The Secret Garden

1993s movie was perfectly good , no need for this remake- its not good

It seems roughly every 7 years someone makes another adaptation, this is still a fine movie but how many more versions do we need, get a life. Are all the writers, producers and directors of today braindead unimaginative slugs without any new Ideas that they have to constantly remake already well known popular films. Time for a new generation of creative, imaginative and original movie makers to arise and take over .

As the movie starts it is 1947 and a small British girl and her family are living well in India. Then when both parents die, newly orphaned she is sent to her wealthy uncle's estate in England. Not sure what age she was supposed to be, the actress was 12 during filming.

She has led a privileged life and at first is difficult in her new surroundings. Then wandering around the large estate encounters a dog, she feeds it the meat from her sandwich, soon the two are looking for each other each day.

Then the dog takes her to a place surrounded by a tall, old wall overgrown with various vegetation, she climbs and inside finds a wonderous, somewhat magical garden, the "secret garden" of the title. Further investigation reveals it was a favorite getaway for her mother and aunt.

She also discovers she has a cousin living in the same big house, a boy mostly bed-bound. Then she meets a local boy out at the garden, eventually the three of them explore together.

All of them, and including the dad, had healings that were needed, the friendships and perhaps some of the magic of the garden help all of them.

Good movie, my wife and I watched it at home on DVD from our public library. Watching the extras on the disc, for the filming in the secret garden they actually used a number of the best gardens in the UK for sites and stitched them together for the film to seem like it was all at one place.

A young girl in the 1940's has to go and live with a distant uncle she doesn't know and she finds a secret garden and some friends.

This starts of very bleak. The only comparison I can think of for this level of isolation, loneliness and alienation is "28 Days Later." The film carries on like this for a while and we get to know the unhappy lead character rather well.

As little girls in the 1940's, stuck in dusty manors in the middle of the moors don't really get up to much the film feels very, very slow and voyeuristic at times.

You get shots of fingers brushing leaves, shoes stamping in puddles, misty moorland, overcast skies, etc.

Then the movie has to put its foot down to get the actual story underway. All that time defining this disturbed, distant little girl is erased in an instant when she suddenly realises that her mum did love her and she transforms into Pollyanna overnight. She then runs around the estate marking off her check list of people to fix.

After an hour and a quarter of gloom and depression the last fifteen minutes are just too cloying. It is like being punched in the throat by a fist made of sweetener.

The young actors are very good. Colin Firth, Julie Walters and Isis Davis are only there for set dressing. The garden is vibrant and bright but not really a garden and no distinction is made between fantasy and reality so you never really get a handle on what it is.

This is a short film that feels long and leaves you struggling to remember what you just watched.

Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel is charming. This movie is a bloated melodrama. 1. Just because you can use CGI doesn't mean you have to. 2. Who needs all the ancillary backstory(ies) that aren't in the novel, and serve no useful narrative purpose. 3. In this film, the secret garden - which is, in the novel, a secret garden - is about the size of the county of Cornwall in England, and full of all sorts of exotic plants that are not in the garden in the novel. In the novel, the children gain agency in their lives by learning to take care of the secret garden, and bring order into a place that has been abandoned and left to go wild (as, in some respects, two of the children have been left uncared-for) - this is sort of the whole point of the story. It would take an army of professional gardeners months if not years to maintain the garden in this film. Read the book, watch the earlier movie. Miss this one.