beautiful...but poor story editing

Rating: 6/10 (14 January 2007)

I saw this film on the weekend at a cinema in Toronto. While the special effects were quite remarkable (although we have become accustomed to this type of cgi, i.e. LOTR, Narnia, Eragon etc) I felt the film suffered due its rather thin storytelling. Some characters seemed over developed, i.e Mercedes and the Doctor, where others seemed crucially underdeveloped, the underground kingdom, the faun, and even the girl.
I mean the obvious hook for this film was the fantastic fantasy-world the girl created for herself-- and you certainly get this impression by the trailers that you see for the film, but how much of this fantasy world did we actually get to explore??? aside from the recurring faun and fairies, there's only 2 real scenes where you really get into the "surrealness" of this fantasy world, the scene with the frog, and the scene with the "pale-man" which seemed amazingly short! Couldn't she have stayed in that underworld just a little bit longer??? and i know people are going to flame this and say that it was just a representation of a child's fantasy, and the real story was about Fascist Spain-- but thats not how the film is advertised!!! I mean the link for the trailer on the official website is an amazing picture of the "pale-man", and one would think that there would be a great showdown of sorts at the end of the film with this nemesis, but there was nothing!
My criticism here is that i felt del Toro tried to cram two films into one here, and was successful in some aspects but not in others. He could have established that Capitan Vida was a jerk right after he killed the farmers, but he seemed to drag that point-- in my opinion the story of Mercedes her brother and the doctor was rather unnecessary, and dragged on...all this "dragging" left little time for the audience to experience the wonders that this Labyrinth had to offer-- i mean its a Labyrinth and no one even got lost in it! not once! SJ