« Welcome to Duloch, such a perfect place »

Rating: 4/10 (15 October 2006)

« Welcome to Duloch, such a perfect place » : sugarcoated, soulless, lifeless, artificial, phony, kitsch and without imagination. Interesting irony: the director of "Shrek" doing this. I guess he felt he needed to apologize from too much subversive thinking.
The huge success of this so-called « movie » tells a lot about our society and the way people want to « dream » nowadays. It's frightening. It's been a long time since I have attended something so lifeless, watered-down, sugary, tame, devoid of any genuine emotion, entirely virtual and fabricated. In comparison, the blockbusters that it tries to emulate (the LOTR and Harry Potter movies) look like timeless masterpieces, and this is coming from someone who'd rather eat a cactus than attend a LOTR movie ever again, as bombast and overkill tend to make me feel nauseous. As for the HP movies, I only celebrated the third one as a « real » movie, thanks to the extremely talented Alfonso Cuaron. To each his own, for my part I'm still in love with Scott's « Legend » (the export version, with Goldsmith's score, not the awful USA cut / Tangerine dream one) as nothing has ever come close to it in terms of painting a fantasy/magical world on the screen. Yes, it's mushy, but it works. Scott was a genius, at this time, at pulling off coherent, alive, breathing, working cinematic worlds (Alien, Blade Runner, Legend).
Here, everything you look at is artless and lifeless, just petty/pretty, sugarcoated pinch-beck images, a « 3-D Barbie fantasy show » as a friend of mine called this, CGI prowess presented as great achievements while being just pseudo-realistic digital dolls on a stage (it kinda looks like the real thing until you try to smell it and discover it has no smell whatsoever, or any taste for that matter) while all sense of depth, substance, emotion, soul, magic, is meticulously wiped off. The whole thing looks like a phony plastic Xmas tree. Pretty to look at, but anyone used to a real tree can only be very disappointed, and feel sad that the magic is gone.
As usual, Tilda is absolutely jaw-dropping. A Queen she is indeed, not only in the story but in the movie team as well. Looks like she was the only artistically competent (grown-up) person in this team. Why such a fantastic actress isn't hired for A-works (artistically speaking) is beyond me.
If you like real fantasy, look somewhere else. If you insist on having some family sugar-coated evening, even the Sound of Music and Mary Poppins are leagues ahead this soulless digital fest. Watch these again instead. Want the real thing ? (Re) discover Legend, the fully restored director's cut.