Midweek Mention... Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Miss Peregrine

Dan: Welcome to the Midweeker!

Reegs: Yeah.

Cris: Have you got an intro for the midweek, Dan?

Dan: That was it.

Cris: Oh, that was very strong.

Reegs: We need to do better than that, because this is the start of Milo Parker Week, isn't it?

Dan: Well, I guess so. Yeah, we did get to interview with the man himself just earlier. That will go out in a later pod. We've got Midas Man that we're going to review as part of that pod as well.

But this is Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Yes. I never watched this until yesterday when I watched it with my daughter Nellie on the TV Sunday,

Sidey: Same.

Cris: Same.

Dan: lit, lit the fire, set the scene, got the snacks in around, because it's a couple of hours long and you want to lock yourself in for this

Cris: Yeah, I was locked in.

Dan: It was was it 2016? This film.

Reegs: It's based on a novel by the superbly named Ransom Riggs.

Dan: And had any of you guys seen this ahead of

Sidey: hadn't heard of it, didn't know anything about it. Nothing.

Reegs: I had because it was a Tim Burton movie and, you know, I've always had, I think Tim Burton was probably the director who introduced me to the idea of an auteur. Like, it was the first time I'd recognized that that was a thing, that somebody would have a distinct way of doing stuff, like with Batman and Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands.

So, even, even though a lot of his later work has been up and down, I've always seen it because it's Tim Burton.

Dan: Yeah, even his animation, Nightmare Before Christmas, it had that kind of Tim Burton feel about

Reegs: Christmas, it had that kind of Tim Burton feel about it all. Yeah, it really

Dan: Yeah, it really does.

I mean, Samuel L. Jackson.

Sidey: yeah Ava Greene

Dan: Milo

Cris: Parker. Yeah, Eva Green,

Reegs: Evergreen, yeah, we can say that again.

Terrence Stamp, Asa Butterfield, Ella Purnell, but real darling at the moment, Rupert Everett, Chris O'Dowd as well popping up in this, so, yeah.

Cris: yeah.

Yeah, and he's short and really strange outfit.

Reegs: And a possibly not very convincing American accent.

no.

Dan: How

does this open, Reeks?

Reegs: It's a sort of long orchestral credit sequence, Dan with a bit of world building and scene setting and stuff. It's a book, some photos of some strange looking people and a date in the thirties, and then that terrific cast floating up.

And then we.

to Florida with the, and a beach and Asa Butterfield sort of voiceover talking kind of about how insignificant he is and asking if the, the audience, they ever feel like nothing they do matters. And I think at that time he's stacking adult diapers in the supermarket he

Sidey: Get a bit of conversation going with the local, like hot cheerleader, go from

Dan: you're at my class.

Sidey: She just

blanks in and her idiot mate throws something through the display. He's just put up and knocks it down. They'll giggle and walk

off So he's a kind of a kind of a nobody at school.

He is not, he's not part of the in crowd, but that way

Dan: and it was one of those that, as you say, sets the scene because he's perfectly civil and nice. He goes, oh, are you in my class? And they're just like,

Sidey: scum

Dan: dicks straight away at him. So we get the picture that he is kind of, you know, You know,

Reegs: He's our everyman kind of

Dan: everyman character.

Reegs: And he gets a call about his grandpa who's clearly very agitated, that's Terrence Stamp, who's looking for his guns and he's frightened and paranoid and he comes across basically as having dementia or Alzheimer's or something like that, which his father will later allude to.

So they, he, his co worker, I think,

Dan: she does him a solid, drives him back home,

Cris: With a really great car.

Dan: Yeah, well, it's a long way, it seems, and when she, they get to his, his grandad's Well, just before they

Reegs: Well, just before they get there, there's a ghostly.

Samuel appears just for a couple of frames, kind of

through

Dan: for a couple of frames. Kind of Um, And, Then they kind of investigate the house.

It's clear there's been a break in. He sees there's a hole in the fence going out into the garden and there's some spooky woods. It's pitch black now. There's a flashlight just throwing up some shapes and, and and like creepy shadows and things. And he finds his girlfriend. And when he turns him round, he's got No.

Reegs: Quite gruesome, really, because this is a 12 rated film, isn't

Cris: gruesome, really. This is a 12 rated film, isn't it? Put looks at it and then

Reegs: it's his grandpa though.

