Mostly Fantastic, with a few small downfalls.

Rating: 8/10 (5 February 2007)

OK, I went to see Pan's Labarynth the other night, and I must say that I was extremely impressed for the most part. I went there expecting to see a film with a few bleak references to the Spanish Civil War (at the start and end) but for the most part the young girl enters a fantasy world and stays there. What I did end up seeing I found was much more interesting.
Pan's Labarynth is 60% a war film, and as I am someone who HATES war films (with the exception of Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and 3 Kings) from Saving Private Ryan to Platoon they're all exactly the same to me! However, this was different. The characters are so engaging and the plot so thick you can't help but be hooked on every moment. It is also not some pretentious director/script writer showing off how much he knows about a certain war and over complicating it with references that only someone with a history degree would get. It is kept simple, down to a few characters and tells of the events of 1 small part of a revolution.
The fantasy element of this film was also much more engaging than I expected. Unlike Labarynth, Mirror Mask etc. here the girl is forced to undergo these tasks and meet these creatures alongside her real everyday life, and we see the effects that it has on her everyday life and how she grows as a character through this, this also adds a much more human element to this film.
I can see why some people may find the characters a little 1 dimensional (everyone seems to be either pure good or evil) but I couldn't help but fall in love with each and every 1 of them. The character design is spot on, especially the Faun (who I only found out from reading the synopsis on the internet is Pan, there is actually no reference to him being called Pan in the film whatsoever) he appears to be a good guy, however has a slightly sinister look about him that you just don't know whether to trust.
The violence is also spot on, for a lot of this film it may as well have been a kids film, but you get so engrossed in the fantasy of it all that you could be a child watching in awe, and suddenly there is a hard hitting scene of brutal violence to remind you of the reality of this situation (particularly the captain repeatedly bottling a man's face in, and Mercedes slicing the captain's cheek open from the mouth!)
Now for it's downfalls; I didn't think that the girl's challenges were challenging enough. The toad, from what I could see, was absolutely no threat to her. Had she not have eaten the grape in the cave, the creature would have lay dormant posing no threat to her. As there was no real challenge to these tasks they were over with quite quickly, and therefore, so was another fantasy scene, and her final challenge didn't even take part in a fantasy scene. (I know anything more would have lengthened the running time, but this was a film I could watch all day).
Secondly, I don't think the captain really got his comeuppance. Let's not forget that this was an extremely evil man who made people live in fear of him and tortured many innocent people to death! I couldn't wait for his final scene throughout the film, expecting a long drawn out horrible painful death, only to see him just get shot in the head! Once! Which was the only other part I didn't think really cut it.
Overall I would say that this film is about escapism. A young girl lives day to day in the chaos of war, evil, suffering and misery with only her books to help her dream of something better. She finally gets the chance to live a better life and it's not in our world because you cannot trust our world. I find this beautiful!