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By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
After Twilight a The Hunger Games turning young adult novels into popular franchises, Hollywood studios moved quickly to lock up the rights to anything that could become a hit. That’s how the book Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, released in 2011, was turned into a Tim Burton film by 2016, an impressive transformation for a young adult gothic adventure. A perfect fit for Burton’s strange artistic vision, the underappreciated film is inexplicably now in Max’s streaming top 10.
A Hidden World Free of Time
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children throw aside the YA post-apocalypse setting cliche, and there is romance, but that’s not what the movie is about; instead, it’s a classic movie 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 the ruins of a house on a British island and discovers that the house, and all its extraordinary inhabitants, are still alive, thanks to a time bubble that n enable them to live again September 3, 1943. The home is a sanctuary for Peculiars, gifted children with strange powers, under the supervision of Miss Peregrine (Penny Dreadful’s Eva Green), who can both turn into a bird, and you’ll never guess what kind and manipulate time.
Jacob meets the strange children, including Emma (Fallout’s Ella Purnell), who can manipulate air but must wear heavy boots or float away, Enoch, the creepy boy who can raise the dead, Olive, the gingerbread pyrokinetic, Bronwyn, a little girl with superhuman strength , and Millard, the invisible boy . As expected, it turns out that Jacob is also a Peculiar One, with the very specific power of being able to see the invisible monsters, The Hollows, who want to eat 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.
Return to Tim Burton Form
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children full of creative designs and scenery-chewing performances, but no one has more fun in the film than Samuel L. Jackson as Barron, the shapeshifter who leads the hunt for the Peculiars. 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 characteristics as the film devotes its time to exploring the strange gothic world hidden in time bubbles instead of dwelling on the trauma and psychological damage of children who hiding from a world that would hate and fear. them.
Unlike the two Burton films that came before, Big eyesand after, Dumbo, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children it was a hit. Not enough for a sequel adapting the second book, Hollow Cityto be green, but a respectable $295 million against a budget of $110 million. The critical consensus of 64 percent fresh Rotten tomatoes knocking the film for being a case of style over substance, but fans would argue that is actually a point in the film’s favor.
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children began to drift from the public consciousness almost as soon as it was released. That is why it is surprising to see that the film proves to be 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 B-movie gothic adventures, it’s still one of the best.
