Someone forgot the popcorn.
The weakest facet of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016) is the thematic material. Let me explain. This is a fantasy film about a special class of people called the Peculiars. They have, much like those in, say, the Heroes TV series, peculiar and varied natural abilities.
In this scenario, a group of Peculiars who desire immortality kidnap a member of a special sort of Peculiar called Ymbrynes, who can control time by ‘looping’ it. Their experimentation goes wrong in a ghastly manner, and the members of the group are transformed into invisible monsters. These monsters, however, discover they can recover normality by eating the eyeballs of other Peculiars – and then use the Ymbrynes to continue their search for immortality.
Typically, Peculiars exhibit their abilities as children or young adults, and to safeguard them from the normal run of humanity, the Ymbrynes will gather a group and construct a time loop around them. Normal people aren’t aware of the loop and cannot enter, but Peculiars who know the exact geographical entry point may enter the loop. While in it, they do not age, and while the loop repeats, apparently on a daily basis, for so long as the Ymbryne who created it is around, the inhabitants of the loop are not constrained to repeat themselves. In effect, they achieve an aging delay.
But if they leave the loop, their years will rapidly catch up with them.
Jake’s grandfather has told him stories about monsters for as long as he can remember, and now, a teenager, he thinks his grandfather’s a bit loopy himself. But when his grandfather is killed outside his home in Florida, and his eyeballs eaten out, Jake nears a mental breakdown. A chance find by a neighbor of an unmailed letter addressed to Jake during the clean out of the house suggests Jake was to be told to visit a small island off the coast of Ireland, to see Miss Peregrine. His parents, in consultation with Jake’s psychologist, agree, and Jake’s father takes him to Ireland.
On the island, they find the home is a ruin, destroyed in World War II by a Luftwaffe bomb. But Jake, led clandestinely by the time loop inhabitants, stumbles into the time loop and is soon meeting Miss Peregrine and her group. But, unbeknownst to Jake, he’s been tracked by one of the wannabe immortals, and soon the time loop is infested with invisible monsters, and Miss Peregrine is taken prisoner.
And what makes Jake a Peculiar?
From here on in it’s a basic action-survival tale. In fact, that’s the entire story, the fight for survival by the innocent, if not precisely innocuous. But there’s a couple of problems.
First, we don’t lose anyone with whom we’ve built an attachment. Such losses are important for driving home the dangers that can arise when doing something morally right in the face of opposition from the self-interested. One our society’s key survival traits is the willingness to give up one’s life for one or people in the group, and by killing off a character who’s engaged in that activity, the deadly seriousness of the business of protecting the group is brought to the fore.
My second problem with the tale is that these sorts of stories need to illuminate problems relevant to the Normals, i.e., the audience, or they will not relate to the story and it will not succeed. Certainly, the fight for survival is relatable, but it’s also old. It’s so old that it’s almost a cliche, and in order to make it appeal to a novelty-oriented audience, it has to bring some new facet to the theme. This story really doesn’t, because having one’s eyeballs consumed may be repellent and gauche, but it doesn’t really reach a more fundamental level of meaning. By contrast, in the Heroes TV series, the main characters may have been immortal, mind-readers, or able to fly, but by making them the Outsiders, their interactions with the normal people as well as each other illuminate themes that are important because they ask questions relevant to audiences of today, from xenophobia to government overreach, conflicting loyalties to the limits of honesty when pursuing government office.
Then there’s the problems with story integrity. The Peculiars in the time loop do not age physically, but they do mentally – or at least one would hope so if they retain their memories. Yet, it’s not clear to me that the Peculiars, outside of Miss Peregrine, are maturing despite their static bodies. That immediately raises questions about the social dynamics of the groups.
It’s a leaky ride into the sunset.
Another story integrity problem has to do with the Normals. While it’s one thing to blame mythical creatures such as poltergeists for some of the activities of the Peculiars, when the invisible monsters wreck an amusement park in search of Peculiars to consume, one would expect more than just a simple police investigation. And what about the sunken cruise liner docked in the port? Shouldn’t that raise an eyebrow? What about the parents of the children?
It’s all very unfortunate, because, technically, it’s a well-made movie. I particularly enjoyed Miss Peregrine’s character, but, outside of Jake’s father, all the characters bring something to the story. The special effects are all in good fun. The problems lie in the story, and thus it’s just a mediocre, if fairly fun and quirky, movie.
