| Overall Grade: |
F |
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| Story: |
F |
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| Acting: |
A |
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| Direction: |
D |
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| Visuals: |
B |
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Tricked by Terrible-bithia Trailers
by Joe (movies profile)
Jun 14, 2008
75
of
105 people found this review helpful
Call me unenlightened if you will, but my sole previous exposure to the movie "Bridge to Terabithia" before taking my family to go watch it in the theater were the trailers showing on TV ads. Blissfully unaware, I was, that the movie was based on an award winning middle reader novel, acclaimed for its realistic portrayals of financial distress, grief, and despair. Unaware I was, also, that the movie was directed by Gabor Csupo, the same creative genius who brought us such culturally uplifting works as "Rugrats" and "The Simpsons." I was even less than cognizant of the new strategy in Hollywood to advertise a movie as cute and cuddly and then slap you with despondency and gloom, as in Pan's Labyrinth. All I knew of the movie were the Disney-esque depictions of castles, happy childhood fantasies, and comedic CGI tree-creatures with green toe cheese which were pictured in the advertisements for the movie. Led to believe I was going to watch a heartwarming movie along the lines of previous Disney releases such as "The Chronicles of Narnia," I plunked down $21.50 for two adult tickets and one child for the Saturday matinee and the moviemakers' deception was complete.
The movie begins inauspiciously enough, in an unnamed town which I'll from now on refer to as downtown Jerkville, USA, the town where everyone is a raving jerk. In the opening scene, our protagonist, Jess Aarons, is verbally abused by his older sisters before going to school and being bullied and harassed by nearly every other student in the school. School persecutor Janice Avery extorts money from all the other girls, charging tolls to use the bathroom while the teachers look the other way. Jess's father is an abusive miscreant as well. Oh well, it's not his fault, he's got money problems and a tough job on which to raise a family. Even our hero Jess doesn't escape the curse of jerkdom, as he constantly dumps on his little sister Mae Belle. Just as Csupo's mean-spirited representation of small town America begins to get boring, however, we're treated to a ray of light. Leslie Burke's character is introduced to us. She's friendly, smart, creative, and pretty, and therefore obviously not from this town. Leslie, the new girl at school and Jess' next door neighbor, quickly becomes Jess' best friend.
The two escape their oppressive surroundings by crossing a stream into a wood, which is soon transformed by Leslie's very creative and active imagination into the magical land of Terabithia, filled with squirrels, birds, and dragonflies who become imaginary CGI warriors in the fight for Terabithia's kingdom. The viewer is drawn into the story as it becomes obvious that Leslie and Jess are soul mates. All seems well in this magical land belonging only to Jess and Leslie, but across the stream in Jerktown, trouble is brewing in the cynical mind of Csupo and company.
The young female school music teacher, who Jess has always had an overload of male hormones for, invites him to accompany her to the town's art museum. Jess thinks about asking Leslie to go on the trip as well, but decides against it. He returns home to find that Leslie has fallen into the creek and drowned trying to cross into Terabithia. From this point on, the movie becomes a treatise on grief, despair, and pain as Jess deals with the loss of Leslie. At this juncture, nothing the writers could do would be able to save the storyline from being a great celebration of negativity and forlornness. The plot tries to have a heartwarming ending when Jess stops treating his sister Mae Belle like a worthless good for nothing pain in the tilly, builds a bridge to Terabithia, and makes his sister a princess, but by then, I already wished I'd left the theater.
Fans of the novel will brush off my negative review, praising the film as an accurate portrayal of life rather than an unrealistic fantasy where happiness always triumphs. I went to the movie, however, to be entertained, not to have a big dose of the ugliness of the real world force fed down my gullet. If I wanted to experience pain and suffering, I would have rather volunteered at a nursing home or homeless shelter. Although the acting and character development were great, for the film's mean-spiritedness and misleading advertising campaign, I give "Bridge to Terabithia" a big, troll-foot sized "F." |
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