Saw it and enjoyed it, but don’t strongly recommend it. Guillermo del Toro continues to have quite a distinctive an imaginative way of presenting fantasy worlds. Both for better and for worse each magical entity seems fairly unique. This isn’t to say that there’s no duplication, just that with a few prominent exceptions even two creatures of the same general species tend to look completely different. On the upside, this means one wondrous visual after another, on the downside it takes away some of the pleasure of pattern recognition and figuring out the rules.
The action was terrific and speaks for itself. However, the plotting was a bit by the numbers with character choices often seeming driven by the dictates of the story and the themes rather than any consistent internal motivation. That was far less of a problem in Pan’s Labyrinth, a del Toro film I loved, with the exception of when Ophelia’s breaking a key and well known fairy tale rule for insufficiently established reasons.
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