Jack And The Giants Movie [upd] -
The film follows Jack (Nicholas Hoult), a young, impoverished farmhand living in the kingdom of Cloister. He’s dreamy but practical, until he inadvertently trades his horse for a handful of “magic” beans. Meanwhile, the headstrong Princess Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson) flees an arranged marriage and seeks refuge at Jack’s farm. A rainstorm, a dropped bean, and a cracked floor later, a colossal beanstalk erupts into the sky, carrying the princess’s house—and the princess herself—into the realm of the clouds.
In the glut of post- Lord of the Rings fairy tale adaptations, 2013’s Jack the Giant Slayer arrived with a curious mix of ambitions. Directed by Bryan Singer (of X-Men and The Usual Suspects fame), the film takes the humble English fable of “Jack and the Beanstalk” and blows it up to a $200 million, CGI-heavy, medieval war epic. The result is a cinematic contradiction: a film that is simultaneously breathtaking in its scale and surprisingly weightless in its execution. It is a giant-sized entertainment that, much like its titular characters, has big feet but not always a firm footing. jack and the giants movie
The characters are archetypes, not people. Jack is “the clever farmer” because the script tells us he is, not because he does anything particularly clever until the final act. Princess Isabelle is branded as “spirited and rebellious,” but her primary action is to get captured repeatedly—first by the giants, then by Roderick, then by the giants again. For a film that tries to nod to modern feminism, it reduces its female lead to a McGuffin in a corset. The film follows Jack (Nicholas Hoult), a young,
So why isn’t Jack the Giant Slayer considered a classic? The answer lies in a script that is as thin as the beanstalk’s upper branches. The screenplay, credited to a committee (Darren Lemke, Christopher McQuarrie, and Dan Studney), never decides what it wants to be. It swings uneasily between grim dark fantasy ( The Dark Knight with giants) and campy adventure ( The Princess Bride with less wit). The tonal whiplash is constant. A rainstorm, a dropped bean, and a cracked