It's his

Dan: though. It's his grandpa, Well, and his, his coworker did say, wait a minute, I've got a 38 in the car.

Every, he just drives around with

Cris: well, in Florida.

Sidey: Yeah, it was, it is quite scary. There were a couple moments in the film where I sort of turned to my daughter and said, are you all right?

You, you okay with this? 'cause it's quite full on for, for someone that

Reegs: Well, and thematically it gets quite dark because pretty soon, you know, in fact after this bit of, of the granddad dying, we sort of get flashbacks of Jake as a child and the, and the grandfather telling him these like fantastical stories about the people that he met and that the incredible powers that they had.

And this orphanage run by a sort of Mary poppin esque woman, miss Peregrine. And then like, and as we are watching it, we sort of think. Is this true or is this really his grandpa's like way of understanding his traumatized past because he was a Jew who was separated from his parents and sent to this old people's home.

Sidey: we see him

Reegs: concocted some sort of supernatural narrative to help him cope with the, with

Sidey: And he does like a show and tell at school where he, he retells those stories to his classmates and they all just laugh at him. And

Dan: Well, he shows the photograph of the boy who's invisible and he has to wear clothes. He's got like a floating cap and then a real dapper suit and everything. And they just, yeah, they just laugh at him.

And he, he's deadly serious

Sidey: it's humiliated, isn't it?

Dan: Yeah.

He's

getting humiliated,

Reegs: Humiliated, yeah.

It

Sidey: character

Reegs: give

Dan: Yeah!

Reegs: some

Dan: her, she's

Reegs: Because he keeps having these dreams, and he keeps upsetting

Dan: It can give him some closure because he keeps having these dreams and he keeps upsetting his parents by just concentrating on the fact that these stories with his, his grandfather and obviously the passing of his grandfather, they're saying it was done by dogs and things would have got to him and they eat the soft bits first.

That's why his eyes have gone. They did find DNA animal DNA on on some kind of knife that. Grandad had and it's case closed for them, but he's really unconvinced, partly because he saw this massive hollow that we find out later, this creepy kind of tall

Reegs: kind of tall giant. He sees him for the first time

Dan: sees one for the first time. Outside of where his grandfather lays and when Shelley comes over with the gun, she's made her way into this spooky kind of wood area behind the back garden. He goes, turn, shoot, shoot, and she just blasts into space or whatever and it disappears. But we've had a flash of this rather

Sidey: Yeah, at the wake for his his grandfather's funeral, he's, there's probably proper term for it, but his grandfather's left in the book, hasn't he?

Reegs: Yeah

Sidey: Which has got some more detail about it and it's got a note. I think it's got a forward written by Miss Peregrine.

Yeah, so we get now her voiceover meet

Reegs: Yeah. and this is what spurs him on to go to the island and they do go eventually to this island off the coast of Wales, Cairnholme. And so he does go and stay there. And I think on the, he doesn't have the best relationship with his father who in turn didn't have the best relationship with his father,

Sidey: No, he's, he sort of says that his father, as in Chris O'Dowd said, like sort of says his father was away a lot.

They thought that he was probably cheating the mother. And so he's like, I don't want to have that sort of relationship with you. But then he's still, you know. Just dismisses all of his troubles. I just got a mental health problem or you know, he's still not not a great

parental role model I would

Dan: a mental health problem or, yeah, he's still not, not a great parental role model, I would say.

And then just putting that out there is, oh yeah, no, these are subjects. I dunno. It was I say watching it with my daughter.

Reegs: You know,

Dan: there's more, you know, it's just a little bit more as they grow up to, to get familiar with these adult themes,

Sidey: you but

Reegs: will. I was just going

Sidey: was? No, I was just gonna say like, moving things along. He does go Yeah. To find the, the orphanage. And it's been kind of destroyed. It's in, its a state of

disrepair. Yeah.

Dan: Yeah. It was Well, he's gone over to the island with, with his dad, Chris Dowd, Chris O'Dowd. And they found the what was it called?

The point. That was the name of the pub there.

Sidey: No, it's the

Priest's Hole. The

Reegs: something. Priest hole. The priest hole. That's right.

Cris: right. Yeah,

Yeah. The priest hole.

Dan: And, and so he's in the priest hole, they've got a room, and he's keen to, to go and explore. Dad wants to go down by the beach and see bird spotting and things down there, doesn't he? So, he teams up.

