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(A word of WARNING: Unless you've already seen this movie or have read the book, I highly do not recommend reading this review unless you want those dreaded SPOILERS!)
'James and the Giant Peach' by Roald Dahl is one of my favorite books. And I'm glad I got to read it before I watched the movie, because it's many times better. The movie's animation, character design, and visual effects are wonderful, but it pretty much stops there.
Secondly, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." I could say that about so many movie adaptations of books, and this is one of them. I wonder if the screenwriters even READ the book before they wrote this? So many parts of the book were missing, and sorely missed. I was distraught that the Cloud Men (who appear during the best part of the book) were replaced by ghost pirates. Ghost pirates have been done too many times, but how many times have you seen Cloud Men? And what was with that mechanical shark, and the rhino in the clouds? In the book, the rhino (which killed James' parents) escaped from the zoo, but in the movie it just appears out of nowhere. And then we have Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker, who were done away with early on in the book, somehow went across the Atlantic ocean in an old car. All I have to say is, "What?"
Randy Newman music is good in stuff like Toy Story movies, but here it'll make you be thankful for the fast forward button. The songs really have no reason for being there, and you won't miss a thing when you skip them.
Aside from that, this was a pretty fine film, but why did the writers stray so much from the book? True, a movie adaptation doesn't have to follow everything in the book it's based on (like 'Willy Wonka'), but it needs to follow just enough.
But I did like the Centipede. Just as nasty as he was when I read about him!
6/10
score /10
xxlittlekittenxx 15 April 2003
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0388134/ |
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1-12-2019 20:19:15
