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Lost Season 1 got me hooked – I was an instant fan, so much so that I was willing to let TV control me when Season 2 came to our shores, not wanting to wait for the DVD release. Sadly, in my opinion, Season 2 was a massive departure from what had made Lost an instant hit. Gone was the mystery of the island and in its place was tedium. I stopped watching part way through only to return to see how it ended.

I had given up on Lost.

Season 3 rolled around on TV and all I ever saw was the weekly preview adverts, and boy did they look interesting, but no, I wasn’t a fan any more.

Fortunately when Season 3 was released on DVD I decided to give Lost a second chance, and once more I’m hooked.

Back is the mystery, the Polar Bears, Black Smoke and that French chick. Back is the adrenaline rush of never knowing what was going to happen next. Back was the Lost that I had fallen in love with.

To be brutally honest, I don’t think I missed a thing not following Season 2, Season 3 welcomed me home like the prodigal son, and threw on a feast for me to devour.

Through the back-stories we get to see some more boring details about the survivors, including a little bit of a tease on the seven degrees of separation theory, but you also get some back-story on the others. This is where things get interesting as we start to uncover some of the secrets of the island, and how people managed to end up there.

Good and evil are back as common themes, but now it’s not so much about who’s on which side. The line between who’s good and who’s evil is brutally blurry, and there appears to be many different factions struggling for control and freedom.

Loyalties fall victim to the blurriness of the situation, especially as new information is uncovered and people change sides, sometimes more than once!

And then there’s the ending. It was certainly a ‘didn’t see that coming’ scenario, and funnily enough, it was an ending that could have been used to finish the whole show, but with the knowledge that Lost is to continue until 2010, it sets up one huge cliff-hanger just by making you think ‘what on earth are they going to do now?’

If you’re a Lost fan, then this is the best Season yet, if you got burned by Season 2 like I did, then it’s time to come home.

Food for thought
Sometimes, no matter how much faith we have, we lose people. But you never forget them. And sometimes, it’s those memories that give us the faith to go on.

Reviewed by: Jonathan Read.
Rating: M – Contains Violence & Sexual References.
Genre: Television, Television Drama, Television Sci-fi.
Actors: Naveen Andrews, Terry O’Quinn, Dominic Monaghan, Ian Somerhalder, Matthew Fox, Emilie de Ravin, Jorge Garcia, Maggie Grace, Josh Holloway, Malcolm David Kelley, Yoon-jin Kim, Evangeline Lilly.
Distributor: Roadshow
Release Date: Available Now.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a wonderfully mythical tale set against the backdrop of fascist Spain, where innocence must grow up, challenge authority and fulfil her destiny.

Ofelia is forced to journey with her pregnant mother to live with her new father, a man she does not know or trust. Set in the hills of rural Spain her new ‘father’ is determined to destroy the last vestments of the Spanish resistance and shows his true colours early on as he beats to death an innocent farm boy.

With harshness and cruelty abounding, Ofelia withdrawals to a world of fantasy that only she can see.

But is it fantasy?

In the opening scene, we see Ofelia as she finds an eye carved into a broken stone, we follow her as she discovers and ancient statue where the eye came from and as she reunited the statue and eye, her own eyes are opened to the reality of the fantasy – spiritual – world around her.

Through this shift in focus of her world view, Ofelia soon discovers that whilst she was born in human form, she is in fact a princess from a spiritual realm and must travel a journey pre-ordained path that will lead her to question what is truth, where does authority come from, and most importantly the meaning of true love and sacrifice.

She will overcome fear; battle evil monsters and feel the pain of loss and betrayal and in doing so grow from an innocent child to a courageous woman.

Guillermo del Toro does a brilliant job of weaving alternate realities in a cohesive storyline with such rich imagery that you’ll want to watch the movie over and over again.

The balance of fantasy and reality at first was disappointing, as I was expecting (as I had with the similarly proportioned Bridge to Terabithia) a fantasy epic, with reality taking a back seat, but as the story progressed I realised that del Torro had achieved a perfectly balanced narrative, where the fantasy element visualised the internal struggles of Ofelia without disrupting the flow of events in the real world.

It’s easy to see why Pan’s Labyrinth won Oscars for Cinematography, Art Direction and Make Up; the film is a visual feast. The hopelessness of the dreary, rugged countryside is complimented with the enchanting world that only Ofelia can witness. It’s richness also lies in the element of the unknown – who is good, who will prevail, nothing is left to chance, but nothing is given away until the final scenes.

Let you imagination run wild as you explore the endless possibilities of Pan’s Labyrinth.

Food for thought
The essence of forgiveness lies in His word and in His mystery. Because although God sends us the message, it is our task to decipher it.

Reviewed by: Jonathan Read.
Rating: R16 – Contains Violence, Offensive Language & Horror.
Duration: 112 mins.
Genre: Horror, Fantasy, Foreign.
Actors: Sergi Lopez, Maribel Verdú, Doug Jones, Ariadna Gil, Roger Casamajor, Alex Angulo, Ivana Massague.
Director: Guillermo del Toro.
Release Date: Available now.