First, let me say that I may be prejudiced against the adaptation because they cut my favourite scene from the book: when Max’s bedroom gradually transforms into a forest. In film this could have been done so slowly over the course of the whole establishing act, but instead Max just walks to some woods in the local park. How hard is it to stay true to source material that’s 40 pages?! Anyway…

The film opens with Hollywood’s consistent message that women are evil and single mothers are especially evil. It’s nice that Eggers nailed it on his first time out. But then femininity seems to fill the rest of the film.

The fantasy world here is not a little boy’s. It’s either the fantasy of a little girl (“guess what, mummy? Barbie and Ken are having marital strife!”) or the projected fantasy of a psychotherapist (“tell me more about the fat monster that represents your father and punches holes in family trees”). No child would sit through this movie.

Co-opting a child’s story for nostalgic adults is fundamentally dishonest to the source material. Why can’t Jonze, Eggers and all their hipster fans go rip off someone else’s childhood?

Little boys’ fantasies are like play-within-a-play that Max dictates in the first act (what’s with all the teeth symbolism, anyway?):

…The vampire bites off the top of a building and loses his teeth. Another vampire says, ‘Why are you crying? Those are your baby teeth.’ And he says, ‘No they’re not; they’re my adult teeth.’

It’d be way more fun to watch a movie about wild rumpus.