Let me begin this semi-professional review with a discourse on reviewing etiquette. If you don’t like political dramas, then by all means do not review movies like “The Last King of Scotland” and “Syrian”. The material can’t compare cross-genre. It is my feelings that force me to confront my own personal biases when reviewing movies like Pan’s Labyrinth.

I hate horror. I have despised the genre from the beginning. I am a firm believer in the idea: “Just because technology gives us the tools to demonstrate things of a egregious violent nature, does not mean we should indulge in their uses.” Let me begin by listing what I believe to be the major flaws with the film,

A:) The movie was exceptionally blatant as to its plot progression. This isn’t a horrible flaw. In fact it is a flaw that most fairy tales suffer from. You know what is going to happen in the story far before it actually occurs. For individuals like me, it gives you a massive power to know when exactly you should avert your gaze. I think this has to do with the fundamental plot points that must happen to maintain fairy tale status. You must have points A, B, C, an D in order to have a plane, and so you must have a standard plot progression to have a fairy tale: usually originating from the real and moving to the super-natural/fantastic.

B:) Visual Assault. I read several reviews before watching the film, and to be honest this feature was one of the major reasons I’ve put off watching the film. There are a lot of scenes that made me so uncomfortable as to want to stop watching the film. I endured through the film, but it was tough. Of course everyone has their own definitions of what thresholds exist as for violent content and gore.

C:) Mary pointed this out, the translations we saw were slightly eschewed and made me wonder how the original language interpretation differed from the story. You see even the title invokes a possible perception alteration. I know a lot about Pan and how the image of Pan has been distorted during the Christian “indoctrination” and “re-definition” of religious artifacts. minor primer: Pan was not evil originally and in fact a lot of the negative interpretations to his character was adopted to give the religions that used Pan as a figure would be discredited as worshipers of a false (evil) religion. This led me to automatically distrust the Satyr/Faun. Which wasn’t necessarily wrong in retrospect, but could have given a very distorted view of the story. I also would like to interpret the “ending” of the movie in terms of Christian stories. The father looks very god like on a beacon in the center, whereas the mother has the suckling babe in her arms which is exceptionally iconic of the Virgin Mary to his left. And where is Christ’s seat? at the right hand of god. at least Christ was female in this story.

Ok so the above points are not all necessarily negative. The movie is gorgeous by far, and the acting is as dead on and passionate as I could ever expect. There were no suspension of disbelief issues, and the story itself was very beautifully written. I certainly don’t regret seeing the movie, I just have my own personal issues with the film as a whole.