masterful horror movie, but really this is not horror, just a thin, dark fantasy. Key word here: thin. If you manage to watch this without ever thinking, you will like it a lot. If you're like me and think about what the hell is happening, then the thin veil falls away and you realize that this movie just doesn't logically make sense. I'm not talking about the fantastical parts, I'm talking about the plot-based parts. Let me explain each part, that I remember, individually, and in no order.

The second trial scene where the girl is given chalk to draw a door to the banquet hall. This is by far the best scene in the whole movie. And yet it has stupid mistakes. The character Ofelia's task: She must set an hourglass and do this task before the last grains of sand fall, without eating any of the food on the table, and use the fairies to guide her. She is told it is paramount she shouldn't eat the food by the faun and the weird book thing. When she starts the task, she spends such a long time walking slowly down the hall to the dining table with the monster. I don't know what gave her the idea she should be walking as slow as she can, but whatever. She opens her little fairy container thing and lets the fairies guide her to the three keyholes, and they point for her to use her key on the middle one. She begins to try it but then says "No," and uses the key on the leftmost keyhole. So, all in all the fairies were totally pointless. Cool. Out of the keyhole she takes a knife, and then proceeds to leave but then stops and looks at a couple of grapes on the table. Of course, it's obvious it would be a waste to let this monster stay there without having its time to shine, so Ofelia does the stupidest thing she can for the plot: she eats a grape, despite being told not to by everything she trusted. What's even more stupid, she continues to eat more grapes without hearing the monster shambling towards her, nor its groans. I can't say for sure what her thought process was, but the plot demanded the monster to be used in some way, and given the rules this was the only way. To me, it's a simple fix to make your plot not force your characters to act so dumb. Just change the rules so that the monster is something she actually has to actively avoid. Make the trial harder, really, when you think about it it is so stupidly simple that I have no idea why it is considered dangerous. So yeah, the monster kills some of her fairy friends, good going Ofelia, and then Ofelia runs back to the door but she's ran out of time, I wonder what could have saved her some, so she has to use her chalk to draw another door for her to escape. She makes it back to her 'real' world bedroom, but the faun is pissed that she failed the task (by eating something), and I don't really blame it. This is another WTF inconsistency because the faun comes back later, WITH the knife she got (she never gave him the knife) and is like, "Actually, you can still do the last task," leaving me thinking "WTF." Everyone already knows she is the lost princess of the king in the underworld or wherever, so why did the faun even say she wasn't the one? This ties back with what I'm saying, dumb plot = dumb character moments.

The first time Ofelia meets the faun is at the heart of the labyrinth, and he first tells her of tasks she must face to become princess again or whatever. He says something along the lines of "It will test you to make sure you are not mortal." Uh, if she wasn't mortal, then why is she a little girl? Also, instead of three convoluted tasks, why not just kill her to see if she is mortal? Isn't that the most surefire way to show mortality? Do you even know what mortal is? Ugh, whatever, this could also have been explained better if the goddamn plot/rules were changed.

The last task where Ofelia brings her brother to the heart of the labyrinth while being chased by the crazy captain dude is probably by far the dumbest thing ever. Ofelia poisons the captain's drink, and we see it take effect just moments after he drinks it, but he somehow manages to follow her AND keep up with her as she runs back to the labyrinth. So, inconsistent poison is inconsistent. Anyway, the faun tells Ofelia that just a prick of her brother's blood will let her go back to her kingdom and she's like "No." Uh, why is she backing out now? I mean, it's not like the faun will kill her brother with the knife, it only said it required a prick and just a drop of blood. You crawled through mud, large bugs, killed a giant toad and sifted through its innards for a key, risked life to acquire the dagger, and risked life again to bring the brother there and you're calling it off because of a drop of blood? She even pricked her own finger for two drops of blood for that ruddy mandrake voodoo baby thing, what the hell is this girl's deal? Oh, yeah, the plot. So her refusal allows the captain enough time to snatch the brother out of her arms and shoot her dead. The captain leaves with her brother, while Ofelia's own blood trickles down and... lets her into the underworld kingdom. It turns out her final task was to die. Or, as the faun puts it, willingly sacrifice herself instead of her brother. I'm not entirely sure she was willing to get herself shot, and I'm not entirely sure a pinprick is considered just as worthy a sacrifice as getting shot, but whatever floats your boat. In the end, all of the tasks didn't even matter, all she had to do was die, like I thought from the very beginning, so WTF.

No more of the fantasy, let's talk about the real world side of the plot. Ofelia and her mother move to this place in the first place because the captain dude wants his son to be born in his outpost in the middle of a forest. There's a doctor and a maid/servant (Mercedes) who are secretly helping the opposing army in the Spanish Civil War. Later in the movie, Mercedes and the doctor sneak out and give aid to the other army. Mercedes gives her BF (a soldier in the other army) a key (when she gave the supposed 'only key' to the captain) to the storeroom of the outpost, and then she and the doctor... they both go back to the outpost and continue pretending to be on their side. So, I have no idea why they even go back, because it'll be obvious when the opposing army gets access to the storeroom and the captain was told he would have the only key by Mercedes. He does later figure it out, surprise surprise, and the doctor is also found out because he stupidly lets the captain match a bottle of antibiotics that was found with the opposing army with his own. Not very smart, but it progressed the plot. Mercedes, after being caught, uses a concealed knife to escape and stab the captain several times and cut his mouth. She then flees and gets chased by several people on horseback, but she gets saved by the other army. I don't know why she didn't kill the captain when she had the chance, oh wait, yeah I do, because the plot requires him to live.

The whole situation with the opposing army is straight up dumb. They create a diversion by blowing up a train and getting the captain and some of his men to go out and see what was up, while in the meantime they stormed the outpost and raided the storeroom. Somehow the opposing army managed to not overpower the men left to guard the outpost, and some of them didn't bother running away since they couldn't even take out the little men left there, no, they remained and had a round of shooting back and forth before they all died. Well, except for one, who is then captured. WTF! They had one job, and they utterly failed, and managed to let one of their people get captured. Truly, genius.

So, given they got massacred in that scene, how the hell did Pedro (Mercedes' BF soldier) come back with FIFTY-PLUS men to save her from getting killed? If they had that many people, WHY THE HELL DID THEY NOT JUST TAKE OVER THE OUTPOST WHEN THEY FIRST RAIDED IT AND KILL ALL OPPOSITION!? THEY COULD HAVE SAVED SO MANY LIVES, WTF WTF WTF?

Yeah, the plot really is so terrible that it brings the movie on the brink of getting 2 and a half stars. Judging the whole movie on those several few, yet MAJOR plot points, though, wouldn't be fair, so I'm giving this 3/5.