The priest hole

Reegs: itself is not a very welcoming place, Dan.

Dan: Yeah, no, it's not. It really teams up with a couple of local young

Reegs: Yeah, what were they called? Emz? Oh, they were

Sidey: D

Cris: Dirty D.

Sidey: that's

Cris: Dirty D and something Mac.

Sidey: It just changed his name, didn't it?

I was thinking Goldie Looking Chain the

Dan: who point them the way to this broken down orphanage, which isn't the finished arc or as he's seen in his his dreams or heard about in in the stories it's completely bombed out.

Sidey: Yeah, literally it's been blown up in the just left.

Reegs: Yeah

So I think he just goes back to the pub,

Sidey: no, he does go and investigate, doesn't he? Is

Cris: he?

The next day?

Reegs: The next day he does, because he goes back, there's a guy in a wheelchair with glasses, who I think is also one of the peculiar children, because he gets killed in that way that only peculiar children do, later in the movie, doesn't he?

But anyway, he goes back to talk to him about, oh, and that's, that's what spurs him on the next day to go and have a look. He goes through these rocks, does

Cris: impression was that that that could have been Victor in that he's dead, but then he's alive in the real world. But I didn't

Reegs: didn't realize that

Dan: There was a few twists and turns, and basically as I understood it, there's certain areas where a time loop will happen, and it will basically send

Sidey: infinite time

Dan: it's another infinite time

Sidey: Although it doesn't work that way in

Dan: No, it's a little bit different. They will go back into this kind of wormhole, I guess it's time loop time. And once they, they enter into this cave in this point and they come out the other side, they're in 1943.

They're September the 2nd, 1943, which is an important date because we know on the 3rd, this building was bombed out and everybody was killed or they didn't find anyone alive, at least.

Reegs: didn't find anyone alive. Yeah, he told him about the guy who's got the strength of

Sidey: Well, he told him about

Yeah, he told him about the kids with who got the strength of 10 men and that's the one that's carrying him.

Dan: So he recognises them all and he goes, oh you must be

Reegs: be Yeah, Emma, because she has to wear lead shoes.

And there's one who's got like fire

Sidey: Oh, it's the twins. Come on. It's got to be the

Reegs: The twins are amazing. They've got like a completely end game breaking power that they only discover right at the end of the movie that if they'd have discovered it now could have helped them. But and we get our first glimpse of this week's guest, Milo Parker at 3450 playing football.

Sort of emitting bees from his mouth like a

white candy man.

Dan: Yeah, he's playing bees with the the blind kid. What was his name? Wilbur or something?

Reegs: something? Wilbur. His power was like projecting his dreams through a little monocle thing, wasn't

Sidey: Yeah.

Has anyone seen Umbrella Academy?

Yeah. It's like a sort of more gothic y Tim Burton version of that. Yeah. Sort of.

Dan: But

I did, I did recognize well, when he was playing football, he let a load of bees out to stick. I mean, it's typical Arsenal, isn't it? He's just kind of doing a dirty foul there. Dirty tricks. That's what it was just to get the ball.

Reegs: played a bit, Dan. Do you think Milo's a natural footballer? Because yeah, I

Dan: You, you, you're questioning his ability, right? Well, I tell you what,

Reegs: Well, let's have a penalty

Dan: penalty shootout to decide this. But Yes, we, we see Milo the boy with extraordinary bees coming out of his mouth and all these other kind of wonderful children,

Reegs: There's one guy, Enoch, he's, I don't know if we see it now, but we might as well talk about all their powers.

He can reanimate, like, puppets that he makes by placing hearts inside them. It's really dark and he makes them do this, like, Ray Harryhausen style, like, macabre fight.

Dan: Yeah, it's a little bit like the the kid out of toy story he puts like claws

Crab claws instead of hands and it just freaks out

Sidey: But we are

Reegs: it's got this like crazy sort of like X Men meets like railway children

Sidey: And League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Reegs: like

Sidey: but we are going to meet Miss Miss Peregrine. And it's evergreen looking

Cris: pipe

Sidey: Smoking a pipe as well. It's very cool.

Cris: Yeah, very cool.

Sidey: I think my mic just doesn't sound right. Maybe it's my head, but anyway she like the first time she meets him and she does the kind of really do like a big explanation, expositiony thing. It's all kind of

pretty matter

Reegs: There is a lot of exposition to get through in the movie, isn't there, to set up its world.

