BEFORE: See, I told you this would make more sense today. It's an updated version of the same "Jack and the Beanstalk" story. I suppose I could go from here to those 2 modern versions of "Snow White" that got released last year, but honestly I'm just not interested in them. Plus I've got a schedule I'm trying to stick to.
Again, I'm suspending linking in favor of maintaining the theme. It's extremely difficult, practically impossible, to connect a film made in the 1950's with one made last year. (Lou Costello was in "Ride 'Em Cowboy" with Arthur Tovey, who was also in "Who's That Girl" with Stanley Tucci...)
THE PLOT: The ancient war between humans and a race of giants is reignited when Jack, a young farmhand fighting for a kingdom and the love of a princess, opens a gateway between the two worlds.
AFTER: This was a respectable updating of the classic fairy tale, and they even paved over some of the plotholes I mentioned last night. Instead of Jack's mother sending him to sell the family cow, here Jack's uncle sends him off to sell the family horse - because who wants to eat a horse? And Jack doesn't so much get swindled as he does distracted, by a stage show, the appearance of the princess, and a monk being chased by the palace guards. This makes things more confusing, but it also justifies the plot point - the city can be a confusing place for a country boy to go and sell a horse.
But here the magic beans are also historical relics - from a time when a previous king had to defend the land from the giants, the beans serve as a sort of gateway between our world and theirs. We're told the giants are stuck in the clouds, halfway between earth and heaven. Religious implications aside, I guess it sucks to be a giant, floating in cloud land (or is it another dimension? unclear...) with limited resources, unable to visit and pillage the land below. (What do they eat? Sheep and other giants? I guess they ate all the female giants because there didn't seem to be any.) There's also a magic crown thingy, made from the heart of a giant, some unholy blending of giant flesh and steel I guess, that enables humans to mentally control the giants. It's best not to think too much about the junk science here, because you also have to believe that a bean that gets wet instantly forms a beanstalk 5 miles high.
It just shows how this film set out to really up the ante - why have one giant when we can animate 100 giants? Why should they each have one head when some of them have two - I hear that two heads are better than one, anyway. They also had many people climbing up the beanstalk, instead of just Jack - we've got the princess's suitor/head villain, his two henchmen, the head of the Royal Guard and his right-hand man, so that's a lot of characters to track, all off in search of the lost princess.
I suppose it's impossible to do this without referencing "Star Wars" and "The Wizard of Oz" - three notable Star Wars actors are in this, and seeing Ewan McGregor fighting with swords and saying "I have a bad feeling about this..." are obvious tributes. Seeing Jack's house carried up into the clouds by the beanstalk just conjured up thoughts of the twister in "Wizard of Oz", I'm surprised the house didn't land on a giant and kill it. More Oz stuff coming up later this week, after the Hobbit stuff.
There was a half-hearted attempt at the end to tie this story to the modern-day, but it was pretty tenuous, and completely unnecessary.
Also starring Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "X-Men: First Class"), Ewan McGregor (last seen in "The Ghost Writer"), Ian McShane (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides"), Eleanor Tomlinson, Eddie Marsan (last seen in "The New World"), with the voices of Bill Nighy (last heard in "Rango"), Ralph Brown, and a cameo from Warwick Davis (last seen in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2").
RATING: 6 out of 10 pigs in blankets
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