Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

I'll be honest, I didn't get half of what I thought I might me walking into. This is a film that had rather had me in it's grasp ever since I was 10 years old. But having finally watched it... I'm disappointed. What did I expect? A cleverly devised, well presented storyline unfolding within a labyrinth. What did I get? A film more focussed on the war aspect than the fantasy, with some unimaginative characters, a story that doesn't deliver and the most generic plot I've ever seen.The labyrinth, while very cool, only takes up 1/6th or less of the movie. Most of it is set in a WWII Spain setting, with a huge lack of fantasy elements. Captain Vidal was truly brilliant, but, just like in The Godfather, his extreme concentration of shocking moments means you get used to the way he acts; and it all eventually just becomes a kind of 'let's get this torture scene over with' approach for the viewer.Ofelia is, in a lot of ways, rather boring as a character. She seems to be a quite generic 12 year old girl with all the same personality traits that come with one. Her actions sometimes seem to completely contradict how she acts at other points in the movie, most notably during the pale man scene, at which point the things she does are just to drive the story forward in a plain way. The scene with the frog is boring, uninventive, quite frankly disgusting and doesn't fit in with the dark tone of the rest of the movie.The story is atrocious; the only good bit about it is the way the ending plays out, which is sort of clever; but if you are good at picking apart stories, you might still find it is nearly as generic as the rest of the plot. So why is the plot so bad? Well, if you've ever come across the plot of 3 tasks, fail one, character storms out, gives main character a second chance then everyone lives happily ever after; that's literally the entire plot summarised. This film is not half of what I hoped for and doesn't deserve the rating it has.

Guillermo del Toro is one of my favorite directors and he spun together history, politics and fantasy so seamlessly I was left in awe. I originally didn't want to watch this movie because of the subtitles but I was drawn in so completely to the plot and the characters that within mere minutes I didn't notice. The movie is brilliantly layered with plot, content, history, politics, brutality, fantasy and metaphors. A young girl finds an escape from her abysmal existence and I was mesmerized from beginning to end. Must watch.

At this point I think the problem is mine. Anytime a new Del Toro movie comes out, I think that finally I'll like this one. But no. None. Never.

Pan's Labyrinth is one of the few movies I rate with a straight ten: a fantastic and unusual story, an outstanding cast (Ivana Baquero is incredible good as Ofelia), a superb cinematography and directing - simply put, a movie without any flaw. Everything composed like a well-balanced opera or a play by Shakespeare.Guillermo del Toro did with this movie one of the finest moments in movie history. Pan's Labyrinth belongs to me in the same league as movies like Metropolis, Apocalypse Now, Godfather etc.A must-see. Especially for every lover of the unusual, fantastic and strange.