Sidey: um

well, basically we're going to get into what's going on with Samuel L.

Jackson and what's happened. How does that actually come about?

Cris: They were all at the, they were all the same.

They were all special. His , and then they kind of, yeah. And then him and his mates Dec decided to experiment because they didn't want to live in continuous loops all the time. Yeah. So they

Reegs: Yeah, because you age outside the loops, don't you?

Cris: Yeah. So he wanted to see how, what would be possible and how they could live outside of the loops without

Dan: Miss Peregrine isn't the only one of her type.

She's an ing Inbreen. She

Reegs: can turn into a bird.

Dan: bird. She can turn into a bird, but she also looks, and their sole duty is to look after these children.

Reegs: And the loops.

Dan: the loops, of which there are many around the world at different times and different places and things. And it's up to them to reset the day.

So, the They don't get any older and, and the, the potential harm in the future doesn't harm them and they just keep living these kind of perfect days.

Reegs: they stop, she literally stops it as a bomb, is like meters above the ground. And then she winds it

back

Sidey: it's just a stopwatch, yeah, just to go back.

beginning of the day. And later on she goes down to the cliff. And is just waiting there with a crossbow and they, there's a chalk outline on the floor and they're watching her, but they can't see what it is.

And she's just waiting, waiting, waiting and knows where to shoot. And this holocaust comes up and it's only Asa Butterfield's character. He let me realize what his power is. He can, he can see these things. And she zaps it and she has to go through this obviously in the loop at all, every time to kill it.

Which he's got. Down to a tee and it's a fucking scary looking monster

Reegs: It is, yeah.

Dan: really scary, and

Sidey: is the bit when I looked at my daughter was like is this okay because it was right before bed as well I didn't want any like oh scared and she was but she was fine with it. I was quite

Reegs: quite surprised. Because they're several metres high, like you said, the Slender Man type quality, but they've got like tentacles that come out of their mouths as well, so.

Sidey: specific purpose,

Reegs: Yeah, yeah. Which we do find out, so Samuel L Jackson's group of rogue

Cris: Yeah, but Mr. Baron,

Reegs: Mr. Barron. Yeah. They want to sort of, and also they were holo gas, weren't they? And you can become more human by, or

Sidey: they become hologasts. They

Cris: They become holo

Sidey: The experiment they do is they put this kind of metal hood on, and they've got, I think it's a

Falcon

Cris: one of the br

Reegs: Inre

Sidey: they sort of, I don't know, electrocute it, and there's some blah blah blah power.

It goes through the helmet into the head, and then we can see it's like torturing them. And they're not able to take it off in time and then they become into these holographs.

Reegs: And they become more peculiar or human again by

Sidey: By eating children's eyeballs

Reegs: which they show of like Samuel L. Jackson, like, literally tucking into a bowl of human eyeballs, slurping down an eyestalk like it's spaghetti.

It's like fucking

Dan: Well, this is it. So he's got a band of kind of merry men, the inner circle, who are dining on children's eyeballs. Thus giving them the power to, to rid themselves the, the ugliness of the slender man and the invisibility that that comes with and puts them in a more human state

Sidey: It's their eyes. Their eyes give them away, yeah.

Dan: but there's he seems to think that if he has more and more eyeballs and then he will be more and more powerful and return him, he'll be able to go in both worlds. And so that's what he wants. But it's not what our heroes want.

Reegs: what our heroes want. Yeah, there's Obviously they've

Dan: the clock now, and so they start it up again, but They found the loop.

It goes a little bit further along the film,

Reegs: Yeah. Because Rupert, he's, he, Rupert Everett is actually, he's this like, there's a subplot of the dad is trying to write this bird book and there's some other American guy English guy there with like miles better equipment doing the exact same thing.

Who turns out also to be Mr. Barron in disguise and he's found the peculiar children.

Dan: And, and this was, this was his whole kind of reason to be there and pretending to be not only the birdwatcher, but he was also the therapist we

Sidey: Yeah, he could just shapeshift into

Dan: he's shape shifting.

Cris: shapeshifting and this is the time when we find out that, butterfield's granddad was in fact a hunter of these creatures. And he would go and see all these other schools where there would be other Miss Peregrines in different places. He would have a map

Reegs: the time loops and

Cris: the time loops where they are and what his actual power was, which we then find out that Asa Butterfield has it as well.

