The BFG (2016)

Since a while ago I'm trying to get a bit more selective with the movies I'm watching due to the lack of time. And that sort of excludes from my "to watch" list the range of movies where the main attendance target is age <15. For "The BFG" I made an exception because long long long ago I've read the book by Roald Dahl, which at the time I liked a lot. Unlike other books by the same author though, as "The Witches" or "Matilda" that I've also seen on scree, or "Fantastic Mr. Fox" where even though I can't compare with the written material the video version was excellent, I always found "The BFG" hard to get into a movie. And I guess I was right...

The context puts face to face Sophie, a girl in a London orphanage and The Big Friendly Giant aka The BFG, who being discovered decides to take her to the giants land, a location probably somewhere close to the British coast and inhabited by other large humanoid creatiures, however less friendly and more hungry. Let's jump to the moment when the girl decides that action should be taken against an oversized cannibal threat, and what's a better solution than the help of her Majesty - the Queen of England. There are more details (in particular a connection between the BFG and Sandman), but let's stick to the essentials...

The reason why I thought "The BFG" hard to get on screen is not that much the difficulty of a realist integration of a giant in the real world, which is actually quite ok in the movie. Technically the production is gorgeous, and Mark Rylance "plays" the BFG part flawlessly. The issues is that the written tale somehow convinces the reader (well, at least a young one...) that the Queen, woken up in a normal sunny day, could have an official meeting with a fairytale creature + other stuff like that. In writing there's a way that this sense of "believable", within the limits of a fantasy, is kept. In the movie this mixture of real and imaginary a bit too forced... Something doesn't seem to work, but I have to keep in mind that we're talking after all about a children's movie, and I'm a bit older (around 20+ years) now than when I've read the book...

Rating: 3 out of 5