I liked it, the peculiar children were cool and the movie was fun; I wish they’d spent a little less time making Jake act like an idiot or concentrating on the annoying love story and I was also rather annoyed at the nonsense of the grandfather being still alive, which would not be possible, but the movie was fun enough nonetheless.
I think that the grandfather-still-alive thing is absurd because even if they killed the murderer in the past, they killed him ‘after’ he had killed grandpa Abe, so why would he still be alive? That reasoning doesn’t make sense. The only possible way I can see is that Jake returned to his year 2016, yes, but six months before, and therefore he sees him still alive, but only for that amount of time, then he’ll be killed, because if he wasn’t killed Jake’s adventure would not have happened at all...
If someone has a better understanding of temporal dynamics, please feel free to enlighten me.
Anyway, movie details:
it starts slow, introducing Jake: he works at a supermarket, and he has a colleague take him home because his father called for him to check up on his old grandfather. When he gets there there are signs that someone might have broken into the house, and then he finds his grandpa almost dead and without his eyes. He loved his grandfather and is very sad, and also everyone’s worried because he saw a monster but nobody else saw it. His therapist says that it’s quite normal after a terrible shock, and when he finds a postcard sent to his grandpa by a woman that featured in all of his stories, and he wants to go to Wales to see if she’s still alive and if the Home for Children really exists, she tells him and his parents that it might be a good idea, that it’ll help him sort out what real and what’s not and also help him to move on. So his father takes him there.
When Jake finds the home, the people there tell him that the house was destroyed by a bomb during the war in 1943 and everyone inside died. Jake doesn’t point out that the postcard was dated only two years before, so Miss Peregrine can’t have died, and on that subject it’s not clear to me how that’s possible, it can’t be possible, but it can’t be a trick either because the bad guys didn’t really know where she was, right?
Anyway, while Jake is taking a look around at what remains of the house, she meets the kids that his grandfather talked about when he told him bedside stories.
They take him across the temporal loop to show him where they live, in 1943 before the house was destroyed. Because of the war, Miss Peregrine was forced to create a loop on that day, before the bomb hit. It’s a 24-hours loop, and every night she has to turn the clock back.
He meets them all: Emma the girl as light as air, Olive who wears gloves because she’s fire, Enoch the stupidly jealous guy who can put hearts into inanimate things and control them, and also: the little boys: the invisible one, the one with bees inside him, and the one who can project his dreams and sometimes has premonitions, and of course the twins; also the little girls: the very very strong one, the one with a mouth at the back of her head, and the one who can make flora grow very quickly.
When Jake runs back overwhelmed by it all, he lies to his father about what he did and when his dad finds out he calls the doctor saying that his son is having a breakdown... which seemed big nonsense since dad was the only one shouting and Jake did nothing particularly strange, after all it’s not like he’s the only teenager on Earth who ever lied to his parents about what he did during the afternoon.
Now his father forbids him to wander anywhere alone, saying that he’ll go nowhere without him, so Jake has to sneak out. He runs back to the house, and Emma takes him to her secret place: when she wants to be alone she goes into the ship that sank; he has to swim but it’s easy for her to go down with lead-boots. Once down there, the blows air into a room to push out the water and fill it with air so they can breath - she’s so light because she’s full of air :-D - and shows her some pictures left by his grandfather Abe when he was with them back in the days. Jake recognises the man he saw the night Abe died. He’s the leader of the bad guys, Barron. She explains to him that Abe was special, like them, and like him. He always thought he was not special, but she says that nobody can cross the temporal loops if they’re not special, and that he has the same peculiar talent as Abe: they’re the only ones who can see the invisible monsters.
Everyday Miss Peregrine has to kill the same monster that once killed Viktor, the strong girl’s brother, and that came back that day. Emma explains that Abe used to hunt down the monsters in order to protect them, that the monsters and the bad people with white eyes want to find all temporal loops and kill all the special kids. Abe retired when Jake was born because he wanted to keep him safe (I get that, but why he didn’t retire when his son was born, only when his grandson was born? Because he knew that Jake was peculiar too and his son wasn’t? )
A group of peculiars got tired of living isolated in temporal loops (why did they need to hide in temporal loops if back then there were no bad guys trying to kill them?) but they didn’t want to die either, they wanted to be immortals outside the loops. Since Miss Peregrine and others like her are the only ones who can create loops and also turn themselves into birds, the bad guys abducted a Miss and tried an experiment, I think that basically they tried to absorb her energy, but it went wrong and they became all invisible monsters.
They discovered that by eating the Peculiar’s eyes, specially the childrens’, they could go back to being visible and in a more human form, so they hunted them down.
Another Miss is found wounded (Judi Dench), and once cured she regains her human form and tells them all that Barron and the others found her loop in Blackpool, killed all the children there and now they want to try the experiment again.
