Luuk-2

The summary sums it up and wasting too many words on this trashy series would be giving it too much honour. Production and acting is OK, but the story and the way the viewer is manipulated is unworthy of a 12 year old. Characters are mere stereotypes and the depiction of the Dung Ages consists of a heaping together everything the popular imagination always associated it with it and spreading it out out more or less evenly across 8 episodes, whether it makes sense or not (witches and witchcraft; evil churchmen, evil knights, you name it) while introducing new elements that make no sense at all (like the way everyone is able to talk to each other whether they are of Norman or Saxon descent). Don't waste your time on this.

What a disappointment this film was. After the first half hour or so there is little to enjoy left, apart from perhaps the camera-work. Not that the acting is bad, it isn't, although I think the demands made of Jodelle Ferland playing Jeliza-Rose are sometime more than she can bear (Janet McTeer and Brendan Fletcher shine). The problem, however, lies elsewhere and is one that I have encountered before in some Gilliam films like Baron of Munchausen, Fear and Loathing and even Time Bandits, and that is the story, which is just too thin to keep the attention for long. The idea of a girl living in a fantasy-land because the real world has little to offer her is fine, but one then expects this fantasy world to be used to reflect and comment on reality, to show perhaps how Jeliza develops to the extent that she might be able to cope with reality later on, or it might be used as a running commentary on the self-centered and callous world in which the film is set ... anything might have worked for me. But nothing of the sort happens. At the end of the film Jeliza is still the same girl she was at the beginning and we are none the wiser why Gilliam bothered to share her life with us. This makes the vaguely fairy-tale ending even harder to bear. The subplot of Dickens and Dell adds a few narrative complications, but they too are imposed upon the main character and ultimately leaves this viewer at least just as dissatisfied. This lack of substance (be it social, psychological, or philosophical) becomes even more obvious if one compares the film to others in which the fantasy world of children plays a prominent role, such as Guillermo del Toro's harrowing Faun's Labyrinth (2006) or Victor Erice's brilliant allegory, Spirit of the Beehive (Spain, 1973). These films had powerful stories to tell and the comparison with Tideland just goes to show how hollow and soulless the last one is. What a pity.