The BFG
Director: Steven Spielberg
Year Released: 2016
Rating: 1.5
Night owl Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) is taken from her orphanage by the Big Friendly Giant (Mark Rylance), an awkward fellow who collects dreams, eats rotten vegetables and mispronounces a lot of words ... oh, and who has to deal with even bigger giants than himself that love devouring human beings. Every once in a while Spielberg tries making a humanistic kids movie and it fails on him (Hook being his worst): here, he and screenwriter Melissa Mathison pad Roald Dahl's (very light) book and sap it of its cuteness (those Quentin Blake drawings are now grotesque and hyper-realistic) and wonder (overdosing on CGI doesn't add to a movie's human value) ... even the final 'battle' with the wicked giants (basically exiling them to their own island) is entirely too brief. Relevant (and irreverent) question: how much nutritional value does a small child have, anyway?
