like a delicious meal with no desert

Rating: Null/10 (14 September 2011)

Had the director polished the movie a little more, it would have been just magnificent.
There are little sillinesses like a woman familiar to war not knowing she must drop to the floor when shots are flying around her, and a man surviving an attack even after the enemies have wasted (!) bullets shooting at all already fallen men.
But what I mean is Del Toro could have at least linked both stories together. There is the story of real stomach-turning war, and the story of fantastic adventure. I was expecting to see when the fantasy story would finally intervene in the reality chaos, when the girl finally had her childhood imagination validated, and turned the line of events for better. But none of that ever came, which is sad. In the end, it all turns out to be mere childish shows on her head, invisible friends. She was indeed smart enough to poison the bad guy's drink, and rescue her brother, but again none of that changes anything in the sequence of events. Nothing she did made any difference. In fact, her character, and her fantasies, are completely redundant. And that is disappointing.