I have just finished watching Pan's Laberinth for the first time an I felt compelled to blog on it. I must confess I find myself asking "what was the point in that?" now that it's finished. For those who don't know, Pan's Laberinth is set in 1944 Franco Spain. The story follows a young girl called Ofelia, who discovers an ancient laberinth where she lives. She meets a Faun who tasks her with several challenges in order to discover who she really is.
The (apparently) much celebrated spanish fantasy film had been strongly recomended to me by several people in the past. Eash recomendation seemed to follow the same line;

"It's fantastic!" "It's something you've never seen before!" "You forget that it's even subtitled!" and ofcourse "The story blew me away!".

Well I can safely say that none of the above can apply to my experience of the film. The way the film is made to appear -by the DVD cover, posters, trailer etc- gives the impression of a quite different film. I was under the impression that it was at least 50% fantasy, where as in actuall fact the amount of screen time taken up by fantasy s outweighed by the realworld elements. Not that this alone makes it a bad film or anything, but it is known now as a fantasy film and the Fantasy element seems to only pop up now and again. As well as this, I couldn't really make much sense of the fantastical plot. The real world parralell plot I understood well enough but the Former I found wasn't explained well enough.
This ultimatetly resulted in me, as an audience member, not really caring about the climax of the story -as I felt I was not provided enough information.
Aside from the (in my opinion) faulty Fantasy story, the technical aspects of the film I found very well achieved. Good lighting, subtle but effective camera shots and good dialogue. However all of this seems lessened in relevance when the story is faulted.
Well that's only my opinion.