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I never had any desire to see the movie adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are. It struck me as a fundamentally unworkable adaptation just from how little source material there is to work with and the amount of filler that would be needed. Seeing trailers really didn't help, mainly due to the horrible music they employed... and the weird amount of emphasis on sleeping in a big pile. Someone literally just handed a DVD to me though, so, let's commence with the torturing of myself.
We start out with the opening logos, with graphiti scribbed all over them by the main character, then abruptly cut to an annoying hyperactive child who seems to be way way too old for this role screaming and just flat out torturing a dog. We then see him outside angrily yelling at a fence, attempting to engage in a snowball fight, crying, and running to his room. Now, again, I feel the need to stress that this kid looks like he's just on the verge of puberty. So... this comes off less as the hyperactive little kid sort of thing that would make sense and more like a kid with SEVERE emotional problems. I mean, yeah, movies routinely cast kids way older than they're supposed to be, but even adjusting for that, I can't buy him as anything below 8. Plus, we just had a scene of him in school, with a science teacher explaining how the sun will eventually grow to envelope the earth, but by then humanity will most likely be dead anyway. So... yeah. Kid is officially WAY too old for his personality to be at all within the bounds of acceptability.
Now he's back home again, wearing the fursuit I can't object to because that's in the book and all, but on a kid this old it seems creepy, especially since it doesn't resemble pajamas. So anyway, he screams at his mother, tackles her, bites her arm, and runs off screaming into the woods. This kid does not need a magical adventure to get his life in order. This kid needs intensive therapy and possibly anti-psychotic medication. He's not spoiled and annoying, he's seriously deranged. Anyway, he just found a random boat and sailed, again somewhat abruptly, into magical fantasy land. And for a moment things are all well and good because we're putting an illustration or two from a beloved children's book on screen without padding it out with a psycho kid.
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And... now here's our monsters showing up and talking way to much and ruining things some more. They're... dropping out of the sky inside weird woven reed spheres and just talking way too much in neurotic New Yorker tones to seem at all monster-like, before they're even on camera. Then our little psycho comes running in screaming at the top of his lungs and attacking the wickerspheres with sticks and kind of unnerving everyone. Well, everyone except for the most prominent monster, who is pro random smashing and encourages him to continue. A giant chicken comes over to tell him WTF! You're smashing my house dude! Our token female monster suggests they eat him because he's that annoying, but he uses his Weirding Way to command them to back off and starts preaching his delusions to them about how he made the heads of vikings explode when they attacked his snow fort. Female monster points out that their heads are pretty freaking huge, and thus probably immune to any head exploding powers he might have. So OK, that's an amusing line.
Anyway, the monsters are, generally, extremely gullible, accept his tale of being declared king of the vikings after the head explodey incident, and proceed to appoint him as head of their society, in the hopes that he might keep away their sadness. Then we slip into some Incidental Monster Dialog which is this creepy mix of realistic talk and childish babytalk that combines to have really creepy undertones of adults asking other adults to carry them. Then we pan over to a pile of human skeletons sitting in a nearby hole, which is immediately dismissed by the dialog, and everyone immediately proceeds to run around all happy like. Uh... what the hell was up with that movie? If you're foreshadowing, that's a pretty impressive degree of liberty you evidently plan to take with your ending, otherwise that was just an incredibly bizarre and tonally dissonant scene.
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By the way, our primary anarchist monster? His voice actor is James Gandolfini, best known for playing the main character in The Sopranos. I take this time to mention this because we've kind of slipped into a rather prolonged instance of not especially having a script and just having everyone running around laughing and saying overly kind and nurturing things to the kid... and now everyone has just spontaneously dogpiled together to essentially make a cave of flesh with the kid in a small cavity in the center. This is how they are apparently planning to sleep since their nests were arbitrarily smashed earlier, which is all well and good except for the profound degree that I am getting the vibe that this is the director expressing a creepy fetish of his. This is also happening as the sun is coming up, which is perfectly reasonable if you're me, but somewhat weird in this context.
So, the next day, we have some more dead air, which slowly transitions into the kid and Tony Soprano wandering through the desert talking about entropy... which is weird and kinda dark. Then we're distracted by an unusually large dog walking by in the background though, and it's time to move on to a cave with some sort of matchstrick recreation of a mountain range in it, populated by little clay figures. Then we get back into yet more weirdly morbid entropic dialog, and horrible music. So... all these monsters are apparently suffering from pretty severe depression. Also the setting in general is generally proving to be something of a desolate wasteland with a bit of a Shadow of the Colossus sort of vibe. Mainly it's the lighting.
