Where the Wild Things Are Review

So I watched the movie this week, after anticipating it for nearly two months since I watched the trailer before watching Up. And although I didn’t read the book, I had read raving reviews on imdb.com (my compass and guide when picking movies to watch on the big screen), so naturally I had high hopes as I set foot into the cinema and waited for the film to begin.

I wish I could say I truly enjoyed the film, that it was a heartwarming, lesson-learning experience, but I have to confess that it wasn’t so great. In fact, the wide seats and the extra leg room in the new VMAX cinemas made a bigger impression on me than the movie. The friend that I went with thought it was ‘really good’ and I didn’t have the heart to say that I thought otherwise so I just mumbled ‘Yeah’, but really, it wasn’t that great.

The movie had a thin plot (the book’s pretty short, I heard) and it was just plain boring. *Spoiler Alert* In a nutshell, it’s about a troubled boy who runs away from home, meets these wild creatures, befriends them, but returns home after realising that he needs to make peace with his family. However, the events in the story unfolded in a tedious manner, the shots overwhelmingly brown and unimaginative, the characters flat,the protagonist oh so very ordinary, thus failing to arouse the intended feelings in the audience. In my opinion, the only thing that saved the film from becoming a total disaster was the dialogue. It wasn’t witty-funny, but there was a sense of humour in how the creatures spoke e.g. ‘(in a genuinely warm and caring tone) You’re the first king we haven’t ate.’ that provided some entertainment.

I took a look at forum discussions after watching the film and I was relieved that I wasn’t the only one who found the movie to be less than what the majority said it was. I couldn’t agree more to the guy who deemed raving, analytical reviews ‘just psychobabble’. One fan said you just have to look below the surface, ‘get’ the film and find the deeper meaning, but I think the onus is on the director to do the hard work so that viewers don’t have to mull over the events of the film to ‘get’ the movie. I once heard a tutor at uni say that the best essays are the ones that take the reader by the hand and lead them through from the beginning to the end. And I think the same goes for film too. You can be ambitious, even ambiguous, and you may even be praised for it, but at the end of the day, there are going to be people like me who go into movies simply expecting to be entertained, not to be puzzled, bored, searching for answers or wondering when it would all end. I have too much of those going on in my life already.

P.S. Don’t tell Susanna.