Oke News-Given all the eerie fantasy elements at work, it’s little surprise then that Tim Burton was tasked with directing the film adaptation of Ransom Riggs’s first Miss Peregrine book. The director seems completely at home telling a story about a an enchanted wartime children’s orphanage, terrifying invisible monsters, and waif-like youths with giant eyes. The result is 124 minutes worth of CGI-embellished, time-traveling adventure that’s ambitious in scope and exasperating in execution. Part of that is because of the sheer amount of magical logic and backstory there is to explain, and the film’s wildly veering tone and pace. But perhaps most lacking in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is something the best children’s movies always have—a genuine emotional center. Or, put more simply, heart.
 |
| Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children Is All Spectacle and No Heart |
The film follows Jake Portman (played by an uninspired Asa Butterfield), a regular Joe Teenager living in suburban Florida with his awful parents and working a glum supermarket job. His banal existence lies in direct contrast to the exciting stories he heard growing up from his grandfather, Abe (Terence Stamp), who as a child was sent from his home in Poland to live on a Welsh island during World War Two. Jake eventually dismissed them as fantastic tall tales (despite the intriguing photographic evidence his grandpa offered). But these stories about monsters and special children suddenly seem like they might hold some dark truth to them after a strange tragedy befalls his family.
All this set-up early on in Miss Peregrinefeels rushed and too exposition-heavy to make viewers care. After a few false starts, Jake ends up in Wales hunting down the mysterious children’s home, and in a creepy turn of events, finds it. Running the facility is Miss Peregrine herself, played by Eva Green, who adopts bird-like tics and speaks in a clipped but kind sort of way. Then there are her young charges known as “peculiars,” who have a wide variety of intriguing (but not always useful) powers: superhuman strength, invisibility, the ability to control air, the ability to project dreams through one’s eyes, the ability to host living bees inside one’s body. Their oddities are indeed remarkable, but as Jake, Butterfield beholds his new companions with all the awe of someone feigning polite interest in dinner-party small talk.
Read more on site..http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/10/miss-peregrines-home-for-peculiar-children/501914/
