I think Dorkman just did that.

Hey guys. The other movie you were trying to remember is "The Devil's Backbone."

This movie is basically a demo reel for the production designer, a series of images not required to abide by consistent logic. For many people, that seems to be fine, but being the kind of writer I am, I can't not think critically about the situation.

If you're making a fantasy world, even to the degree we're signing up for with every movie, the rules of the world should be clear, or at least internally consistent. There's a tradition in myth and in fairy tales, when you meet a guide and they tell you the rules, they're right. In other movies, it's just called exposition. It's generally the only information we have about the situation, so we have to take it as fact.

Am I giving the movie too much credit if the point was an unreliable guide to the fantasy world? They seemed to imply the faun was lying all along for some reason, which would have been interesting if it had built up to that twist by stages of her figuring that out before making an informed decision at the end.

Just the number of times in the commentary you guys say "they did that so the next thing in the movie could happen" convinces me that nope, this movie was just making up the rules as it went along. In Jan Svankmajer's Alice, that's cool, but PL tried to eat its gritty realism cake at the same time.

"Fantasy" doesn't mean you have total freedom to change the rules as you go along. That's the whole point of magic beans.

I think the problem with Pan's Labyrinth is that it probably has a moral (and I shall explain it) but it doesn't hang a lantern on it so anyone who doesn't watch the movie and look deep (really deep) into the character's motives won't even scratch the surface of it.

Stay with me, here.

After much thought and a second listening to the commentary (I have a lot of time to listen to stuff at work) I think the moral of Pan's Labyrinth is: Make your own decisions and live (or die, as it were) with the consequences.

Why do I think that? I guess that goes back to the reason that the girl, though she dies, still "passes" the tests and goes on to HappyFantasyLand. To pass the frog test, she had to ruin her dress and get punished. For the pale man test, she doesn't pick the door that the faeries say is the right one. She "passes" the test, but  makes the stupid move of eating the grapes and almost pays with her life for it. To pass the final test, she has to choose whether to kill her brother or not, but (obviously) has to live with the fact that she stole him from SuperFascist. Blam, she's dead, but "ascends" to HappyFantasyLand because in the end she "passed" all the tests.

The same could be said for SuperFascist. He throws the mandrake root in the fire and almost loses the baby he wants so desperately. He shoots the little girl in the end and the rebels kill him for it (and all the other oppressive decisions he's made).

While it's not harped on and we don't get flashbacks of "Ah-ha! She made the right decisions and that's why she gets to go to HappyFantasyLand!" that's the throughline that I see through the film.

That's my rationalization and I'm sticking to it. *nod*

*smiles, gazes into monitor for days, eventually dies of dehydration*

Just finished watching the movie for the first time and my initial reaction is that I kind of love this film, and now I just started the commentary and you guys hate it? Hmm.

I see the Captain's motivation as he's a narcissist/psychopath, and that's all I needed to really "know" (although that's how I read his character; it's not mentioned), but people with consciouses don't do what he did, and he mentioned pride as a weakness.

And I didn't really care that it didn't follow the rules of a fairy tale, is it wrong to break the rules sometimes?

Edit: Because kids never disobey what they're told to do

Goddammit, you guys were condescending assholes in this one.

I had one more thing to add to this thread a while back and didn't want to dredge up the topic just for this:

The only thing in the movie that had perplexed me was the story Ofelia tells to her unborn brother about the rose that could give eternal life. I couldn't figure out why it was in there, and then it dawned on me. The baby is the rose. I suppose you could look at the rose story as some kind of metaphor for life in general as well. People sought the rose because it gave eternal life, but the thorns gave instant death. But the two are inseparable. You can't have life without death, yeah? So maybe it's like a story about how dumb it is to want eternal life. Like, this Captain guy just wanted his name and memory to go on, yeah? So that's why he wanted the kid, but he obviously got stuck by a thorn instead.

I still don't know what all that crap ends up meaning, but there you go. I wonder if the face-smashing scene was a metaphor for alcoholism or something...