5 Children & It
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Movie Reviews of 5 Children & It
Movie Review: Not True to the Book
Summary: 2 Stars
My twelve year old who read and loved the E. Nesbit book Five Children and It hated this movie. I have also read the book, and the movie has very little in common with the original story. There is no eccentric uncle and cousin Horace or secret door in the greenhouse. The children are not sent to the country because of the war. Even the wishes the children make are not true to the book. My nine year old enjoyed the movie because she had not read the book.
So, although it is pleasant, clean, family entertainment, I think E. Nesbit would have been disappointed at the adaptation of her book. It seems to me that the producers of this movie merely plagiarized E. Nesbit's idea of five children and a sand fairy and then totally wrote their own story borrowing from C.S. Lewis' Chronicle of Narnia series.
Movie Review: dougv
Summary: 2 Stars
A slow moving film, with a boring plot.
The actors are British, so it's sometimes hard to understand them.
Not a good movie, so I shut the DVD player off.
Movie Review: ?
Summary: 2 Stars
The seaweed is very fake and they're wings look like they come from the
special effects section of a LifeCam/Webcam. That's all i have to say.
Movie Review: Why follow Nesbit's book, when Narnia made so much money?
Summary: 1 Stars
5 Children and It / B0009S4ILA
*Spoilers*
If you haven't read Nesbit's book, 5 Children and It, then likely this review will mean little to you and you will find better information in some of the other reviews. If you are like me, however, and remember Nesbit's charming tale from childhood, you may be considering this movie based on your love of the book.
Do not be fooled. This book jettisons everything lovely about Nesbit's tale in favor of a blatant Narnia rip-off that is painfully obvious. Like Narnia (the movie, not the book), the movie starts with the children being shuffled off to the countryside in a train, longing for their parents and their familiar surroundings. The countryside house looks like a replica of the Narnia film house, and the sandpit with no sea (which the children find so pointless and boring) is not here. We'll get to that later.
The house caretakers are, a la Narnia, quirky and old and eccentric. A good deal of film is wasted on this portion of the movie, detailing how boring it is at the house, how much time is to be spent on maths, how long the chores lists for the children is. There's a abhorrent cousin added here for unnecessary conflict.
One day, on a rainy day, the children are bored and cooped up in the house and they find a magical doorway to another world. You'll note that 0% of that is in Nesbit's book, but 100% of that statement describes Narnia. Fine. The other world has a luxurious beach, complete with a large ocean, and the children take this in stride - no disbelief, no wonder, no worries.
When they unearth "It", the voice......stings. "It" sounds like...Eddie Izzard. There's no other way to put it. (Eddie Izzard is also a voice in the Narnia series. Do we see a pattern here?) It wisecracks, It sounds like a wise guy. When the children feign disinterest in It, he practically begs to be paid attention to. And the whole twist of the book, the drama of "Is It ruining the wishes on purpose?", is immediately tossed to the winds (and incorrectly) by making it very clear with supernatural spying and smirking that, yes, It is ruining the wishes deliberately and on purpose.
When I tried to enjoy this movie apart from the radical changes in the storyline, I found I could not - the dialogue is boring, the action predictable, and the story "twists" are painfully bad. I don't doubt that a small child may like this, but if you're looking into this for literary nostalgia, as I was - Stay Away!
This version provides a closed caption option for the hard of hearing.
~ Ana Mardoll
Movie Review: Whatever this is, it's not Nesbit
Summary: 1 Stars
Yuck. This movie makes me feel as if some nasty person had smeared fecal matter all over my treasured childhood copy of the book.
Warning to Nesbit fans: this movie is an outrage. It includes a scene where an evil child straps the Psammead to a table and threatens to torture it if it doesn't grant him wishes.