"La Cité des enfants perdus" is excellent, imaginative and very accomplished movie-making with an excellent, extremely fitting cast. Still the film leaves a few things to be desired and this is mainly due to a script that almost seems to embrace plot holes.
One's willing compliance with the thieves and Miette's sudden affection for One are never fully explained, at more than one point characters use tiny pieces of evidence to jump to the wildest conclusions and some layers of the story seem oddly disconnected from one another. When you think of the bare-bones story you even realize how the subplot involving the evil Siamese twin sisters was unnecessarily stretched out to cover a wide range of movie without very much consequence other than providing a back story for Miette and setting her up with One. Also there is a brilliantly weird, wonderful climax that just flat out ends the movie, leaving the viewer hanging without a sense that the story, despite completed, has been fully resolved.
I certainly won't brag about all the riddling, fantastic moments (like the dream sequences) that are not very easy to understand. That is actually the movie at its best and most imaginative and should be left to everybody's own interpretation. As I said, the pictures were wonderful and Jeunet triumphs in constructing a dark, menacing world rooted in our own but at the same time completely disconnected, a joyride through the subconscious.
See it for the fun and the wonderful experience. Just be aware that emotionally some of it will pretty much leave you hanging in the air due to an underdeveloped script.
One's willing compliance with the thieves and Miette's sudden affection for One are never fully explained, at more than one point characters use tiny pieces of evidence to jump to the wildest conclusions and some layers of the story seem oddly disconnected from one another. When you think of the bare-bones story you even realize how the subplot involving the evil Siamese twin sisters was unnecessarily stretched out to cover a wide range of movie without very much consequence other than providing a back story for Miette and setting her up with One. Also there is a brilliantly weird, wonderful climax that just flat out ends the movie, leaving the viewer hanging without a sense that the story, despite completed, has been fully resolved.
I certainly won't brag about all the riddling, fantastic moments (like the dream sequences) that are not very easy to understand. That is actually the movie at its best and most imaginative and should be left to everybody's own interpretation. As I said, the pictures were wonderful and Jeunet triumphs in constructing a dark, menacing world rooted in our own but at the same time completely disconnected, a joyride through the subconscious.
See it for the fun and the wonderful experience. Just be aware that emotionally some of it will pretty much leave you hanging in the air due to an underdeveloped script.