By Jonathan Klotz | Published
After Dusk And The hunger games After turning young adult novels into blockbuster franchises, Hollywood studios quickly moved to lock down the rights to anything that could become a hit. This is how the book Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, released in 2011, was transformed into a Tim Burton film in 2016, an impressive twist for a gothic adventure for young adults. Perfectly suited to Burton’s uncanny artistic vision, the underrated film is, inexplicably, now in Max’s streaming top 10.
A hidden world freed from time
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children we throw aside the YA post-apocalypse cliché, and there is a romance, but that’s not the point of the film; rather, it is a classic cinematic adventure with a young boy, Jacob (Asa Butterfield), discovering a hidden world. In this case, he follows in his grandfather’s footsteps when he arrives at a ruined house on a British island and discovers that the house and all its eccentric inhabitants are still alive, thanks to a time bubble that brings them back to life on September 3. 1943. The house is a sanctuary for the Peculiar, gifted children with strange powers, under the supervision of Miss Peregrine (Penny Dreadful Eva Green), both of whom can transform into a bird, and you’ll never guess which type, and manipulate time.
Jacob meets the special children, including Emma (The fallout Ella Purnell), who can manipulate the air but must wear heavy boots to avoid flying away, Enoch, the scary boy who can resurrect the dead, Olive, the ginger pyrokinetic, Bronwyn, a little girl with superhuman strength , and Millard, the invisible boy. . As expected, it turns out that Jacob is also a Peculiar, with the very specific power of being able to see the invisible monsters, The Hollows, who want to consume Peculiars to regain their lost human forms. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children tells a strange story and plays with familiar tropes, but it’s also one of Tim Burton’s best films in years.
Tim Burton’s return to form
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is filled with creative designs and breathtaking performances, but no one has more fun in the film than Samuel L. Jackson as Barron, the shapeshifter leading the hunt for the Peculiar. It’s impressive how Jackson manages to overact in a Tim Burton film, but it works. Each character is essentially a sketch with one or two defining traits, as the film spends its running time exploring the strange gothic world hidden in time bubbles instead of dwelling on the trauma and psychological damage of the children themselves. hiding from a world that would hate and fear. them.
Unlike the previous two Burton films, Big eyesand after, Dumbo, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was a success. Not enough for a sequel adapting the second volume, Hollow cityto get the green light, but a respectable $295 million against a budget of $110 million. The fresh 64 percent critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes considers the film a matter of style rather than substance, but fans would argue that this is actually a point in the film’s favor.
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children began to recede from public consciousness almost as soon as it was published. That’s why it’s surprising to see that the film is proving popular enough on Max to crack the top 10 alongside Burton’s latest film, Beetle juice Beetle juice. It’s not a perfect film, but for fans of Burton and old-school gothic B-movie adventures, it’s still one of the best.
