Jim Gill

I’d say it’s utter rubbish but I don’t think it’s that good. If you like to pretend you’re getting esoteric wisdom from self proclaimed gurus you’ll probably enjoy this movie, but if you're a realist with any life experience you should avoid this ‘self help’ drivel unless you have some REALLY powerful weed 👍

Everything was there for them. Delaney had LITERALLY written it down for them in black and white, yet they still managed to bugger it up. The books are set in England. They reference a lot of English folklore, so they choose a RUSSIAN director.... of course, makes sense 🙄 Being Russian, Bodrov’s influences have given him a profoundly different mental picture of the world to that of the author, so his adaptation has a distinct ’Eastern bloc’ feel to it. As an example, the movie starts with a man hammering atop a barren mountain, (instead of being in a quaint English village), or that Gregory’s house looks like some sort of industrial steel plant etc.... They might as well have had him battling the bourgeoisie instead of the witches. That said, not all blame for this failure lies with the director though. The film is so different from the source material that the screenwriters must have either relied on third hand accounts of the book or thought they could tell the story better than the author himself; no wonder it only got 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. For me, one question springs to mind: did Delaney sell out his fans in order to get his film made, or did he simply not have enough clout to make them stay loyal to his book?