So he would have been one of them that he would be one of the ones that can see the holocaust compared to all the other peculiar children that

Dan: He, despite

you're right Chris, he becomes, or his, you know, his destiny is to become a, protect, a protector of the,

Sidey: like Buffy the vampire, slay

Dan: a bit like that

Reegs: And every day, because the time loop and obviously what occurred on that day, he, his Abe, his grandfather phones as a young man, Miss Peregrine, to have a conversation, which leads to Abe and and what's the character's name? What's Asa Butterfield's character's Is it Jake leads

to Abe and Jake having quite a nice touching moment.

Cris: Yeah, when he says I miss you and all that, yeah,

Reegs: So like it's sort of that nice thing of like being, you know, he's that wish fulfillment of being able to say to somebody after they died, you know, I love you and all that stuff. All the important things.

Cris: after that is,

happens the scene where Mr. Baron turns out to be the birdwatcher man and follows Jake into the cave, which is where the transition happens to, to get into the loop. And he, then we, we get the, I can't remember why Judy Dench was there though.

Sidey: Yeah, her role seems a bit, it's kind of superfluous to me.

Reegs: Me She's being,

Cris: She's another Peregrine, but she's from another school. Oh right, she was from the school of Blackpool,

Sidey: She does have a, a kind of, like, good bit of defeating expectations when it does kick off. Because it does kick off, right? Baron turns up at the house. And it's all gonna go, you know,

Reegs: Well, he, like, he forces her, basically, oh, I see, Eva Green has to, like, really calmly, kind of, give up.

He takes her hostage first,

Yeah.

And He's Yeah. Yeah.

Sidey: he doesn't know that Judi Dench is there. So you're kind of waiting for it to kick off and see all the powers in action. That's what I was waiting and then a holocaust does, does come in and start causing a fucking riot. And Judi Dench's character is just giving a speech about how you've got to do this, that.

And then right as she's in the middle of it, it just fucking whips her away.

Dan: just

Reegs: Through a wall, yeah.

Through

Cris: wall, yeah.

Reegs: Through a wall, brutal and then there's a bit of jiggery pokery with Jake being shit with a crossbow It is notoriously hard to fire a

Sidey: Oh, to reload it is a fucking nightmare.

Reegs: But anyway, so the bird, the bird Samuel L. Jackson fucks off with the falcon in the cage.

Sidey: turns into a falcon

Reegs: And they've gone off to Blackpool to this other time loop that connects to the year 2016.

Sidey: yeah.

Reegs: And it turns out that what's her name? Ella Purnell. She's like, she can blow better than anything you've ever, she's like the world's greatest

Cris: Yes.

Sidey: of hot air.

Cris: Floating water. Yes.

Sidey: of

Dan: She's full of hot air, yeah. And one of the great scenes actually in the film is when they dive underwater to a ship where she blows all the air, blows air into the ship and displaces all the water. And she has a conversation with with Asa there Jake there and is sort of saying,

Sidey: Well, they've, they've, they've been getting, they've been getting a bit close, haven't they?

And there's been a few where she's like, well, you're just going to leave and go back to your grandfather. And you can tell she's like, oh, wait to stay, because I love you.

Reegs: Mm-Hmm.

it's nearly a moment where they kiss, isn't

Dan: it? It is. But the next time we're in, in that ship, she

Reegs: she blows it so hard.

They go up to the

Dan: They go up. Yeah.

Cris: And they go to Blackpool and

they

Reegs: to Blackpool, they sail it to

Blackpool,

Cris: Noah's Ark.

Dan: It's a long way round from Wales to Blackpool.

Sidey: Yeah.

Cris: Around

the other side. Yeah. Yeah. They could have just flown over.

Dan: It would have,

Sidey: She could have, I learnt, so when, She's just floating around. He carries around like a balloon.

Reegs: Yeah, I really

Dan: Yeah, because she's got these heavy sort of lead shoes, isn't she, that she has to wear all the time.

