IMDb plot summary: Upon moving into the run-down Spiderwick Estate with their mother, twin brothers Jared and Simon Grace, along with their sister Mallory, find themselves pulled into an alternate world full of faeries and other creatures.
Directed by Mark Waters. Starring Freddie Highmore, Mary-Louise Parker, and Nick Nolte.
The Spiderwick Chronicles is a young adult fantasy movie based on a book. Freddie Highmore stars as twin brothers who, along with their sister and mother, move to the mansion they've inherited from an ancestor. One of the twins, Jared, discovers an ancient book detailing the world of fairy tale creatures, and soon he learns this was his great-great-uncle's life's work, and it's caught the attention of an evil ogre who wants to use the information in it to conquer the world. So I know that there are a lot of people who inherently love the faefolk kind of fantasy world and will eat up anything involving dark mysterious forests full of tiny magical people. I however find that kind of setting just... so, so dull. And this wasn't the movie to convince me otherwise. Highmore has given good performances, but he's at a weird place in his acting journey here, where his character choices feel forced and stilted, and having him play two separate characters doesn't help matters. The monster CGI is pretty messy and feels entirely separate from the actors, and the film draws a surprising amount of attention to it -- especially by withholding the "big reveal" of the main monster until the end, at which point it fully disappoints. I get someone having a soft spot for this movie, but very little of it works for me. Someday I'll have to see if the books fare any better!
How it entered my Flickchart:
The Spiderwick Chronicles < Le voyage au Groenland
The Spiderwick Chronicles > Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
The Spiderwick Chronicles < The Happiest Millionaire
The Spiderwick Chronicles < The Lost Weekend
The Spiderwick Chronicles < Sliding Doors
The Spiderwick Chronicles > Fracture
The Spiderwick Chronicles > The Devil is a Woman
The Spiderwick Chronicles < The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach
The Spiderwick Chronicles > Teorema
The Spiderwick Chronicles > Borderline
The Spiderwick Chronicles < The Forger
The Spiderwick Chronicles < Luther
Final spot: #2869 out of 3965, or 28%.
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