The first glimpse I had of this movie was the small snippet that
Spike Jonze allowed me to see - that of the back of a Wild Thing, racing down a hill among the winter trees.
My first response was, if I remember correctly, "Oh, hell no."
That was two parts horror, two parts hope, and three parts disbelief. Disbelief that anyone would have the chutzpah to make this book into a movie. It only has around ten sentences in the whole thing, for God's sake!
But yes, Spike Jonze has attempted if not the impossible, the certainly very very hard and fraught with peril.
And he's succeeded.
By the time King Max shouts "LET THE WILD RUMPUS START!" you'll be sold, if you were the kind of kid that demanded ever more readings of this book, perhaps even to the point of exasperation of your parents. The movie is, and let me be clear here, not for all kids. It's been made for two kinds of kids. First, it's made for the kids still living secretly inside the adults who, when they were small, read this book with their parents over and over.
And it's made for the kids they've all been having the past fifteen or twenty years; the kids who were brought up not so much on Rowling and Twilight but on Seuss and Sendak and Silverstein.
The filmmakers have managed to capture, with remarkably little damage, the concept of Kid Logic. Things happen in the movie, and things are reasoned out by the characters in the movie in a fashion which will be entirely incomprehensible to adults who don't have one of those kids inside them. The kids will understand it intuitively, after all, because it's right.
At the end of the day, though, a bit of a let down happened to me. I realized that Jonze & Co. had undertaken such a suicide mission making this movie, that when they against all odds managed to pull it off without screwing anything up, without disrespecting the source material, without changing the essence of the story despite now having lines for people to read and ninety-plus minutes of time to fill with what was a 26-page picture book - when they'd pulled off that herculean task, there wasn't much left over to make it an awesome movie.
It's an unbelievable accomplishment.
But that's not always the same as 'awesome.'
I respect it. I'm just not sure how much I enjoyed it at anything other than the technical appreciation level.
And of such things, fun nights at the movies are not usually made.
I would recommend it, though - because anyone who loved this story needs to see the unbelievable thing that was done with it - and who knows; maybe, unlike me, you'll manage to effortlessly see past the accomplishment and watch the movie. I suspect that if you can do that, and do do that, the movie itself is, indeed, awesome.
Maybe on a later viewing, for me.