Sidey: So they're on the the promenade, whatever you call it of the boardwalk, is it Blackpool? And as a ghost thingy, ghost train ride. And that's where it's all going to happen. And, so Baron's goal is to redo this experiment. And this is the one that's going to give them the ability to exist in And it's going to go down in this, Ghost Yeah. And then, and then they, the kids are just sneaking around. It's, but it's more like a kind of auditorium, isn't it? They're

Reegs: It's like a circus type tent, or something,

Sidey: different rooms to it. 'cause Yeah, it's, it's like a stage with the, like a, yeah, like a circus.

'cause there's like a big top and all this, the chairs go around it

Reegs: Well, later on there's a massive sculpture of a fucking elephant that he's

Sidey: that might come useful. And so the kids are all kind of like hiding in amongst it and it's just getting ready for the big finale fight.

Reegs: which sort of comes in two parts that first off, there's like a confrontation down at the

Cris: At the pier.

Reegs: the pier. Yeah, where they hit snowballs at the invisible. Actually, one of them just gets taken out by tram. It's a going across the road.

I quite enjoyed that. And then there's like a little fight there and some Ray Harryhausen again, style like skeletons fighting with the

Sidey: Yeah, that's cool.

Reegs: get rid of them. And then it goes back to have the sort of final confrontation back at the circusy place.

Dan: Yeah, that was real Jason and the Argonauts stuff, wasn't it? Because obviously he's put a heart in all these skeletons of the boat that had been sunk. And and then you, you've got. Yeah, it's safe. It's just, it's just like that, isn't it? You've got the skeletons attacking and fighting the good fight

Reegs: And he, that guy Enoch had been in a kind of love triangle almost with Asa Butterfield's character and Ella Purnell.

Cause he had his own thing and he kind of resents him cause he wasn't a peculiar and then was and all

Sidey: that. Yeah, he knows he's going to lose that.

That fight that, that love triangle

Reegs: him out at this point

Sidey: does. Yeah.

Reegs: So then they end up back at the

Sidey: the big toy

Reegs: the big top thing. And more shenanigans Milo's back in it in a.

He fires bees at people,

Dan: Bees are stinging.

Reegs: and there's a girl who can make stuff grow real quick, and one of the holographs, I think, gets taken out by Cress,

Sidey: Well, it's one of those, yeah. She's a poison ivy type character, and she waits for loads of stuff to happen before she throws the seeds and stops the guy. And you're like, you could've done that at the start . Yeah. Like right at the start. Anyway and yeah, there's, there's a room with a great big cage and it's full of.

These birds and jake's taking ages flummoxing around trying to get them out And this is going to be the big confrontation with samuel

Dan: Did think he was flummoxed in there a little bit because

Sidey: it didn't seem that difficult. It's just a bolt essentially.

Dan: it just seemed to bulk but that they are all the the it? Ingley in? In greens, they are all the protectors of the children and they fly out. Eventually and and just leave him with baron and they're Down for their showdown

Reegs: And he can shapeshift Baron. So when, after a bit of shenanigans, when the other two come in, there's two Jakes there.

But what Baron doesn't know is, and because he can't

Sidey: because a hologast

Reegs: because a Hologaust comes in, and he can't see them either, so Jake basically just callously waits for him to get slaughtered by the

Dan: yeah, so there's nothing, yeah

Reegs: and

Sidey: takes his eyes, everything.

Reegs: Yeah. Yeah. It's horrible. And then he does take the thing down.

He finally, with the heroic shot with

Sidey: crossbow

Dan: finally gets that shot right,

Reegs: Yeah.

Dan: And and that sort of means that the baddies are done, but love has suffered because I think the time loop is closed he can't get back to

Sidey: right. It has closed. Yeah. So she, she, she's like, he's going to go to a different way. I think is the implication. Cause he does go. He's

Dan: He, he's got to go. Yeah, he's got to go.

Sidey: And she,

Dan: but she can't follow him because she will

Sidey: would be dead.

Dan: and he wants to get back because in this set of circumstances, and I must say with the time loops and things, it wasn't always the easiest to follow for for us, but

he, he,

understands now that his grandfather might be alive and he runs off and sees him, doesn't he?

Sidey: It does. And They have a, they, him and Elepa now, they have a heart to heart and They both seem to be, they don't, like, she doesn't put up a fight particularly, and neither does he

Reegs: well, they're trapped, aren't they? That's part of it for the peculiar children.

They're trapped in their world.

Sidey: so, he does go back to see General Zod, and Zod says, Well, probably go and, like, finger her. And he's like, but,

Reegs: How do I find, how do I get back to 1943?