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And now we're back to weirdly supportive and kind dialog and silly kid activities, specifically fort building. OK, you know how I've been watching a lot of movies lately that clearly need ritalin? This movie needs lithium. It just keeps swinging between upbeat and mellow, and weirdly depressing, totally at random. Anyway, they're building some big crazy fort which I have to admit has a weird aesthetic to it. It's like they're building a giant wicker Kline Bottle or something. And... see? Now we have an incredibly awkward situation, shifting us back into depressed mode. So far it really seems like you could change this setting from a magical island full of monsters to a drug rehab setting and everything would make a lot more sense.
And.... now we're stoning seagulls to death? Oh, they're owls. And... we're suggesting that when you nail owls out of the air with rocks, they like it. What the heck is with this movie and it's glorification of animal abuse? Apparently their names are Bob and Terry, and they possess unlimited wisdom, but they only speak owl so this drawn out scene of asking them for advice ultimately pointless. Generally speaking, the other monsters are cool with bringing the owls back to the fort, but Tony Soprano is weirdly against them and is really chewing the kid out for allowing them in rather than brutally murdering them.
Anyway, just when the kid seems to actually be leveling off into a somewhat socialized state, he decides the best way to relieve tensions is to arbitrarily factionize everyone into good guys and bad guys and encourage everyone to start hurling rocks at each other's heads. They're saying dirt clods, but these are clearly frelling rocks. Also a live raccoon. These are being thrown hard enough to knick people over too. So... we're taking a kid's book with a nice positive message, and turning it into a kid's movie which incourages fighting with rocks and animal abuse in highly imitable fashion. Wonderful! Anyway, the rock fight scene eventually gets stopped DEAD by two of the monsters having a way too authentic feeling screaming match about how someone took it too far by stomping on someone else's head.
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So, we're back into depressive mode. So, child king, let us see your proclaimed magic powers that you claim will alleviate our bad moods. At this point, the kid starts doing the robot. The monsters are unimpressed, throw their arms up, and ditch him. So, now he's just kind of aimlessly wandering through the wasteland alone. Eventually he comes across one of the monsters, who has a gaping head wound from the earlier rock fight. So... at least we had some consequences there? Injured monster goes "hey, you aren't really a king with magic powers are you." "No." "Well, don't ever let Tony Soprano find out." Sudden horror style orchestral sting. Yeah, things are suddenly getting weirdly dark here. I am not kidding when I say the tone of this movie all of the sudden is implying that Tony is going to snap and go on a killing spree. I'm not even exaggerating here. What the hell is WRONG with this movie?
... ... OK, Tony just ripped the giant chicken's arm off and started beating him with it. We have officially Gone There. And while I'm still reeling from that, it's time to introduce our next Creepy Frelling Fetish of the director! OK, so Tony has totally lost it and is chasing the kid. The monster he doesn't get along with, you know, the owl bashing one? Encourages the kid to crawl into her mouth and hide. So, he's just hanging out inside her stomach now, along with a live raccoon. Thankfully when he eventually comes out out's via the mouth and not some lower orifice, but all we have to do at this point is give someone a sex change and force them into a latex bodysuit and we will officially have all our bases covered on the Creepy Internet Fetish Top 5 Countdown.
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Oh, and now that it's the next day and the chicken has a stick jammed into the socket where his arm used to be, as some sort of bare bones prosthesis. So... now the kid is going to get on his boat and go home, because apparently he's done enough damage. The most entertaining monster (from the head explodey bit), sadly notes that he's the first king they haven't eaten. So... I guess we're canonically establishing that it is par for the course that human children arrive on this island, are declared king, asked to solve their bleak emotional problems, fail and are then killed and eaten, and that's why we had that pile of bones? Actually, slightly later, someone says "Don't go, I'll eat you up I love you so." Which I guess would be a sweet sad line out of context, but having established that our writer director here is apparently into the Vore scene, I'm just not going to think about that line.
So... the kid is sailing home, the monsters are all more depressed than ever to see him leaving, and are crying, and seriously, they were so depressed to begin with it's not unreasonable to assume they're now entering into a suicide pact, we're just being tasteful enough not to show it. Instead we have the kid wandering home, for a wordless reunion with his mother, who passes out as he sits down and eats the dinner he opted to freak out over and bite her rather than eat. And then we just have the credits.
So uh... what the hell? Seriously. What did I just sit through? That really didn't strike me as particularly having anything to do with the book, aside from the character designs, and it sure as heck didn't strike me as anything any little kid should ever watch. It's WAY too bleak, and I'm totally serious about it actively encouraging animal abuse. Every single character had some form of extreme debilitating mental illness which is never really addressed. The only way I can see the plot working is if we are attempting to present a metaphor for the life of a child living in a severely dysfunctional and abusive home. If that's what we were going for here, congratulations are in order I suppose. I mean, yeah, that totally resonated with my mercifully brief childhood experiences in Dangerous Unhealthy Environment by what the @#$% did you try to market it as a kid's movie if that's what you were going for? I'm not going to say this was terrible per se, but unless you're an artsy type with a thing for depression, this is not the movie for you. Interesting visual style, sure, but the content is seriously messed up.
