#3 Pan's Labyrinth

Fairy tales are not always designed for children. They can be very haunting and disturbing. Pan's Labyrinth represents what a fairy tale used to mean.

Pan's Labyrinth is set in 1944 fascist Spain(and is told completely in Spanish subtitles). The main character, approximately 10-year-old Ofelia, is forced to move in with her very pregnant mom to a settlement in the middle of the woods. The mom is marrying one of the fascists leaders, Captain Vidal, who is hiding with his troop seeking out any resistance fighters.

This decade has had some incredible villains. Heath Ledger as the Joker, Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, and Christoph Waltz seems to be the front-runner to be the third straight villain to win Best Supporting Actor for his performance as "The Jew Hunter". But my favorite villain of the decade? Captain Vidal played by Sergi López in Pan's Labyrinth.

By the end of the movie, there is no smidgen of sympathy that remains for this guy. His level of cruelty somehow finds a way to shock you multiple times. You are wishing the worst possible ending for him, but you know that there is nothing that can possibly be done to him that can account for his atrocities.

While her mother is in intense pain from her pregnancy, Ofelia finds herself wondering alone and stumbles into an alternate reality. Director Guillermo del Toro does an incredible job of designing this world; which manages to use modern effects, makeup and costumes while combining it with traditional fairy tale standards(for example Ofelia must complete three tasks).

Pan's Labyrinth is also a great war movie. The skirmishes between the resistance group and Captain Vidal's army are some of the best gunfights that I've seen in a while. Additionally, the inner effort to overthrow Vidal through the spy Mercedes is incredibly suspenseful.

But what makes Pan's Labyrinth work so well is the way that it seamlessly blends the two seemingly different stories together. Ofelia's world becomes so connected with reality that, especially by the end of the movie, the audience is forced to question if what Ofelia went through was real.

But how can we judge what is real? Well, we know what facts are. The world is flat and 2+2=4. But we can only ever experience life from our own perspective. So facts are just a consensus. Objectivity is just finding a commonality among many different subjective people. It's not a coincidence that reality and relative come from the same root word.

And if your reality differs from the majority? Then the world decides that you are wrong. But what if you are never told? Your reality feels just as real as anyone else's, and nobody is letting you in on it. As movies may say, Santa Claus or fairies or any other magical creatures only stop existing when you stop believing in them. And as cliché of an expression as it is, ignorance is very often the most blissful state to be in.

This is the situation that Ofelia finds herself in throughout Pan's Labyrinth. Her real world is so barbaric that her retreats into fantasy are not only understandable, but perhaps the only method she has of escape. Is she consciously pushing herself into another world to avoid the one she's stuck in? Does it matter? All that is important is that she buys into it and that the world is true for her.