Today’s post begins with a fractal called MixIt. Read my commentary on The Spiderwick Chronicles and you’ll probably see why I picked that as the image.-
It wasn’t too long into The Spiderwick Chronicles that I realized I’D SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE. Of course then it had a different title (The Seeker) and a different cast of characters but it was essentially the same movie. The story is pretty much the same: disaffected “Tween” boy finds himself in a strange out of the way place where he encounters a magical secret that thrusts him into a "cosmic" battle he never planned on. I don’t need to say much of anything else about the story. You can almost hear the gears grinding away as the plot takes you from one point to the next. (I saw this movie in a theater full of youngsters and I don’t even think THEY were surprised.)
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Freddie Highmore (in his third movie in six months) plays Jared (the “disaffected tween” I mentioned earlier). He’s angry about having to leave his home and Father in New York City to some moldering old Victorian manse in the hinterlands. He also plays his own twin brother Simon (but manages to never give the impression that he’s playing against himself via “split screen” imaging). Character Actors David Strathairn (playing Arthur Spiderwick) and Joan Plowright (“crazy“ Aunt Lucinda) do fine with their roles Seth Rogen plays to type as the voice of Hognose the Goblin as does Martin Short providing the voice of Thimbletack--a brownie who sometimes morphs into a boggart. The effects, a mix of models and C.G.I. are acceptable if not super spectacular. The directing is suitable and the music is quite nice. In the end, it is just the overall similarity to The Seeker that really bothers me.
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The Spiderwick Chronicles isn’t a particularly bad movie--but it suffers terribly from bad timing. (If this movie and The Seeker I’d probably be making the same complaints about that one.) It lacks originality and doesn’t really make up for that with “heart” or “charm” but it is a nice, safe movie the whole family can watch.
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FINAL GRADE: C-
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