Movie Review - The Princess Bride

Okay, I've just seen a movie that I've been wanting to see for a while. "The Princess Bride" is the movie that gave us that pop culture meme "My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die" and it served as the source text for 'Shrek'. I've heard many people speak of this movie with affection and respect, including Mark Kermode, who's opinion on such things I normally have a high regard for (though, he's had a lot of strikes against his name recently, truth be told I think he's losing it) so I've wanted to see it for a long time.

Let's get this over with quickly. One word sums up this movie, and that word is:

FAIL.

This movie is beyond bad, beyond terrible, this movie is like being trapped in a broken lift with someone who thinks they're cute, clever, funny, and charming, but who is none of those things (and probably drunk). I admit I've seen worse, 'Chocolate' was worse, but this is certainly up there. What's more, this is a movie that I went into not with high expectations, but with a degree of goodwill. Early on Peter Falk turns up, and I think "Hey! It's Columbo!" and the goodwill rating goes higher. Really, this movie didn't have to do much for me to think "Well, it's not all that, but it's alright," yet it pissed all its goodwill away.

Which raises a very mysterious question, why would the near infallible factory of awesome that is Pixar choose to remake this awful movie? I think I know why, we'll get to that later.

Of course people are going to say that my response to this movie is because of what's happened in movies since. This movie's been remade, and it's been remade better. Times have moved on and 'you can't understand it if you didn't see it back in the day', blah, blah, blah. I'm going to use ample evidence from within this movie itself to prove that this is not true, to prove that the movie is bad, and that it's makers knew it was bad.

Let's examine what we have here.

The movie opens with a sick kid in bed playing video-games. His granddad turns up to read him a story from a book, the rest of the movie is that story.

Stop. Why the frame? Why does this movie need a framing device? Why don't we just go straight into the main story?

Simple, the main story is poorly scripted, unengaging, rather woodenly acted, and has third-rate special effects. The producers knew this, and slapped the frame device around it because it allows them to say "Ah, but it looks that way because we're acting out a story from a children's book! Clever huh? It's all postmodern and ironic and stuff."

No it isn't, it's just annoying. All the way through this movie has this smug feeling of "Doing satire" of being a self-referential send-up of the Errol-Flynn movie magic. It's ironic fan-fiction. If it were a genre of music, it would be Filk.

The jokes are completely unfunny. You can tell they're there because the cast deliver them with such gusto, convinced that each turkey is gold-dust. Consider this:

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in Asia" - but only slightly less well-known is this: "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line"!

That stuff about 'a land war in Asia' is supposed to be funny, you can positively hear the movie saying:

"eh? eh? You see what I did there?"

"Yes. It wasn't funny."

"Nah, you just don't get it. I just broke the fourth wall, 'cause you didn't expect-"

"No, I totally got it, it's not that hard to understand, it just wasn't funny. What else have you got?"

This is the tone of the whole movie. It didn't make me laugh once, but remained smugly convinced of it's own comic brilliance. I understand jokes fade with age, but there should be some afterglow, some hint that they were once funny.

Then, there's the characters. Early on we meet the leading lady and leading man. Initially they are completely, mindblowingly, dull. I did not give a hoot if they lived or died, but I figured things hadn't gotten moving yet. I was right, later we get to know them in more detail, and they move from dull to annoying.

The leading man, Wesley, turns up later pretending to be a pirate, and behaves like a bit of a git. We later discover that he's just pretending to be a git, but by then it's too late. You see, Wesley is a colossal Mary Sue (yes, I know I've railed against the whole 'Mary Sue' thing in the past, but even a stopped clock is right some of the time). He's always confident, and better than everyone else in everything, and he thinks he's charming, but he's just kinda... cardboard. The taint of 'smug git' that he brings on himself won't wash off, because there's not enough character there to supplant it. It's like my mother used to say "If you pull faces like that, the wind will change, and you'll be stuck that way". Wesley pretends to be a git and it becomes the lasting impression, because when he takes off his git mask there's nothing underneath.

But worse than the leading man is the leading lady.

