This is the gothic romance retelling of the classic fairy tale, directed by Katherine Hardwick, the director of TWILIGHT. The idea came from Leonardo DiCaprio (from TITANIC) and is produced by his company, Apian Way. The movie stars Amanda Seyfried, Gary Oldman, Virginia Madsen, Lukas Haas, Max Irons and Julie Christie.
The story: a young girl (Seyfried, because apparently people think she still looks 15) is in love with the boy next door, but she is to be married off to another guy who is rich, and while he's also nice and handsome she just doesn't love him. However, their village is under attack by a werewolf. Now a priest comes to hunt the werewolf who he says is someone who lives in the village (the people call it a werewolf but apparently didn't know werewolves were human most of the time). While the priest hunts the werewolf, the girl struggles to decide which boy she loves as she suspects each might be the wolf.
Was it good?
No.
It's bad. Very bad. Just a mess. I thought it was supposed to be a gothic romance, but there isn't really any story to the romance. She is supposed to marry one guy, but she's in love with someone else and decides to go with him...and that's the middle of the film. For the rest of the movie there's no tension at all. I suppose there's supposed to be some as she suspects that the guy might be the wolf, but it is all handled so poorly that it's hard to care. Not to mention they bounce you from suspect to suspect -- even her mom is a suspect at one point. In fact, the movie is so dominated by the question of who is the wolf that it feels more like a lame mystery than a lame romance.
It's a shame because I love the idea of using Little Red Riding Hood to tell a gothic romance, especially considering girls current obsession with bad boys (and what is the wolf other than ultimate dangerous, feral man?). However, this movie just failed to dig into any of that.
It wasn't romantic. It wasn't scary. The only thing it was is boring.
*** AVOID ***
***
On a message board someone asked:
"What does this (the failur eof the movie) tell us about the next dozen similar projects on the way?Should they pull the plug now?"
My answer:
I'm not sure what you mean by "similar projects."
I wouldn't pull the plug on anything because this. It was just a bad movie. There are few lessons I would take from it.
1) KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE DOING -- GENRE
I'm actually not sure what they were trying to do in this movie. I thought the idea was to do LRRH as a dark/gothic romance. I love the idea. But this isn't a gothic romance. This isn't a gothic anything, and it's not really a romance anything. Really what it is is a mystery, but the solution to the mystery ***SPOILERS*** is actually her father wanting her to leave with him. That's about as non-romance as you can get. In fact, this movie really is closer to THE WOLFMAN remake than it is to a romance story. Look at TWILIGHT -- you might love it or hate it, but it clearly is a romance story that has attracted millions of fans. IF YOU WANT TO MAKE A ROMANCE, THEN MAKE A ROMANCE.
2) KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE DOING -- CENTRAL QUESTION
I think almost every story has two central questions, usually an internal and external. One thing you should do is when you think about the movie, the genre, the audience ask yourself is your central questions are compelling AND are the answers compelling. Here the external question seemed to be WHO IS THE WOLF? Now if this is a fairy tale version of SCREAM it would make sense. But part of what made SCREAM work is the way they took a universal girl emotion -- Do I trust my boyfriend enough to give it up to him -- and externalized it to Do you think your boyfriend is a serial killer. There was a wonderful parallel there that the movie exploited beautifully (and which the sequels lacked which is part of why they sucked.)
So what's the parallel for the question of Who is the wolf? I don't know. I guess maybe they were trying to have it parallel her choice of men, but that really never worked. She makes her choice fairly early. You would think they use the idea of does she want a nice guy or a bad boy in some way, but that's not really there either. It's almost like they had her choosing between two guys because it worked in TITANIC, except TITANIC worked because it is basically ROMEO AND JULIET on a boat -- a girl set up to marry a man she doesn't love when she meets another guy and tries to run away with him, but fate itself then begins to seperate them and threaten their lives. LRRH doesn't have anything like that. Not at all.
And what is the answer to that question of Who is the wolf? ***SPOILER*** Well, it's her dad. How the fuck does that make sense? If you are making a romance the answer to the central question is her dad??? WTF?!?!?!?
Again, nothing works.
And that isn't even hitting at what the interior question is, because honestly I'm not sure there is one. At one point there is the struggle between which guy she will be with, bu that is decided so early and so easily that it's hardly a question at all.
3) KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE DOING -- TROPES
Movies like this that are playing around with pre-existing material, obviously part of the fun is what you do with the familiar to make it fresh and interesting. Here what tropes do they play with? Well, none. They have a nice beat with the "My what big eyes you have..." lines but that's about it. They don't really use anything from the fairy tale -- they don't exploit the concept at all. Compare that to SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN -- everything is there, the dwarves, the wicked queen, the prince, the apple, the mining, the magic mirror...often picked up and twisted around in ways that while not being subversive, are at least different and fresh. Here they don't use the story. That means for the people that are intrigued by the idea of a retelling of LRRH they aren't delivering what the audience wants. While I didn't love SW&tH for various reasons, it delivered tons of good stuff for people who want to see the big movie version of their classic fairy tale.
4) KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE DOING -- THEME
I think we all know that in a lot of ways theme is the appendix of the screen writing world -- basically considered useless until something starts to go horribly wrong. However, theme can have a powerful impact if it's not done in too didactic of a manner. SW&tH used theme in a smart way -- instead of the girl being helpless and having to be saved, he made it about teaching the girl to save herself (a reflection of what fairy tales were meant to do originally). It's a wonderful theme (not especially well executed) that cuts to the core of the story. In LRRH what is the theme? Um...try not to be a wolf? I don't know. Again, a lack of anything -- a clear romance story, a strong central question, a strong internal question, an exploration of the tropes of the original story...make this a mess completely lacking any sort of unity which makes an effective and powerful theme impossible.
There are lots of ways to have made this an effective movie. Like I've said, I love the concept of retelling LRRH as a gothic romance. So why not start by asking what romance you want to play around with? The fact that the movie doesn't have a compelling romance at the center that draws on the tropes and themes of the original story is a strong signal that these people wandered off the path and into the dark woods of bad metaphores where anyone can get lost and holy crap where the am I and how did I get here where it's so dark and there are so many trees? I'm so scared...
There's no reason to think this style of movie can't work -- whether it's reinventing fairy tales or a dark romance. But it's a good example that if you are going to make a movie you need to make clear what kind of movie you want to make and make sure all the element are being exploited and unified.
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