Now they’re close, so Miss Peregrine tells the children that they all have to go away.
Jake goes back to his father, and he tells him that a man was found dead and without his eyes, just like Abe. Jake runs back to warn them that Barron and the monsters are much closer than they thought, and an ornithologist runs after him. When he crosses the loop Jake understands he must be a Peculiar too, and it turns out that he was Barron, a shapeshifter who turned into his therapist first and the ornithologist later to find out where the Home was.
Now Barron shows up at the house holding Jake hostage, so Miss Peregrine has no other choice but let him cage her to protect them - why? why would Barron let them live? why does he leave them in the house caring only about taking Miss away? Maybe because he now cares only about the experiment and doesn’t bother anymore with the eyes?
There are some visible monsters, who already ate a lot of eyes, and there are invisible monsters who keep hunting for eyes to regain their human form - how many there are? We see something like ten in total, which more or less is the same number of them that we saw doing the experiment, so who has Abe been hunting for all those years? Twenty for sure, probably many more years, where did all those monsters come from?
After Barron leaves with Miss, an invisible monster attacks them and Jake’s the only one who can see it. He saves Enoch but the other Miss has been taken. The little girl makes a distant tree grow so much that they can get out of the house, in a hurry to escape both the monster and the bomb that will now destroy the house because there is nobody here anymore to set the clock back.
They need to reach Blackpool quickly in order to save Miss Peregrine, so Emma fills the entire ship with air so it re-emerges, and Olive starts the engine and off they go.
They go to Blackpool and cross the temporal loop that brings them to January 2016. First they need to get rid of the invisible monsters, and they fight all together, with some help: Enoch revives all the skeletons in the ship and sends them to fight.
Now they must deal with Barron and the others like him, and this is really tough. They all fight, and we finally see what the twins peculiarity is: they take off their ‘masks’ to kill one of them, and they have strange eyes and scream like Banshees, and turn her into stone, which then falls down and crashes into pieces.
When they go looking for Jake, after he already freed five birds and also Miss Peregrine, Barron turns himself into a copy of him, so they can’t know which one is the real one, until Jake sees one of the invisible monsters coming towards them, one who fell in the water and was not destroyed. Jake says nothing until the monster is so close that it takes the fake Jake and eats him, because he couldn’t see it.
They all go away, without the Miss this temporal loop will end too, and they must go back to their time in 1943. Miss Peregrine is not strong enough to create a new loop, but at least they will live, growing old one day at a time until she’ll be strong enough.
Jake stays behind, because it’s his own time, and when he goes back to his house in Florida he finds Abe alive and tells him everything. Abe tells him to go back to Emma, that even if he doesn’t know where they went he knows for sure where they were at a specific date, so he goes to a loop in the California desert which brings him to Tokyo and another one brings him to 1942.
Now, why do the first two take him to a different place? They are temporal loops, what has the place to do with it? The loop in Wales took him to Wales in the past, then he went to the one in Blackpool which took them to Blackpool in the future, how come now he can enter one in California and come out in Tokyo??
Anyway, he finally gets to 1942, and for some reason he enlists himself in the Navy, maybe he didn’t know what else to do, what with being without a home, without documents, and without money?
Anyway, he had to wait a year and then he ran towards the ship right before the kids left and reached Emma, and now they kiss and go away together, with Miss Peregrine flying over them, in search of a new home.
It’s a fun movie to watch, but when it’s over and you think about it there are so many things that leave you puzzled, and so many things that don’t satisfy. Jake was rather plain and at moments very annoying - okay he was sad about Abe’s dead and worried that he might be mad and all that, but that doesn’t seem enough. He had believed Abe’s stories when he was very little, then had believed his parents when they told him there was no truth in it all and he was making it up, and now he is so overwhelmed to find out that it was all true? Shouldn’t he be relieved about that? Shouldn’t he be glad that he’s not mad and that Abe never lied to him, instead of running home like a scared little child?
Ultimately, I didn’t like the love story, I really hoped for a moment there wouldn’t be any, specially with a girl who liked his grandfather before him, and most importantly not between two people - one of them a teenager and one who has been a teenager for 70 years - who have known each other for like a couple of days. Sure, he felt attracted to her, big surprise, a teenager attracted to a pretty girl, but seeing her fly and talking about monsters doesn’t really mean eternal true love. I really hoped she wouldn’t be his only reason for going back, I hoped he’d go back to be with them all, to get to know better those that meant so much to Abe, to feel sure that Miss Peregrine was fine or whatever, and not just because of one girl. What will happen if he falls out of love, leave them all?
Miss Peregrine-Eva Green
Jake-Asa Butterfield
Abe-Terence Stamp
Emma-Ella Purnell
Olive-Lauren McCrostie
Enoch-Finlay MacMillan
Therapist-Allison Janney
Ornithologist-Rupert Everett (I would have never guessed had I not read it in the credits)
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