# Laberinto del faun (Pan's Labyrinth)



## Sir Terrence (Jun 8, 2006)

I have never been a real big fan of foreign movies with subtitles, however as of late I have been running into some real treats that have now made me a big fan. 

About a month ago I saw Pan's Labyrinth at the movie theater and I really like it a lot and couldn't wait for it to come out on DVD. The other day I received an academy copy and sat down in my hometheater to watch it again. This time I REALLY enjoyed it. It is a fantasy movie, but its not for kids (too much graphic violence) its really what I would call a adult fantasy. The creature costumes are extremely imaginative. One creature who had eyes on the palms of his hands, and raise his hands (with palms facing out) to where his eyes would be was genius. 

Pan's Labyrinth is a story about a 12 year old girl who loves fantasy, travels with her pregnant mother to northern spain in 1944 to meet and live with her mother's husband and her new father. Her new father is a captain in franco's army and is extremely sadistic, cruel, and very detached towards here (he considers her baggage). During the night she meets a faun who tells her who she really is, a princess. However he tells her she must prove her royalty by surviving three gruesome tasks. If she fails, she will never prove herself to be the the true princess and will never see her real father, the king, again. 

I am not going to spoil the ending by telling you, but it is not what you expect and that is what makes this a great movie. 

One thing I noticed between my two experiences watching this movie is that the theater sound system could not pull out the fine details of the soundtrack that my hometheater could. The music score was one of the best and more realistic sounding I have ever heard. All of the fine harmonic instrumental textures of the score were captured splendidly, and actually sounded like the orchestra was playing in my room. All of the sound effects came across very realistic sounding including the sound of rain (which is very difficult to keep from sounding like frying bacon), the thunder (which can often sound artificial and digitally created), and explosions which sound deep and powerful (I could feel the subsonic waves and the floor shaking like crazy). 

I did find a bit of mosquito noise and some edge halo's, but this is a academy copy, so PQ while not bad was not the best I have seen. When upconverted to 1080i there was just loads of detail both in the close up's and in the background. This film color palette is pretty muted, so there is not much to see there. 

This movie is perfect for the film lover, but would be uninteresting to a lover of hollywood based action and adventure. This is not a Spielberg or Lucas fantasy either. It is the combination of great story telling, and uses visuals to advance that story telling. Something rare, but great to see. This is a must own movie when released on DVD.


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## Ayreonaut (Apr 26, 2006)

Thanks for the review, ST. I saw this reviewed on Ebert and Roeper, and it looks intriguing.


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## Magyar (Feb 20, 2007)

I plan to revisit this on HT as well, I was underwhelmed in the theaters, probably partially because of the hype it received prior to being released. It was rather boring to me. The faun's world was weird but not very interesting, lacked imagination IMO, or just was "darK" for a reason. A commentary by Del Toro would be great on the DVD IMO.


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