Directors: Mark Waters
Starring: Freddie Highmore, Mary-Louise Parker, Sarah Bolger, Nick Nolte, David Strathairn, Martin Short
Genre: Adventure, Fantasy, Family
Rated: Rated PG for scary creature action and violence, peril and some thematic elements.
Plot: The three young heroes, 9-year-old twins Jared and Simon Grace, and their 13-year-old sister Mallory, are part of a newly divorced family. They have moved with their mother to the old, run-down, family estate at the edge of a small town. As the Grace children try to adjust to their new surroundings they discover a secret world populated by brownies, goblins, griffins, sylphs, and worse. They first meet Thimbletack, the family’s house brownie, who is mighty unhappy with the new occupants of his home, especially when young Jared finds Arthur Spiderwick’s field guide. The field guide contains all of Arthur Spiderwick’s observations on magical creatures, which could endanger all of the faerie world if it fell into the wrong hands. Over the course of the movie, the children learn the family secrets through a series of exploits culminating in a desperate quest to save not only themselves and all of the good creatures of the faerie world but, all of the non-magical world as well.

My Review: The Spiderwick Chronicles follow the adventures of the Grace children as they discover the secrets of the faerie world. Can they learn them in time to save the faerie world as well as their own? The Spiderwick Chronicles is based on the series of books of the same name by Holly Black and Tony DiTerrlizzi. My son and I read this series last year and as I wrote in my review of the series, we loved them. So, I was very excited when I heard the movie was coming out this month. This is one of the few times that I wish I hadn’t read the books before seeing the film. Harry Potter was the complete opposite, I got so much more out of the movies because I had read the books in advance. In the case of the Spiderwick Chronicles, they condensed the whole 5-book series into a single movie so they had to leave out a ton of details. Second, they didn’t do a very good job sticking to the details they did include in the movie. I really think I would have enjoyed the movie a lot more had I not read the books first.

If I put aside my disappointment in the relationship between the movie to the book series, I still think the Spiderwick Chronicles was a mediocre film. The plot as written wasn’t that easy to follow and didn’t do a very good job of explaining why certain things were happening. The special effects were OK, but when you compare it to the CGI today’s audience’s have become used to with other fantasy movies such as Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and the Matrix they could have been better. The acting was very good though. I didn’t find out until after seeing the movie that Freddie Highmore played both Jared and Simon. I’ll watch a little closer next time to see if the you can tell in the scenes in which Jared and Simon interact. Sarah Bolger did a really great job as the sword wielding Mallory. She has a little bit of an exotic look which was a little distracting. Mary-Louise Parker of Weeds fame did a great job as the mom. Nick Nolte’s role was really small and he was a little weak at it.

Now we come to the main question, which is ‘Will your kids like this movie?’ Of course the answer is yes. Kids have a much higher threshold of pain when it comes to bad films. So if you have a Saturday afternoon or a snow day to kill, this is not a bad film to take your kids to. At the end of the day it isn’t a bad movie and its entertaining enough to hold your and their attention for 96 minutes. Given the choice of reading the books or seeing the film, I would definitely recommend reading the books. Actually, I would recommend reading the books no matter what. They were really good.

Rating: 3/5 stars

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