Disney, we can relive those days vicariously. Enter Bridge to Terabithia. Our hero, Jesse Aarons, is a repressed teenage artist with an oppressive father, something we've never, ever seen in a movie before. This father is so oppressive that he was once the evil Terminator in Terminator 2. Now he's an impoverished hick working as a slave for a local retail store. From bad to worse, we say. Anyway, Jesse finds a friend in new neighbor Leslie, who helps Jesse find (with some help from her novel-writing parents and a hippie schoolteacher) the artist within. Together they imagine a backyard world of "Terabithia." We will not say what happens to Leslie, except that the way the movie constructs things, we didn't care that much.The movie succeeds several other recent ones--Finding Neverland and Big Fish come to mind--in which both reality and characters' imaginations are visually blended. It's not quite magic, but it's close. In traditional fantasy stories, fantasyland can be a whole world to itself, as in Lord of the Rings, or else characters have to enter fantasyland through some portal--like the wardrobe in Chronciles of Narnia or the pillar at the bus station in Harry Potter. But in Bridge to Terabithia, reality is fantasyland is reality. One can be made into the other. If ideas have consequences, this sounds a little problematic to us.
Of course Jesse's family is quasi-fundamentalist Christian, and his little sister mouths hate speech about wicked sinners going to hell. Leslie disagrees, asserting that if God is something, he/she/it has to be nice and friendly. Then Leslie punishes a bully with a mean prank. But despite this, the movie appears to agree with Leslie. If Terabithia is Leslie's constructed heaven on earth, hell can't be much worse. After all, heaven is hell and hell is heaven. Just imagine it in your backyard.
Entertainment: 5
Intelligence: 5
Morality: 2
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