Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) is a ten year old orphan living in London. One night, she looks out of her window, and sees a giant. He calls himself the Big Friendly Giant, (Mark Rylance) because he doesn’t eat children. For this reason he has been ostracized by the other giants in the Land of the Giants. BFG takes Sophie to the Land of the Giants and tells her what he does for a living. BFG captures people’s dreams, and creates dreams for children. Sophie sees the nice dreams and nightmares of people and is enchanted. But the other giants get Sophie’s scent and want to eat her. After protecting Sophie, he takes he back to the orphanage, but she wants to go back to the Land of the Giants with the BFG. After heading off another attack by the giants, Sophie comes up with an audacious plan to get rid of the giants once and for all, does the plan work, or do the giants feast on the children of London?
There are movies made for kids, and there are kid themed movies made for adults. The BFG is strictly for kids, there is a good giant willing to protect the little girl from the other giants. While it is a laudable theme to have a noble giant protecting the youth of London, the story ends up being simplistic and predictable. There is also an overreliance on special effects, instead of developing the characters or plot, there are some nice moments between the BFG and Sophie, but not enough to sustain a two hour film. There is also some bathroom humor that only kids would find funny.
The BFG is a movie where the acting makes the script better than it is. Ruby Barnett plays Sophie as a precocious girl who’s not afraid to talk back to an adult, even when the adult is a 24 foot tall giant. But she adds just enough emotion to make Sophie sympathetic to the viewer. Mark Rylance plays the BFG with wit, charm, and a twinkle in his eye, making the giant a very approachable person.
A good movie uses CGI to supplement a good story, but the BFG, seems to be overwhelmed by special effects, and while some of the effects are vibrant and colorful, the over-reliance on special effects is distracting. Steven Speilberg directed this movie, and unlike Jaws where he kept the shark under wraps for much of the movie, special effects get in the way of the storytelling here. The pacing is slow, which doesn’t help anything. There’s a good story in here somewhere, but Speilberg didn’t find it. In E.T., he found the magic between a group of kids and an alien. In Close Encounters, there was the excitement of alien visitors. There is no sense of excitement or wonder here, too bad.
The BFG: Big Floundering Grandiosity.
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