On 12 June 2019, I watched on DVD the fantasy movie Where The Wild Things Are – that's 97 minutes of my life I'll never get back!
Directed by Spike Jonze, and released in 2009, Where The Wild Things Are was inspired by the famous award-winning children's picture book of the same title, which was originally published in 1963 in French (with its first English translation appearing in 1967). It was written and exquisitely illustrated by Maurice Sendak, and is a book that I've always loved.
However, the intrinsic problem faced by anyone trying to convert it into a movie is that this book is basically a series of gorgeous pictures, with few words and minimal associated story.
In it, a young boy named Max (played by Max Records in the movie), wearing his favourite wolf costume, is naughty one evening, so his mother (played by Catherine Keener) banishes him to his bedroom, inside which, inexplicably, a forest grows and a sea develops, on which Max sails in his boat until he reaches a land where the monstrous and highly ferocious Wild Things live. But after he stares them in the eye, they make him their leader, they all cavort together for a while, then Max leaves them, travelling back in his boat until he re-enters his bedroom, where there is no longer a forest but there is a piping hot supper waiting for him. The end.
Consequently, in order to make a feature-length movie based upon this briefest of plots, a much more detailed, extensive storyline needs to be devised. Unfortunately, however, the one that was devised – and which also introduces additional characters, including Adrian (Mark Ruffalo), the boyfriend of Max's mother (unnamed in the book but christened Connie in the movie) – is imho truly abysmal, repetitive, and mind-numbingly dull. So much so, in fact, that halfway through Where The Wild Things Are, I had to pause the DVD, go off some place where they most definitely were not, and do something else for an hour or so, in order to wake up my stupefied brain before subjecting it to the second half of this film's slumber-inducing tedium. If you're looking for a cure for insomnia, here it is!
To my mind, this movie seems to have been aimed at an audience of four-year-olds with the attention span of a gnat, because it consists of a series of disjointed scenes of imbecilic, infantile content that its creators presumably thought that such children would enjoy, which in turn makes the film's PG rating both unexpected and in my view wholly unnecessary – no-one would surely keep awake long enough to be frightened by it!
The Wild Things were represented by humans in enormous suits, whereas CGI or traditionally animated monsters would have been much more effective, especially as the source material is a picture book famed for its detailed hand-drawn illustrations.
All in all, Where The Wild Things Are was for me a very disappointing experience, and also a very depressing one – the monsters were inexplicably unhappy throughout the movie. And quite creepy at times too, calling to mind some bizarre hybrid of H.R. Pufnstuf and The Wicker Man! Indeed, at one point I half expected to see Max and his huge Wild Thing companion walk around a corner near the cliff face and be confronted by a giant wicker man, with all of the other Wild Things assembled there, ready to capture Max and place him inside it!
Not even Tom Hanks, who didn't star in it but did serve as a co-producer, could inflate this flat fantasy for me. I'm sorry, but, at least as far as I'm concerned, Where The Wild Things Are is a very weird but not in any way wonderful movie. Or, to use a 1960s music-inspired metaphor: Wild Things, I think I love you – NOT!!
Nevertheless, you may feel differently, so please click here to watch an official trailer for Where The Wild Things Are on YouTube, and make up your own mind.
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Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly
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