BEFORE: I've got time for one more film with Samuel L. Jackson carrying over before I start my Mother's Day trilogy of films, and it's very fortunate that I found one that will lead right into it. Still, I'm cutting the chain a little short here, because another film with him is going to pop up next week, and I didn't get to "The Red Violin" or two other films that just started airing on cable, so I'll have to do a follow-up chain later, and I know exactly where it can connect to some of the loose films that are floating around the bottom of my list. With luck maybe it can tie a bunch of them together, I haven't worked all that out yet.
THE PLOT: When Jacob discovers clues to a mystery that stretches across time, he finds Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, but the danger deepens after he gets to know the residents and learns about their special powers.
AFTER: At this point, it sort of goes without saying that a Tim Burton film is going to be weird, I'll probably tune in just to see HOW weird, and if he's finally gone off the deep end. Umm, wait, since he sort of started there with "Beetlejuice", I'll tune in to see if he's gotten into the DEEPER end, and I think that's the case. He's practically in the Marianas Trench by now. He's transcended "weird" and he's now in territory that's so out there that he's practically circled back again - he's gone as far out as he can, so there's nowhere else to go, it seems. You expect this to be weird in the same way you expect a Wes Anderson film to have introspective characters.
With a school for children with unusual, impossible talents, naturally this is going to seem like it's venturing into "X-Men" territory, but with both the latest "X-Men" and the "New Mutants" film pushed back into 2019 now, at least the field is a little open for this one. If it weren't for the time-travel, this almost feels like it could fit into the X-Universe, somewhere between the Fox show "The Gifted" and the latest comic run titled "Generation X", featuring such little-known mutants as Eye Boy, Nature Girl, Hindsight and Bling (gee, I can't imagine why that comic book didn't sell enough copies to avoid cancellation, it's almost like people need to see characters they recognize and like...).
The main character here follows the stories told to him by his grandfather, about a special school he knew back in the 1940's, and the strange headmistress and students there - but of course, there's the possibility that these bedtime stories were all made up. Until, that is, Jacob visits the site of the school, decades later, and finds himself pulled back in time to 1943, the last day before the school was bombed by the German Luftwaffe, and it turns out the students have been placed in a time-loop, and have been living the same day over and over for the last 70 years, without getting older, and also somehow without dying from boredom.
The Peculiars include a girl who is lighter than air and can also breathe underwater, a teen who can re-animate the dead and also mechanical puppets, a girl who can burn whatever she touches, an invisible boy, a super-strong little girl, and a girl who can manipulate growing vegetables - and those are the USEFUL powers. The non-useful ones are a girl with an extra mouth on the back of her head, a boy who can project his dreams onto a screen like a movie, and a boy with bees living in his stomach (for God's sake, WHY?). It's very hard to envision a scenario where this exact combination of powers can come in handy, though the film tries, it just doesn't get there.
This is all set in a universe where the rules about time, space and having powers are whatever the story needs them to be, and I think are fairly inconsistent over the course of the film. But one "rule" is that Jacob couldn't enter the time-loop unless he was also a "peculiar", and he finds out that he has the same power his grandfather did, which is the ability to see the invisible monsters called "Hollows", not to be confused with the "Deathly HALLOWS" from the Harry Potter-verse, though I'm sure this film wouldn't mind if you made the connection there for them. (Right, another U.K. school that teaches kids how to use their powers, so this is really "X-Men" meets "Harry Potter", or at least it's trying to be.).
So there's a bit of a paradox, since Jacob's grandfather died early on, which kicked off his whole adventure and motivated him to travel to Wales to find the school. But during the adventure Jacob entered a time-loop that took him back, let's say six months, and during that part of the story, the entity that killed his grandfather was killed, before he could kill the grandfather. So therefore, Jacob's grandfather did NOT die, because his killer died before he did. That's great, but if he hadn't died, then Jacob never would have been motivated to travel to Wales in the first place, so then the killer would NOT have been killed. Since time-travel is capable of creating these conflicting situations, it's fairly safe to say we'll never have real, working time travel.
Also starring Eva Green (last seen in "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For"), Asa Butterfield (last seen in "Ender's Game"), Terence Stamp (last seen in "The Art of the Steal"), Judi Dench (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Chris O'Dowd (last seen in "St. Vincent"), Kim Dickens (last seen in "Gone Girl"), Allison Janney (last seen in "The Girl on the Train"), Rupert Everett (last seen in "The Importance of Being Earnest"), Ella Purnell (last seen in "Maleficent"), Finlay MacMillan, Lauren McCrostie, Cameron King, Pixie Davies, Georgia Pemberton, Milo Parker (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), Raffiella Chapman, Hayden Keeler-Stone, Joseph Odwell, Thomas Odwell, Louis Davison, Scott Handy (last seen in "Shadowlands"), Helen Day, Jack Brady, Philip Philmar, Robert Milton Wallace, O-Lan Jones (last seen in "Pacific Heights"), Nicholas Amer, Shaun Thomas, Justin Davies, with a cameo from Tim Burton (last seen in "The Death of "Superman Lives" - What Happened?")
RATING: 4 out of 10 vintage photos
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