A terrible, awful, mess of a story

Rating: 1/10 (27 January 2007)

I don't want to sound like an intellectual snob, but when a movie attempts to tell a Hero Quest story and fails so spectacularly through incompetence, it's hard not to. Basically, the Hero Quest, as developed by Joseph Campbell, is a pretty rigid story structure with very strict rules. The Quest is supposed to be the archetypal journey every hero character takes to achieve a goal no one else can.
Del Toro makes it obvious pretty early on that the main character, Ofelia, is meant to go on this quest when she passes through a vaginal threshold in the beginning of the film and yet again when she's given a series of tasks, one of which includes finding a key. By the rules of the Hero Quest, that's all very by the book stuff.
But after the initial stages of the Hero Quest are completed, del Toro takes the movie in a whole different direction and has the main character defeat her own quest to become a hero. What's left is a mess of a story which completely contradicts itself and a main character who fails miserably.
It's a horrendously insulting movie. It's a dumb story with a horrible pay-off and no character development or structure.