I saw it yesterday. It was okay.
The ending was really powerful–I teared up–which made up for a lot of its shortcomings. But it did indeed have a lot of shortcomings.
Part of the problem was that the fantasy stuff was by far the least compelling aspect of the film. I know Guillermo Del Toro has accumulated a lot of genre-fan goodwill with Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone; all I’ve seen of his work is this and Hellboy, and in both cases I was struck mostly by the paucity of his imaginary bestiary. (Seriously, you have access to every creature Mike Mignola’s ever drawn and you just stick with frog monsters the entire time?) In this case, for all the comparisons Pan’s Labyrinth has garnered to dark fantasy classics of both page and screen, you basically have a grand total of four fantastical creatures: the faun, the fairies, the giant toad, and that (admittedly creepy) eyeballs-in-his-hands creature. That’s kind of a poor showing even if you’re generous enough to add in the wiggly weepy mandrake root. And even the best of the monsters, the eyeball guy, behaves in a way that doesn’t make a whole lot of internal sense; just because his eyes are in his hands doesn’t mean they can’t look up.
Moreover, I’m never very big on children’s fantasies wherein the main character’s journey begins out of simple curiosity rather than some actual motivating factor. Whatever the psychological underpinnings of her fantasy world might be, little Ofelia isn’t chased or driven or lured into the labyrinth–she gets embroiled in this whole netherworld thing just ‘cuz. I’ve never found it realistic that a kid’s curiosity would overcome their fear of something that would naturally be quite terrifying, unless there was a damn good reason for them to need to overcome that fear. Contrary to popular fictional opinion, I don’t think children just “accept” weirdness (especially of the monstrous variety), since real-world evidence shows that children freak the hell out over weird shadows cast by their crumpled-up clothes in the light of a nightlight. That faun would send me running screaming in the other direction, sick mother and fascist stepfather or no. Point being, I was much more interested in the Spanish post-Civil War intrigue than I was in any of the ooh-wow-magic stuff. (The Captain was a magnificent villain in that regard, far more fun even on the good-vs.-evil level than anything the faun introduced Ofelia to.)
But the main problem (and I’ve seen this articulated elsewhere but I can’t remember where) was that at several different points, characters chose to do the absolute stupidest/least realistic thing possible, which not coincidentally ended up being the exact thing that would move the plot along. The little girl finds a big giant bug cute rather than disgusting; she eats grapes off the monster’s table even though she has no reason to do so and it’s not like she’s going hungry in real life and she’s been explicitly warned NOT to do that exact thing; the guerillas launch this huge attack on the captain’s compound but rather than shoot or detonate the lock on the storehouse, they use the key, thus making it crystal clear that they have a mole on the inside of the Captain’s household; Mercedes stabs the shit out of the Captain and has the chance to finish him off, but instead she just calls him a motherfucker and leaves him alive so that he can stumble out after her and sound the alarm; the faun makes a big thing about yelling at the little girl and telling her she’s shit outta luck after she breaks the rules and eats the grapes, but then just changes his mind; etc. And what was the point of centering so much of the early business between the guerillas, the doctor, and Mercedes around leg-wounded Frenchie, only never to show the guy again after the doctor finally operates on him? Enchanting Journeys and Fairy Tales For Adults become a lot less enchanting and adult when you can see so many seams in their construction.