Making faun of Spain's Civil War

Rating: 4/10 (10 December 2017)

Long mystified by this film's grand reputation, I watched it for the second time yesterday, and the nicest thing I can think to say, really, is: I don't get it. Maybe that's because I can't easily dismiss plot devices and plot holes, even if they're part of an elaborate fantasy.
Guillermo del Toro is trying to have it both ways-- Brothers Grimm-style fantasy and the actual Spanish Civil War. Unfortunately, the fantasy is a virtuoso display of grotesque characters and a relish of cruelty that makes Hannibal Lecter seem like a faintly decadent gourmand, while the Spanish Civil War was no more real to me in this film than WWII was in the brilliant opening sequence of Del Toro's pure fantasy, "Hellboy."
At no point did I take the human characters seriously, especially not the relentlessly evil Colonel (Sergi López). He's the equivalent of Grimms' cruel stepmothers, which is as thin as fantasy gets. Three particular things bothered me, not all of which can be written off as fantasy or a child's viewpoint -- if it is a child's viewpoint. Adolescent Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is the heroine, but powerful Pan (Doug Jones) is the voice-over narrator.
1. When the mother (Ariadna Gil) tells her daughter that real life is hard, not like the fairy tales that Ofelia devours, I waited for some evidence to support such a claim. Ofelia's fairy tales are gruesome and repellent-- as bad or worse as anything in real life.
2. Toward the end, the housekeeper (Maribel Verdú) viciously stabs the Colonel, first in the back, then chest, shoulder, and mouth. The wounds leave him at her mercy-- but she doesn't finish him off. Given her risky loyalty to the rebels he's battling, and her willingness to stab him four times, the only reason for stopping short of murder has to be to set up more brutality. So the Colonel survives only to be almost-killed again. Indeed, he emerges from the quadruple stabbing strong as ever except for a bloody shirt, a bandaged lip, and a firearm. If you'll notice, the plot wouldn't change an iota if she hadn't stabbed him at all. The same is true a little later, when Ofelia poisons the Colonel. He staggers a bit in his bloody shirt, but in the next scene, he's back in fine form, gun in hand.
3. The movie really lost me at the end. When the godlike character on the throne says to Bardo Ofelia, "Arise, my daughter. Come. You have spilled your own blood rather than the blood of an innocent. That was the final task and the most important." The blood she spared was that of her infant brother. But she's, what?, 12? That's not an innocent?
Given that the actress who played Ofelia was at "the bud-stage of breast development," as Humbert said of Lolita, I actually wondered if puberty is being referenced there, as the loss of innocence, the end of childhood. Probably not, since it's not an issue anywhere else in the movie. Anyway, the point is, in war, most if not all children are innocent.
I have not yet seen del Toro's latest, The Shape of Water, which is getting high praise as I write. But at this point, with the dominance of sensational visuals over coherent ideas in his work, I'm beginning to think Guillermo del Toro is Spanish for Tim Burton.