The Bridge to Terabithia

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT
















I just watched this movie and read a few reviews on imdb. Several people claimed to dislike it because, as they said, it mixed fantasy and reality. They didn't like the sweet fantasy scenes in contrast with the realistically depressing scenes. They also didn't like the main character getting killed because they didn't feel there was any kind of reference to it in the beginning of the film. Just wonderng what other people who have seen it thought about these things?

To get things started I'll go first. I thought the movie portrayed the original fantasy genre fairly accurately. Anyone who has read The Lord of the Rings (the original fantasy novel) will recognize the darkness that was quite apparent in the death of Boromir and the overall toll of the war which essentially destroyed the elves (who all left at the end of the war) and the few dwarves who were still around, bringing about the Age of Men. Originally, fantasy was supposed to be a creative vehicle to parallel reality and express realistic ideas in ways which were unique and original. To this end, I thought the movie did an amazing job at portraying this parallelism. As to the death of Leslie, I guess most people who wrote about it being so sudden and unforeshadowed were not writers, or didn't pay very close attention to the details. As a writer I saw it coming at the very first mention of the Dark Lord. Reading some of the complaints about the movie that appears to be the writer side of me moreso than the audience side of me. But I am curious to see what other people thought, because I thought that all things considered it was one of the better films I've seen in recent childrens' movies.

Holy crap that movie was depressing. I think people didn't like it because they went into it expecting a fun happy time kids movie(because that's how it was advertised) and it was more like an "oh shit, that's what life is really like" type of movie.

The clues about a foreboding death are there, but not quite as obvious as a lot of stuff people are use to these days. Personally I thought it was a decent movie. It had funny quarks about it and it wasn't really updated for modern times so I kind of felt like I was back on a farm in the sixties or something. A good book-to-movie translation but odd because it was done so well.