SOME SPOILERS
I might have enjoyed it more if I hadn't recently listened to the BBC radio version or read the book.
I understand that books and films are very different media but this is a very adaptation indeed and wastes some very useful actors. I recall watching a exterior version, possibly a BBC serial as a teenager.
It was very sanitised; the menace of the boys lurking in the woods planning to attack a girl in the earlier version has become a banal incident of adolescent confusion. The children's ages were all wrong, some siblings no longer existed, while another, who'd died before they came to the village, was miraculously resurrected only to be killed off again. The constant jumping back and forth in time was badly done and confusing too.
I understand that books and films are very different media but this is a very adaptation indeed and wastes some very useful actors. I recall watching a exterior version, possibly a BBC serial as a teenager.
It was very sanitised; the menace of the boys lurking in the woods planning to attack a girl in the earlier version has become a banal incident of adolescent confusion. The children's ages were all wrong, some siblings no longer existed, while another, who'd died before they came to the village, was miraculously resurrected only to be killed off again. The constant jumping back and forth in time was badly done and confusing too.