The Spiderwick Chronicles

The original book is my favorite fantasy story ever, it is full of wonderful creatures and was made to make people dream. It was the book that made me like fantasy and I got so excited to see more creatures than we saw on the movie. I expected to see a lot more since the série format would allow to explore the universe a lot more than in the movie. Well let's just say I was soooo disappointed, I wondered during the whole show when we would see hobgoblins, elves or mermaids... the only fit scene was the unicorns one. Wanted to see a show about fantasy, got a show one mental health played by annoying people.

I really wanted to like the show- but Daniels and Cottrell are terrible actors. They couldn't even hold a gaze for effect.

How could they convince audience to believe they're here to save the day if they couldn't show confidence in their stride and speech.

Daniels is lanky and soft spoken. He could not match the right emotions with appropriate facial expressions. Cottrell could not carry a scene because he is too conscious of how he sounds and looks. His gaze is loquacious. He looks away frequently during intense moments.

After watching 5 episodes, I could surmise, the writers and the directors are completely disengaged and oblivious to the supernatural.

I blame the director(s) especially because he or she failed to allow characters to shine.

I think this is at least 3rd series in a row for me, that has nothing but aesthetics. The other recent ones were Fallout and Ripley. As with them, I can't say anything bad about the aesthetics and general style: it does look like what I would expect from a fairy tale. But the essence of the fairy tale does include the "tale" part.

It's just boring. Completely unremarkable, with quite a few moments ruined by telling things, rather then showing them. For example, pretty early in the show there is this moment, where Ogre (or whatever he really is) is trying to manage his temptation to eat a human. Most of the scene it's the girl (whoever she is) literally saying "Are you not hungry?". A good narrative would show a trembling hand trying to reach out to doorknob, but stopping (o being stopped by the other hand), or showing some more emotions, including hunger, on the face of the character (licking lips, salivating, clenching the jaw).

But alas, we have another case where book is transferred to screen in a literal manner, forgetting the whole point of such an adaptation. In a book you have to spell everything out, because you can't show things, since you can only rely on text and reader's imagination, which is dependent on how much details you provide. But on screen, you can not only tell things (which uses hearing), but also show things (which uses eyes - the main consumer of TV shows). Why modern shows has forgotten the art of visual story-telling is beyond me.

8 epsiodes, 8 hrs to develope better than the orginal that was well done in 90 min. When you cannot tell a solid story in 8 hrs with the foundation already laid out, time to call it quits. And do we need to throw in every issue of todays world and make the main character another villain. Cause that is what Jared was. Far too much emphasis in mebtal health. We get it. And the towns people reaction after what happebed to them! Really? Why did we hardly see thimbletack? And his design was horrible as well as the rest of the CGI? Roku if you are reading this, no season 2 unless you switch writers and spend some xtra money on the effects and the fairy world we are all looking forward to. Too.

The ONE & ONLY redeeming aspect of this entire fiasco is Christian Slater's devastating performance, worthy of a real cast, crew, writers, producers and directors. If the last episode would have shown us that there was science fiction involved, and Slater had been transported into a D-list production from an A-list one, THAT would have felt far more believable. OK, actually, the actress who played Lucinda was pretty charming, as well, so who's to say how she might have done with adult-written dialog? The remaining cast could have been good; it's hard to say - the material they had to work with was so atrocious, repetitive and grating, it is almost impossible to watch. I did watch the whole thing - and, unfortunately, there is zero character development. So a character who says an annoying thing in the first episode will continue to spout the same time of thing throughout all of the whole 8 episodes - bar none. There's no relief from a gorgeous CGI fairy world, bc the producers largely felt it wasn't needed in this production. So you have Slater, the actress who played Lucinda, portaled into the worst television fantasy series to have been produced in decades. Watch the 2008 film or Willow or House of the Dragon or pretty much ANYTHING else, bc this is a dumpster fire.