Miss Peregrine et les Enfants particuliers

Jake (Asa Butterfield) is an outcast teenager that adores his grandfather Abraham 'Abe' Portman (Terence Stamp) that used to tell stories of the orphanage in Wales where he was raised to him. When Abe is murdered in his house in Florida and has his eyes removes, Jake sees a monster and his parents take him to a psychologist. Jake asks to go to Wales to visit the orphanage and his psychologist agrees. His father Franklin Portman (Chris O'Dowd) travels with him to Wales and Jake discovers that the orphanage was bombed in 1943 by the Germans. When he decides to visit the ruins of the orphanage again, Abe finds a girl and soon he learns that the orphanage, the headmaster Miss Peregrine (Eva Green) and the children still exist trapped in a time loop. But they are in danger since monsters are hunting them down. And Jake has the gift of seeing monsters. What will Jake do?

"Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" is a delightful original adventure directed by Tim Burton. The fantasy is a sort of X-Men and is highly entertaining with lovely characters and evil villains. Despite the confused idea of time loops, the film entertains adults and children. My vote is eight.

Title (Brzil):"O Orfanato da Srta. Peregrine Para Crianças Peculiares" ("The Orphanage of Miss Peregrine for Peculiar Children")

I haven't read the books, so I can't talk about the differences at length. I read a comment from another reviewer who is furious about the movie, because of all the changes. You have to remember when a beloved book gets made into a film, it's almost impossible it'll meet what you had made of it in your mind.

Also as this is limited (running time mostly), it won't have everything the book had. Even Peter Jacksons adaptations could not have everything Tolkien had written in his book (at least not in the version that was running in the cinemas). Having said all that I hope this prepares you in case you do want to watch this. This is light and fun (with dark themes of course) and aimed to our inner and outer child. It does a good enough job taking us away and entertain us. That's good enough in my book (no pun intended)

Tim Burton has tackled almost all of the genre's, and done most of them very well. So who doesn't want to see him go back to his adventure-fantasy comfort zone with Miss Peregrine?

It's billed as Tim Burton's X-Men, and I like that comparison a lot. It definitely has certain similarities to a mutant story, but with Burton's flare for obscurity and peculiarity. Let me start off by saying that I really liked the premise and set up. Not only are the characters similar to X-Men, but the story slightly resembled Days of Future Past. I love the time travel elements and links to World War II. But the rest of the film just didn't live up to the promise of the trailers.

As delightful as some of Burton's films can be, I find the unevenness to be one of his biggest detractors of his otherwise intriguing ideas. For some reason, the second half of his films don't have the same cohesiveness that the opening's do. With Miss Peregrine, we are set up with a much more grounded take to a heightened story than I thought. You certainly get to see the impressive and outright strange abilities of the young children, but it isn't taken into any extraordinary levels, until later. The second half is flooded with ridiculous and over-the-top 'peculiarities'. That's would be all fine and dandy if the first half didn't set up an already intriguing story without all of the added strangeness.

As for the performances, Eva Green is the only one that really stood out here. She seems like a perfect fit into a Burton-esque drama. Her line delivery and presence just speaks Burton. She's also the only character that kept my attention from beginning till end. Sadly, she's not really in it all that much, even with the title having her name. We mostly focus on Asa Butterfield's 'Jake' and Ella Burnell's 'Emma'. Of course, there is some romantic tension, but it never leaves the constructs of a typical teen angst drama. I just didn't buy into it.

There's a ton of cool things about this movie, but by the time I left the theater the whole idea just felt tiresome. But with all this said, I would still be open to another entry in the series, just include Eva Green a little more and don't fall into clichés, Burton. You're better than that.

+Premise

+Eva Green is perfect

-First and second half are completely different films

-Romantic chemistry was hard to buy into

5.9/10

If you are fan of visionary director Tim Burton, chances are you know mostly for his distinct visual style, a style he's possessed since his signature debut in the comedy-horror 'Beetlejuice' in 1988. Burton has embraced a Gothic visual modus and macabre atmosphere that has most often made his films more of visual spectacles than films with compelling storytelling. This dark fantasy inspired by Ransom Riggs's best-selling novel series of the same name sees Burton continuing his signature trend with his dazzling visual methodology that manages to outplay it's occasionally clunky script. Written by Jane Goldman, frequent collaborator of director Matthew Vaughn, this film translates it's compelling source material with fine, but occasionally sluggish style-over-substance flick that only succeeds on embracing Burton's typical visual grandeur than coherent storytelling. Enter sixteen-year old Jake (played by Asa Butterfield), a young teen inspired by the extraordinary adventures of his grandfather Abe Portman (played by Terence Stamp) to seek out a mysterious foster family raised by the witch-like Miss Peregrine (played by Eva Green). The family consisted of children gifted with utterly bizarre abilities including a child who can manipulate air and breath underwater, another with an invisible body, one with a monstrous mouth at the back of her head, another with the ability to light things on fire with her bare hands, the list goes in. As the young man is drawn into their unnatural world, he learns the secrets of their family that put their lives in grave danger against mysterious monsters that pray on them.

With Tim Burton operating behind the camera, it is predictable that this strives for bizarre and spooky imagery that immediately hits you with reminiscence of Burton's previous works. The world of the titular character's mysterious habitat is drawn with an authentic 1940s-era production design and spooky imagery of characters with creepy CGI anatomical abnormalities and corpses with eyes hollowed out; just enough bizarre scenery to give elementary-school aged kids to the heebie jeebies. The make-up done on Eva Green's Miss Peregrine to give her a Maleficient-like appearance is pretty nice to look at as well. How Tim Burton's visual heft manages to tower over the storytelling however, comes as the film's prime disappointment. The first hour follows a 'X-Men meets Harry Potter' plot introducing a series of uncanny characters through long, convoluted exposition. In the process, the characters then introduce a time looping element that is should have made the plot more interesting but only adds more needless confusion to the already mind-boggling plot, and it's not until the roughly the hour and a half mark when the story begins to make reasonable sense. At that point, we are granted with our heroes engaging climatic showdown against creepy Slenderman-like creatures followed by a fight against devilish, glowy-eyed Samuel L. Jackson (an odd casting choice) filled with slick special effects and CGI. By the end, it fairly makes up for the sluggish narrative as does the performances. Asa Butterfield does a fine job as the protagonist but it's only disappointing that his character falls short of interest. In the midst of the crowded cast however, Eva Green is easily the standout in the performance department, giving a profound portrayal as the titular supporting entity.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is a slick dark fantasy spectacle that is gracefully held up by Tim Burton's signature visual appeal above Jane Goldman's blemished screenplay. In fair words, Tim Burton's effort on rendering Ransom Riggs's popular source material come to somewhat satisfying results, even if it falls deep under the flairs of Burton's magnums opuses.

The difference from the books allows this to be stand alone without driving you mental because you're left with a cliffhanger for a long time or, potentially, forever... if you enjoyed watch and enjoy it without reading the books?? Read them or get them on audiobook; you will LOVE them!!!

If you've read the trilogy first and THEN watch the film. You're in for a wee change, but it sat well with me rather than be left in insane-land til I could get the next book, or chapter, or be able to see the bigger picture...