Product: Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story
Rating: 1.0
A Huge Disappointment
Having enjoyed the first two installments of the Anne saga, I was deeply disappointed with "The Continuing Story."I expected to be re-introduced to the characters that I came to love. I expected to feel the same warmth and delight unique to the first two Kevin Sullivan films. Instead I found next to nothing reminiscent of Anne of Green Gables or Anne of Avonlea. The story was moved from Prince Edward Island and relocated to war-riddled Europe in the midst of calamity and conflict. Gilbert is sent to war and ends up missing in action. Anne spends 90% of the movie searching for him amidst bombings, wounded soldiers, orphaned children, and every other depressing scenario peculiar to a war zone. This is too big of a departure from the series and from the sequel long expected by Anne of Green Gables fans. If Sullivan had wanted to make a war film, he should have done that, however, absent the Green Gables franchise.I expected first of all that the setting would remain in Canada...Prince Edward Island, Halifax, etc. Secondly, although I, quite naturally, expected Anne to have matured, I thought I'd still see the same irrepressible, colorful Anne that made her such a delightful character. Instead she wanders through Europe on a search for Gilbert; and set against the gray and melancholy backdrop of war, there's no opportunity for her to be the quaint and eloquent Anne we came to know and love.Sullivan's first two Anne films were perfect "feel good" family movies, but he strayed too far from a flawless formula with this one. This movie was depressing, long, and cumbersome. Since the essential elements in this film are so far removed from the first two Anne adventures, it, therefore, can not be considered a sequel or a continuing story. Nevertheless, in the end Sullivan takes us back to Avonlea, and we find that Green Gables is in ruins; and although there's some semblance of Anne's former home, we don't feel that we've returned to Green Gables.This movie lacks the warmth, the imagination, the beautiful scenery, the amusing dialogue, and the uniqueness of the characters that Lucy Maud Montgomery created.