Pugwash News - Portsmouth's Official Student Newspaper

1/5]

Where the Wild Things Are. Photo by Warner Brothers.

This was one of those films that I wanted to see more out of pure astonishment rather than because I actually thought it looked good. The book which this movie is based on is very short and succinct, and I could not fathom how they had managed to take that simple tale and turn it into an hour and half long film. Sadly, the answer is by taking every symbolic element out of the book and weaving it through a story which is nothing to do with the book, but just happens to feature the same title and characters.

As a writer and an English student, and as an amateur wannabe phycologist, I’ll admit I did enjoy this film a tiny bit. It was fun to ‘analyse’. But I also found it disjointed and abstract, and REALLY could not warm to the main character at all. (Though I do commend the kid actor who pretty much had to act all by himself for a large majority of the screen time.) Max is a tempermental and selfish little pain, who doesn’t really seem to get the real world. I always assumed that the book was about a kid like this, who retreats into the world of his imagination at night to escape it. In the movie, it looked like things were going that way – and that in the world of his imagination he would learn some lessons and be less of a nuisance after that. But it fumbled and flopped with this message at the end, as it did with its point and plot all the way along.It killed a few hours on a snowy day, granted, but overall this film will be remembered as a poor effort that just didn’t quite live up to its potential.