Well, I must say this film absolutely blew me away. ..
Pan’s Labyrinth is an interesting and spooky story set against the backdrop of a fascist regime in countryside Spain in 1944.
Right from the start, the film contained ‘out-there’ colors and bizarre angles, you would know that this movie would not be like any other movie you’ve ever seen. Pan’s Labyrinth includes kooky twists of children’s fairy tales and it definitely breaks numerous general ‘film rules.’
The film centered on Ophelia, a pre-teen girl, who was just a bit ‘imaginative.’Her mother married and is impregnated by a hard-headed, fascist captain in the midst of a civil war in Spain. So Ophelia and her mother moved to an old farm house located in the middle of a forest surrounded by a group of rebels.
Ophelia often wandered from reality and walked into a world of fairies and unicorns. That all changed when fantasy became reality as Ophelia found a weird-shaped rock that belonged in a totem of stone. Her discovered rock was the final piece to the puzzle and from there the entire challenge unraveled.
With a natural instinct to always disobey, Ophelia found herself in an ancient world where she had to complete three tasks so she could return home as the long lost princess. As the film went on, she completed those tasks with huge obstacles in the way. She had to face a gross, overweight frog and a child-eating mutilated being.
In the end, she was murdered by her step-father, the Captain, and ultimately was freed from her currant body and her soul traveled back to where it belonged. The ancient, mysterious world.
This film had many metaphors, abstract meanings, and parallels to the bible. It is quite impossible to come up with one solution or answers every single little detail in the movie. Even after a few times of watching the movie, you still would not obtain only one answer. A huge part in this is definitely the theme; disobedience. If everyone followed orders and did what they were told, the plot would not be possible and the world would be a boring place.
Ophelia, among a few others (Mercedes, the doctor, the rebels, etc) went with their gut instinct with every decision opportunity presented. Ophelia chose to ignore her mother and ran off to the labyrinth to complete her tasks, and Mercedes ignored the Captain and aided the rebels hidden in the trees.
Color played a huge role in this film. In the beginning, the movie started out having a normal color contrast until after Ophelia completed her first task. Every day was a rainy day ever since. This may see like a minor thing but in actuality it is major. The film continued to use dark colors until the very end when Ophelia dies. That was when the movie made a complete one eighty turn to a scene with bright and super bold colors.
It's hard to have a personal engagement in this one. I never was into 'fairy tales' growing up so I never had much of an imagination. In no way can I ever relate to Ophelia in her bravery. But Ophelia and I do have something similar; we disobey when we feel the need to. If the Captain was my step-father, I probably would be the first person to be murdered.
Overall, this movie was very interesting.. actually... the word ‘interesting’ doesn’t even cut it, doesn’t even describe a portion of this film. Pan’s Labyrinth requires a lot of analysis (the bigger the group, the better) and abstract thinking. del Toro is a pure genius and he has a lot of guts to make a movie of this caliber.
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