Il giardino segreto

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

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.

This movie looks beautiful, it really does. And the acting is good. But why oh why did they feel they needed to upgrade an already amazing story? It's too embellished, and there are new storylines added that weren't in the book. Why? The story is magical enough as it is!

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.

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 .