A few weeks ago Heffner and I were sitting around and drinking and he was flipping through the pay-per-view channels in the hotel. He asked if I wanted to see this movie and I said I really didn’t think so, it’s a kids movie. Last night we were drinking again and he asked about this movie again. I said I had no intention of seeing it but if he insisted, I’d sit through it. After we watched it, he hollered at me for not stealing his remote and throwing it out the window when he asked about it.
It was a very boring attempt at displaying the imagination of children. I young boy is an artist, that is, he draws all the time. He is picked on by the bullies in school just like everyone else. The new girl shows up and they become friends. She is the writer type and they have fun running around in the woods. They swing on a rope across a creek to get to their kingdom. She insists on imagining everything in the woods is alive and part of their invisible kingdom. He has trouble seeing it but eventually she gets him to see it to.
They never really create a new world and it is never implied that the kingdom exists anywhere but in these kid’s heads. There are very few special effects and those that are there look crude and rough, just like a child’s drawing would be.
They have trouble with a female bully, she becomes a giant troll in the woods. He bully breaks down and they befriend her, the giant troll becomes their friend. Not much to go on here.
So one weekend, a teacher he’s had a crush on asks him out on an impromptu visit to the museum. He wants to ask his friend along but he also wants this for himself so he never asks her along. When he returns home, the family is crying. The rope swing broke and the girl hit her head and died. The boy feels guilty because he feels that he should have invited her along. His little sister almost falls into the creek trying to follow him to the woods. He yells at her to stay out because this was only for him and his friend. After accepting his friend’s death, he builds a bridge over the creek and invites his sister to share the kingdom with him. She has trouble seeing it at first and eventually she starts to believe and the only decent imagery in the entire movie shows up and for a second I start to think that if they had incorporated any of this anywhere else in the movie it would have been better.
As it stands, it is a shallow impression of some writer’s true-life childhood tragedy and a nice little tale about friends and death and the power to imagine. I liked the fact that the little girl died and they didn’t have her miraculously appear at the end or anything so predictable. She died, she’s gone. Nice. The trailers had more special effects than the entire movie did. If you watch this looking for the effects you saw in the trailer, you are going to be disappointed. If you watch this for a heartwarming story about friends that live in a make-believe world, you are going to be disappointed. If you watch this looking for a story about a lonely little boy who experiences minor happiness and then great loss as well as ambiguous questions about “does the father abuse the boy” or “why would a beautiful young teacher ask her young-teen student out on a Saturday? Is she molesting him?” then the story will make a little more sense. He’s withdrawn, he’s shy, he’s pouring all of his time into a make-believe land… I think he is just a sequel away from hanging himself from the Bridge to Terabithia. So if you liked “Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings” or the After-School-Special “Good Touch-Bad Touch” then you might like this.
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