Sidey: It's like it's not where she is, it's when she is. And then it goes back to her and she's sort of moping around being all fucking teenage girl about it. And he just rocks up and he's like, fuck, it's like took fucking ages

Dan: ages since

Reegs: mullet now. He's got like a

Sidey: And he explains that he's had to go

Dan: Japan, Tokyo, he joined enlisted is like

Sidey: It's the three years in the Navy. Yeah, together. Yeah.

Dan: And eventually he's, he's back in her time.

Sidey: and they kiss. And that was the most terrifying bit of my daughter. She lies. The only bit she looked away.

Dan: bit that, it was really popular with us. Nelly said it was one of the best things she'd ever seen.

Sidey: Well, when I left to come here, my daughter had put it on again to show mom, you know,

Dan: know.

Oh really? Yeah.

Sidey: straight away.

Dan: You're all connection. Yeah, I think they, they really loved the characters in it. They loved the the superpowers and everything that the kids had. And also those Kind of adult y themes and and the fact that it felt like a film that was made for kids, but definitely older kids.

Sidey: it doesn't

talk down to kids, you know, it doesn't sort of, I don't know, it's quite spooky, I thought very Tim Burton,

Dan: Yeah, it kind of asks kids, are you ready for this? Can you take it? You know, it's just, and just, Pushes them a little bit out of the comfort zone. I'm talking about 12 year old, 13 year old,

kids who possibly haven't been exposed to Real scary characters like the the Hologast is

Sidey: Those two twins.

Dan: And what about

Sidey: waiting to see what they were

Reegs: they're like.

Dan: the little girl with the the mouth or the back of her neck? That was pretty like, when, yeah, she said, oh, she doesn't want to eat in front of you and you go, no, no, it's fine. And then she puts this chicken bone to the back of her neck and it just like devours it. This horrible kind of hollow gas looking mouth,

Reegs: Yeah, and then the twins, like you were saying, they have, like, Medusa like powers,

Sidey: basically, which

Reegs: very handy to have had

Sidey: They have this kind of cloth mask, the two of them.

Reegs: And it looks

Sidey: And it looks Do

you remember the Cybermen from Doctor Who. Yeah. The expression on it is like that, that kind of like emotionless,

Cris: Yeah, it was more like a mime kind of face.

Sidey: And you see that when they get, when they're, when they're packing their suitcase to leave the house, they have to pack their outfits, and and they eventually do, they do show their face, and they're this hideous, like Medusa quality, because they turn this one of the

stone, yeah which is a handy power to have.

Reegs: Yeah, it's it's about two hours long there is an awful lot of exposition it spends a lot of time explaining its world and it's if that was my only criticism probably is too much going on,

Sidey: I wondered if the book was you know an epic

Reegs: yeah,

Sidey: Because it is It's a bit of world building going on

Reegs: but I struggled to see really why this didn't connect.

And Harry Potter, you know, does absolutely be Jenga and all the other young

Dan: maybe because of Harry Potter this might have taken a a side

Sidey: It did alright though. Do you want some metrics?

Cris: metrics? Yeah, go

Dan: which, just the fact that we had not all watched it before now and

Cris: I remember watching the trailer and I all I remember thinking I need to watch this because evergreen is in but I'd never got to

Dan: eight years later.

There you

Cris: and eight years later, here I am. But numbers,

Sidey: inside? Budget for it was 110 mil.

And it took just under 300.

Dan: I imagine most of that went into Milo's pocket.

Sidey: Yeah, I thought so, yeah.

Reegs: Yeah. You could see RIM for like. Coming back to this world, because now that they've established so many of the rules you could settle in and explore some of the interesting things like what it's like to be in a perpetual childhood for a hundred

Sidey: other loops.

Reegs: or some of the other loops or whatever.

Yeah. So

Sidey: two other books, though, who knows. But it's eight years down the line and seem like there's gonna be another one. But,

Reegs: If you've slept on this, I'd say strong recommend, particularly as it seemed to go really well with the kids.

Sidey: Kids. My daughter really, really loved it.

Yeah. Really, really loved it.

Dan: Yeah, it is I think if you've got 12,

13 year old kids, then check this out for them.

Reegs: And if you haven't got 12 or 13 year old kids, just go

Dan: and You'll enjoy it anyway.

Sidey: Strong recommend.