Not the movie the ads would have you believe

Rating: 4/10 (1 February 2007)

All over the newspapers, TV, and the internet you see the ad for this movie: a little girl standing in a room with a weird-looking creature sitting at a table. So you think "wow, I've got to see that." Yes, there are weird creatures in this movie, but their screen time is brief. The film is largely a standard wartime drama, and the brutality of the Franco regime is shown repeatedly just in case you don't get it the first dozen times. Ever see a man beaten to death with a liquor bottle? It's just one of the three hundred scenes calculated to foment your anger at fascism and the concomitant loss of individual freedom.
There are some startling images in this movie, among them a gigantic frog and a man mending a slice in his face, but you'll spend most of your time wondering what atrocity el capitan will commit next. The suspense is there, certainly, but all the while you'll be wondering: where are the strange creatures I was promised, and how do they fit into the plot? The answer is, they don't.
Yes, this is one of those duality films where all the cool stuff that is going on exists only in the head of the main character Ofelia, in other words, that most boring of themes: individualistic escapism. The film seems to be saying that during times of oppression, it's okay to seek solace in fantasy. In the meantime, a very real rebellion is occurring in the mountains of Spain. This is why the film doesn't work: everything going on inside Ofelia's head has nothing whatsoever to do with the Franco resistance. Del Toro makes sure that the audience has no clue that this duality exists until the very end, where it is shown that Ofelia can see the faun and el capitan cannot.
There's nothing original to be seen here. Even some of the special effects are Harry Potteresque, such as the mandrake and the book with invisible ink.
What is the point to all this? It's a lot of brutal, ugly images that add up to a whole lot of nothing. In a year or so, people will look back and wonder why they voted this movie a "10".