BFG an empty beauty

Ruby Barnhill stars in The BFG. Image courtesy Disney.

There used to be a time when Steven Spielberg inspired dreams both fantastic and nightmarish. It really wasn’t that long ago in relative time, but just far enough away to settle into nostalgia, with the fears and joys of movies like E. T. and Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark resonating within memories. It only makes sense for Spielberg to take on a project featuring a literal dream maker and taking place through the lens of a precocious, lonely girl, and it’s doubly disappointing a man like Spielberg can miss as wildly and beautifully as he does with The BFG.

Roald Dahl’s seminal childhood tale is a marvelous book with fantastical elements anchored by a friendship between two very unlikely beings – the eponymous giant and whip smart orphan Sophie – making for a brilliant playground for a good filmmaker, let alone a legendary one like Spielberg. Except Spielberg and writer Melissa Mathison shift their focus away from the elements that make the book so great and get lost in the aesthetic wonderment instead. They stripped away the film's heart to make the body look prettier, resulting in an often gorgeous but ultimately empty and rather cowardly picture.

There are a few notable issues that ultimately sink the film, yet the one that ties them together is the filmmakers trying too hard to appease to the youth demographic the book was already written for.

The logic makes a sort of sense, especially given how the book places its protagonist (played by Ruby Barnhill in the film) into constant peril when she's surrounded by creatures bent on eating her. It's a wicked dark premise in the book, a gaggle of giants waltzing around the world nabbing children from their homes to gobble them up (except for people from Greece), with only one decent soul (Mark Rylance is motion captured to play the friendly giant) around to protect her. The BFG is a nightmare inducing book with the scariness of the world deepening the bond between the lonely giant and the lonely and miserable little girl.

Spielberg and Mathison ditch the fright though, referencing the other giants' ferocity in passing and skimping over the book's darker bits and general nastiness. So much of the horror is stripped away and sanitized the film is far too safe to evoke honest emotional connection between BFG (excellently captured by Rylance), Sophie and the viewers. It's insulting in a way to try to protect children from a little nastiness. They can handle a little fear and some intensity along as there's a parent or two around to remind them things will be OK. And Dahl was an expert on never taking things too far; bad things only really occur to the wicked or vile characters in his work, so good and decent children like Sophie and Charlie Bucket and James and George never received a harsh comeuppance. Sadly Spielberg and Mathison remove much of the peril and insert dangerous levels of cuteness to the mix, including a few fart jokes bandied about, a rather silly secondary story about a replacement family for Sophie and an overall failed attempt to make The BFG a nauseatingly British experience. Even the most aesthetically wondrous moments – the most notable being a sequence at a dream tree – come across as sweet diversions rather than interesting plot points.

These little diversions into the saccharine rob The BFG of a clean narrative, or at least one that is more linear than episodic. Viewers never really learn an adequate amount about the other giants (poor Jemaine Clement and Bill Hader, the two lead giants, get precious little time to shine), about Sophie's orphanage experience, and even about the relationship between the BFG and Sophie. A vital theme of this film is skimped over so Spielberg can go toy around with motion capture technology for almost two hours at the audience's expense. Spielberg’s created a beautiful world yet fails to fill it in with depth and heart. Sadly, I find The BFG more interesting as an interpretation of Spielberg's and Mathison's perception of the book than an actual movie. That they see so much lightness in a film clouded by darkness is an impressive show of optimism but a rather dishonest read of the book’s message and intention. Spielberg mentioned in a featurette prior to the film that the technology to make this a film wasn't available when the book came out in 1982; perhaps 2016 Spielberg is no longer capable of making a film as dark and nasty as The BFG is meant to be.

Review: Three out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 117 minutes

Genre: Fantasy

Ask Away

Target audience: People like me who grew up reading Roald Dahl and Steven Spielberg fans.

Take the whole family?: Most of the dark stuff is discussed and never shown, so this is pretty safe and tame for the kiddos.

Theater or Netflix?: If you see it, theater is probably the best bet just for the visuals. Don’t pay the extra costs for the 3D option though.

How beholden should the movie be to the book?: Not completely given the impossibilities of perfectly encapsulating a book in two hours or so, but there should be something resembling a baseline for it. The main issue is when the alterations from book to film make for a lesser film, which is the case more often than not in The BFG.

Watch this as well?: Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory is the most beloved adaptation of Dahl's work and comes relatively close to capturing the original's tone, although The Witches is the best of them all at capturing Dahl's nastiness. Matilda, James and the Giant Peach and Fantastic Mr. Fox are very much worth watching as well, as is a film Dahl wrote himself, the surprisingly creepy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.