Fascism bad! No, the movie is.

Rating: 4/10 (12 June 2007)

EXTREME SPOILERS: Pan's Labyrinth in a nutshell: a little girl dies because fascists are bad. Her stepfather does every evil thing imaginable; torture, misogyny, and intense shaving constitute his daily routine. Short of eating babies (that's reserved for floppy-skinned monsters that put their own eyes on plates), there's nothing he won't do to ensure that the noble revolutionaries hiding in the woods die without any dignity or unswollen eyes. He's portrayed with zero subtlety or sympathy; he can't even die when stabbed in the heart, he's so evil.
I kept wondering, why is this man portrayed the same way as a Disney villain? The answer: Guillermo del Toro set out, with this movie, to warn the world's masses that anyone who is anti-Communist is exactly like this man.
Why am I giving so much attention to the historical fiction facet of the film rather than the fantasy elements? Because the movie gives just as much time to them, maybe twenty percent of the entire 112-minute running time. The few scenes in the fairy-tale subplot are visually imaginative but irrelevant to the larger point of the movie: fascism is bad.
At the end of the film, the audience is led to believe that this girl's imagination has provided some sort of redemption from her brutal surroundings.
Wow. The profundity is overwhelming. People imagine that they end up as royalty and not middle-class corpses? I'd have never thought of that without you, Guillermo! Pan's Labyrinth is just another cog in the wheel of the artsy crowd's anti-right wing obsession. Like an exterminator wielding a 300-pound sledgehammer to smash a long-dead housefly, wannabe avant-garde directors keep using big-budget films to preach to the world that, yes indeed, fascism during World War II was bad. I, personally, would love to see a new generation of filmmakers with the cojones to speak out against the fascists of the world today, including the Communists of Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, et al. However, if del Toro would face up to the fact that more than one side of the political spectrum rules oppressively, then he would drown in his tears realizing how pointless and obsolete Pan's Labyrinth is.