John Sayles has never let me down before. But he surely has this time with this wildly tepid movie.
I suppose there are so many child-magic "save the world" movies because kids are really easy to please.
But you have to have several things for these to work. You have to have charming kids. You need to have some unique imagination in the creatures or the forces they operate under. And you need to have basic narrative shape to the thing.
This has none of that.
Now this may just be my experience, because I made the mistake of seeing it in Imax, and when things get bigger you expect the spaces to be filled. This is gremlins meets Potter kids lite.
I went to it, in fact blew most of a day to get to it, because of Sayles. His cinematics are a bit stagebound for my tastes, but knows how to shape things so that you go somewhere. Waters, the director has done some poor work recently, but his first film (House of Yes) really impressed me. That was based on a play and used the same stagecraft preferred by Sayles. So I thought we'd get something both tasty and nourishing.
Alas, neither. What do parents think? That you can scrimp on children's imagination and narrative sense and not have them suffer?
I suppose a bright parent could say that the story was about stealing a book with lessons in it, and the book was destroyed.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
