Where is the fiction in this tale of adult violence?

Rating: 1/10 (15 February 2007)

When I got into the theater I was expecting a better movie than 'The Lord of the Rings' or 'Narnia'. Any director, at this point, must have learned about doing a technically good movie, that's a fact. What we, the audience want, is a good story. But after a while, I was sure of something: I was going to be disappointed. But I waited longer and longer, and the sensation didn't disappeared, only got stronger. Del Toro made a movie about a fabulous tale, but fail on the point of telling the story of Ofelia, a girl taken to the middle of the Civil War in Spain -that actually never concerns or interests her-, and confronted to an evil man who is meant to be his stepfather. She finds a labyrinth that nobody has explored even if is located near the soldiers camp, she goes down and finds out that she might be a princess, but has to go through three dangerous tasks. The faun, Pan, doesn't look believable and the story, itself, doesn't, either. Is she is the lost princess and the king has lived for centuries waiting for her, why does she has to confront dangers and prove it? The movie seems to be conceived as a horror movie, full of creepy sounds, with an evil man (Vidal) in the main character who becomes, at the end, in the only half-developed character in the movie (the mother, Ariadna Gil, appears like a ghost, an empty character), and has dozens, hundreds of unnecessary violence, shootings in the face, torture, blood and only more blood. What a way to waste a good tale and a good story. The girl, at the end, doesn't have but very short encounters with the fictional world. The real and violent adult world prevails.