Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children

Last night I saw an early screening of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Tim Burton's adaptation of the popular novel by Ransom Riggs, and it is, well, peculiar.  When I say peculiar, I mean it in a good way, a Tim-Burton-takes-us-on-a-fantastical-journey good way.  When Jake's (Asa Butterfield) grandfather dies from a horrible attack by a monster only he can see, he follows clues left to him by his grandfather to an island near Wales.  He eventually finds the orphanage where his grandfather grew up but it is in ruins.  While trying to return to the orphanage, he meets Emma (Ella Purnell), who can manipulate air, and Millard (Cameron King), who is invisible, and they take him back to the orphanage, now fully restored.   Jake is introduced to Miss Peregrine (Eva Green) and other children who have "peculiarities" and learns that it is now 1945 and they live in a loop which allows them to reset the day just before the Nazis drop a bomb on the orphanage.  He eventually learns that the monster who killed his grandfather is one of a group of Hollows who prey upon the peculiars at the behest of the Wights led by Mr. Barron (Samuel L. Jackson).  Jake must use his peculiarity to save Miss Peregrine and the children in an epic showdown with the Hollows and the Wights as well as decide where he really belongs.  Does the plot sound complicated?  It is.  There is a tremendous amount of exposition in this film and it does occasionally get bogged down in its own storytelling.  But that is of little consequence because this film is so visually stunning.  As Tim Burton is wont to do, he creates a fully realized world that could only exist in your imagination and lets the children use it as a playground to display their peculiarities.  My favorite scene is when Emma floats to the top of a tree to rescue a baby squirrel.  Eva Green is a true heir to Helena Bonham Carter (Burton's former muse) in terms of eccentricities (she even has a strange hairstyle with blue highlights) and I loved her performance.  The battle scenes are fantastic, especially since one of the peculiar children can bring inanimate objects to life.  Once this film gets going, it is a lot of fun to watch and I highly recommend it to fans of the novel and of Tim Burton.

Note:  One of my favorite aspects of the novel is the use of vintage photographs and I really like the way the film incorporated them.