Whose idea was this?

The movie is an "adult" adaptation of a children's book. The "wild things" are part of Max's imagination and his unbridled rage toward his family.

They don't change. Max changes.

???

actually what I meant to say was that it was "geared" toward adults, not that it was "adult" that sounds kinda funny

???

I don't think we were supposed to be thinking of the monsters as twenty-somethings. I think they were supposed to be of the same emotional age as Max, making them more akin to children.

That in itself makes their behaviour feel more excusable; they're not supposed to be 'young adults', they're acting like children.

I'm halway thru it and really (really!) tempted to bail. This feels like one of those after school things with giant muppets.

I've never read the book, but I've read it's, at least in part, an examination on how Max uses his imagination to learn about his anger. He has to come to term with his that emotion before he can learn to control it.

The problem with turning a short book about a 9-year-old using his imagination into a full length movie is there isn't much room here for the audience's imagination. So far I'm giving it a 2/5 netflix score. The visuals are impressive. The story is, as you say, pretty thin and uninspiring.

I didn't find it unwatchable; I felt that visually, it was fairly entertaining.

What I did find annoying was how whiny, negative & emotionally fragile all the characters were. Yes, I fully understand that the monsters are basically aspects of Max's personality, and I get the symbolism. I get that Max learns from his monsters how he had been acting in real life, and how freaking annoying it is trying to get along with someone like that. But Max was SO annoying, right from the start, that I just could not empathize or connect with his character at all.

Despite the fact that he's obviously from a broken home, doesn't like his mom's new date, hates his sister for not sticking up for him when her friends stomped on his igloo, doesn't have his own friends and doesn't seem to get enough attention from his mommy even though she's strapped for cash and barely holding the family together, he still comes off as a rotten little BRAT. I never got that feeling from the Max of the book. I mean, he bit his mom, what a rotten kid! If I'd ever bit my mom at that age, I would've been knocked into next week. He seems like he's got the worst case of bi-polar depression I've ever seen, flipping almost instantaneously from happy, ecstatic playing kid to needy, crying, brooding brat over nothing. Max in the book was misbehaving; Max in the movie needed to be committed for psychological evaluation, and could likely benefit from some medication as well.

Then all the games he comes up with to play in his fantasy-world entail a lot of injury & violence, and there's talk of being eaten & threats of harm. When I was a kid, me & my friends had plenty of "dirtball fights," and we used to huck giant clods of dirt out of the freshly tilled fields at each other, usually aiming for each others' heads. We also had "sword fights" with sticks, shot each other with rubber bullets and wrestled, all in good fun. So I was kind of surprised it bothered me that Max was so violent-minded. I guess it was because I wasn't identifying with the Max character at all.

I also couldn't figure out if the movie was meant for kids or adults. The book is great & teaches a subtle lesson. The movie on the other hand, was very dark, profoundly emotional, and disintegrated into the characters all standing off against each other, glumly turning their backs on one another or going off by themselves to mope & sulk alone. They have awful love/hate relationships, berate each other, and exhibit extremely dependent, selfish behavior that is the core of every severely dysfunctional family. The movie was depressing, and depressed me.

»«ëÕ|{¥(V)
I can't understand your crazy moon language.

It was quite depressing...

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"Is that an iceberg?"

I don't know, but it was a bad idea, in my opinion. I got it for 5.00 at Target, thinking my son and I could watch a movie together this afternoon, since we both loved the book. Dull, depressing, dark, blah. Neither of us sustained interest after 30 minutes, that in itself was more than enough.

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