The BFG

Dir: Steven Spielberg

2016

**

Roald Dahl's The BFG is quite a big book for my generation and indeed, every generation that has come since. I was in school when the book first came out and everybody read it and then read it again. Our teacher would read a few pages at the end of every school day and when it was finished she'd ask us to choose a new book and we would ask her to re-read The BFG again, which she did, several times, until the school year was out. It has since become one of those unique things, much more than just another children's classic but something rather special, it's now almost a vital part of youth and a magical part of childhood. Dahl's stories have been adapted before, some animated and some live-action, some good and some not so good but a live action version of The BFG pretty much always seemed impossible. The 1989 animated version featuring the voice of David Jason is very charming but it wasn't quite as magical as the book. 2016's BFG is actually twenty-five years in the making, with producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy beginning its development in 1991. Many writers were hired to work on a script and Robin Williams was at one point set to star as the BFG himself but nothing ever came of it because it never quite worked. They soon lost the right to the story and it wasn't until 2011, once the right sort of special effects had been developed, did Dreamworks pick up the rights and get Marshall and Kennedy back on board. The Lord of the Rings, Planet of the Apes and the Harry Potter movies had shown how motion capture animation could best be used and how far special effects in general had come, it was time for the mighty BFG to finally reach his full potential. Well, that was the idea anyway. The motion capture animation is all very clever, Mark Rylance sounds just as always thought The BFG would speak and young Ruby Barnhill was lovely as Sophie. I pretty much hated everything else about it. Much like with The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, Steven Spielberg and company just don't understand what made these books so magical for us. Spielberg grew up with adventure stories and sci-fi and was clearly passionate about such things, that's why Indiana Jones and Close Encounters are so great, but Tintin and The BFG just don't suit him. Both characters and stories are universal and universally loved but Tintin is very much a Belgium thing and the BFG is very much a British thing. This version of The BFG is another horrible example of Americans getting England wrong. It isn't just America that think England is Mary Poppins, Peter Pan and Harry Potter - to some extent, but this weird sort of nowhere place that tries to be London, is pretty far from reality. Fine, it is a fantasy film but there would be something rather lovely if they had tried to be a little more realistic with the visuals, particularly in the Tea with the Queen scene. So much of what I loved about the book was missing from the film, for me it was another case of just because you could, doesn't mean you should. Why Spielberg feels the need to turn every little simple act into a full blown action sequence is beyond me, it's actually getting quite tiresome and I don't think it has ever been necessary. It really does feel like he sticks an action sequence in places not where anything happens but where good quality story telling should be. I didn't feel the initial terror of the book's first chapter, I didn't feel the bond between Sophie and the BFG and the Queen's scene, my favorite from the book, was a huge let down for me, even though I did like Penelope Wilton's version of Liz II. I'm generally all for evolution of ideas and I'm not always against remakes or reinterpretations but I think this film is nothing more than a cash in of a popular book made by people who have no emotional connection to the original story. It should have been made with passion but it was not in my opinion. I was open minded about this film but now I've decided it's a Quentin Blake style animation for me or nothing. When you can replicate the feeling you get reading a book then an adaption is futile and that is what this film has become.