Stunning, But Not Stunning in a Good Way...

Rating: 5/10 (14 January 2007)

Sigh, the critics and most viewers are raving over the ravishingly beautiful, darkly intense trip into this Fascist Nightmare...two hours with Shiite Death Squad on a murderous night rampage would be easier to take.
Bring your cast iron heart with you if you dare to see this film. It will rip you apart and leave you weeping at the true horror of life. It is all here, myth and magic, Homer and a pile of shoes from the Holocaust, blood and death and evil and brutality and the destruction of innocence and a scene of temptation right out of Genesis as well as Christ's stigmata's as eyes.
The movie will affect you as only Art can....it reaches right into you and re-arranges the very molecules of your soul. And yet, and yet, it looks like all pleasantness and light, but no child should ever see this movie. It is rated R, but should be rated XXX, absolutely no one under 30 admitted.
I was going to comment on the opening film stock, half burnt out, high yellows everywhere but it changes to a more somber and brutal blueish cast soon enough. Oh, there are Reds, female reds and female blood and this is very much a female movie, life forces of women against the dancings of death so loved by men. But there is even deeper evil, no one seems to have noticed or mentioned the female pre-pubertal terrors of entering into womanhood and even more menacingly, was Ofelia, the little girl, being groomed by the mother for bed of the murderous Captain Vidal? Oh, there are layers upon layers upon layers in this movie.
Was there Justice? More importantly, was there even allowed the possibility of Justice in the world? Or the possibility of maintaining Goodness? Or, was it pure Nihilism? I left the theater feeling beat up, sobbing like a child...the movie is certainly Art, but, the lingering question remains...Was it Good Art? Best Wishes, Traveller