THE BFG (2016) MOVIE NEWS & REVIEW

THE bfg (2016) movie

Genre               |   Fantasy

Classification   |   PG

Running time   |   117 minutes

Released         |   30 June 2016

cast

Mark Rylance ... BFG
​Ruby Barnhill ... Sophie
Penelope Wilton ... The Queen
Bill Hader ... Bloodbottler

director

Steven Spielberg

writer

​Melissa Mathison ... (screenplay)
 
Roald Dahl ... (book)

cinematographer

​Janusz Kaminski

music

​John Willaims

film editor

Michael Kahn

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box office result

Worldwide             $ 199,905,224​ 

Australia                 $​​11,477,037

North America        $​55,483,770

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the best dialogue

Sophie: Never get out of the bed. Never go to the window. Never look behind the curtain.
[Sophie does so, and spots a giant. She rushes back to bed, but the giant comes for her... ]
Sophie: And that is where our story begins...

Sophie: What's in those jars?
The BFG: Dreams.
Sophie: Dreams aren't things!
The BFG: Is that right?

Sophie: Where am I?
The BFG: Giant Country!

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THE BFG (2016) IMAGES

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THE BFG (2016) STORY SYNOPSIS

​Ten-year-old Sophie is in for the adventure of a lifetime when she meets the Big Friendly Giant (Mark Rylance). Naturally scared at first, the young girl soon realizes that the 24-foot behemoth is actually quite gentle and charming. As their friendship grows, Sophie's presence attracts the unwanted attention of Bloodbottler, Fleshlumpeater and other giants. After traveling to London, Sophie and the BFG must convince Queen Victoria to help them get rid of all the bad giants once and for all.

THE BFG (2016) MOVIE REVIEW

Reviewed by Mark Geraghty   |   Review date 28 June 2016
​Pop Movee Rating ⭐⭐⭐

THE BFG is a gorgeous-looking but emotionally-flawed feature film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel. Written by the late Melissa Mathison (who receives a tribute in the film’s closing credits) and directed by Steven Spielberg, THE BFG fails to capture the wide-eyed magic and heart-felt emotion of their previous cinema collaboration, E.T. THE EXTRA TERRESTRIAL.

At 117 minutes, THE BFG is long for a children’s film and the relatively faithful adaptation of Dahl’s story results in an extended Third Act that sees the Big Friendly Giant’s dilemma solved in a most improbable fashion. It’s not very often that Steven Spielberg has become unstuck with material of this kind, but failure to evoke a genuine performance from young Ruby Barnhill, who plays the central character of Sophie, leaves the film reliant upon the Mark Rylance’s motion-capture performance as the Giant. As good as Rylance is, THE BFG never quite tugs at the heartstrings in the manner that the film’s creators may have hoped.

THE BFG opens in the small hours of the morning in central London; the camera making its way through the streetscape to a girls orphanage, where the audience meet Sophie for the first time. A montage of scenes show Sophie, a self-confessed insomniac, going through her nightly ritual to ward-off “The Witching Hour”. After scolding drunks on the street below, Sophie retires to her bed in the girl’s dormitory. Sensing something else out on the street, she dares to look and is confronted by the sight of a giant sneaking through the shadows. As it turns out, the giant has also seen her and the story wastes no time in whisking her off to Giant Country.

One of the problems from the outset of THE BFG is the absence of real character development for Sophie. Long-serving Spielberg Film Editor Michael Khan wastes little time in getting the audience into THE BFG’s world, but it comes at the expense of understanding who the little girl really is and what her emotional drivers are. This is the critical flaw of THE BFG. Sophie’s opening scenes show her as inventive, crafty and a bit of a grump. The absence of soft emotions or actions make her less sympathetic than perhaps she should have been.

The action in Giant Country is mixed...

The stand-out sequence of the Second Act sees Sophie and THE BFG embark upon a journey to Dream Country, a place high in the mountains where The BFG travels to help capture dreams and use them to help those most in need of some subconscious inspiration. An assault on The BFG’s home by the other nine giants who inhabit Giant Country leads to Sophie’s epiphany to help her new friend solve the very real bullying problem he’s been subjected to because of his status as “runt” of the giant litter. In all of this though, there’s a sense of something missing in the emotional connection between Sophie and the Big Friendly Giant.

Despite Dahl’s characters preposterous encounter with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, this segment of the film is one of the best as much needed humour is injected into proceedings. Spielberg has seldom ventured into slapstick comedy but the explosion of “Whiz-Poppers” punctuating the air is welcome as it lightens the tone of the film. The film’s climax closes events as expected, but the decision to deviate from Dahl’s ending may have purists of the novel scratching their heads, as it’s a significant departure from Dahl’s story and is symptomatic of the film’s problematic treatment of the relationship between Sophie and the BFG.

Steven Spielberg doesn’t make bad films. Rarely does he have a film that misses its emotional mark. THE BFG is not a bad film, but regrettably, the connection between Sophie and her new friend never becomes SO strong that the audience’s collective emotions are wrenched in the way it did with Elliot and E.T. - The BFG’s presumptive cinematic soulmate. The similarities between the two sets of characters are many, both narratively and thematically, but young Ruby Barnhill doesn’t have the same emotional range as the young Henry Thomas to deliver the punch needed to convince the audience of the sentiment she confesses for the Big Friendly Giant at the film’s conclusion.

The concept of adapting THE BFG is wonderful and the film is superbly crafted, but, without emotion to balance the technical wizardry, the film is “Good” and that’s not something audiences have come to expect from cinema’s modern master.

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