Stop, exhibit B. Something is missing from this movie. Normally in a film like this there's a Good Girl and a Bad Girl that the hero has to choose between. Now, I always have an issue that the hero generally choses wrong. The Good Girl is normally a little frumpy and dim and whiny, whereas the Bad Girl is sassy and smart, a provocative dresser, obviously good in bed, and has her own interstellar battle-cruiser (and two helmets). However there's normally *something* about the Good Girl that lets me maintain some shred of belief and respect for the hero's decision.

"The Princess Bride" features no Bad Girl. In fact it features no other females of reproductive age that have names or a single line of dialogue. I think we see some peasant girls in a crowd scene, but that's it.

Why do you think this would be, eh?

Well, in a scene involving "Rodents Of Unusual Size"...

"You thought we'd say 'Giant Rats' but that wouldn't have been funny! Eh? Eh?"

"It wasn't funny."

"No, you just don't get it, you see-"

"I got it. It wasn't funny. What else have you got?"

... in this scene involving giant rats, the hero is downed and savaged by one such rat. His sword lies on the ground some distance away. The princess stands with her mouth open, watching the love of her life get molested. Surprisingly Wesley at no point cries "Oi! Princess! A little help here?!", but then when she finally does realise she should act, you understand why he didn't ask for her help.

The princess, after watching Wesley get rat-raped for and extended period of time, finally realises she should do something, and picks up a stick.

A stick.

There's a sword on the ground, and she picks up a stick.

She then proceeds to fall over in her high heels. The rat turns on her (not sure why, she didn't hit it or anything), and she kinda pokes at it, misusing the stick.

Now, I don't want you to think I'm coming at this from a feminist perspective. I'm coming at this from a biological perspective. This stupid bitch doesn't even know how to use a stick. A STICK. What did she evolve from? Monkeys know how to hit things with sticks! Monkeys aren't even apes! And what kind of human being has a choice between a sword and a stick, and thinks 'I'm going for the stick, that's advanced weaponry that is?'

Wesley, you're a bit of a git, but still I'm speaking to you as a friend. You plan to marry this... this.. creature? I understand you feel sorry for her, I do too, it's a shame, but if your children are lumbered with her genes then they're toast! She's pathetic! She needs protection in some kind of institution, but for heaven's sake not the institution of marriage!

This is why there's no other females in the movie. It would be egregious of Wesley to marry this simpering dimwit if he had any other choices at all. If there was a scene where so much as a milk-maid had a line of dialogue the audience would be screaming "Marry her!"

So again, they knew the film was bad, they had to take out all the other women to hide how poorly realised their lead female character was.

And then it's back to the awful jokes. Here's another prize witticism.

Sonny, true love is the greatest thing, in the world-except for a nice MLT - mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe

In fact, go to the imdb quotes page for this movie, and you can read more and more of them. Are any of them funny? Can you imagine a scenario, a world, a situation in which they would be? Would they be funny if you were twelve? Would you think the 'Don't get involved in a land war in Asia' thing would be funny if you were twelve?

And periodically we flick back to Granddad and the kid, the kid sitting with his video-game joystick set aside (always clearly in view). Improbably the kid seems to find this turgid rubbish engrossing. No real kid would.

You see, this claims to be a movie for kids. It isn't. It's a movie for grandparents that declares the superiority of the paper-based media that they grew up with, that's real culture that is, and one day the kids will realise and turn back to it. There was a lot of this propaganda in the 80s against anything computer generated or electronic. Rockers with electric guitars turned into their parents, complaining that the new music was 'just soulless noise'. Video-games were derided. Cyberpunk was dismissed as 'not real science fiction' by the lovers of phallic silver space-rockets.

And this solves the mystery of Pixar. Pixar is a company full of those poor kids who were forced to see this movie. They knew it was propaganda by the older generations trying to discredit the culture they were growing up in, the culture of pixels, not paper. Well, revenge is a dish best served at the box office. The kids at Pixar knew that their artform had been dissed, and that this would not stand. The plan was simple, they would meet this insult to the computer artist by demonstrably producing a better product. CGI-characters made of pixels would act cardboard 'human' characters off the screen. Their hero would be likeable, their jokes would be funny, the clever bits would be clever, and the princess would be a woman worth fighting for. They would remake and BURY this second-rate, amateurish piece of book-fetish propaganda. Embrace, extend, extinguish.

And they did. Shrek isn't just a better movie, it's orders of magnitude better. That's how you know who's won the fight, last one standing, and the winner is Pixar.