★★★
I remember seeing this when it first came out…it was at the High Museum’s Latin American Film festival. At that time, I didn’t know quite what to make of it. It was oddly evocative, but it was hard to put my finger on why.
This time around…knowing del Toro’s work so much better…I had no such problem. Cronos is a del Toro fantasy tale, plain and simple, and that’s what makes the film so compelling. First, there’s the dark morality issue. The grandfather, Jesus, makes a bad choice and is punished for that error. As that story element is worked out, del Toro uses elements that are bizarre or baroque, a tool kit he frequently uses. Scenes such as those with the cronos machine digging in suggest things I’d see later in Hell Boy and Blade II, as does the extreme make-up we see in Jesus. I saw another del Toro interest as I watched the preternatural granddaughter Aurora, who prefigures characters in The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Laybrinth. And then there’s the vaguely once-upon-a-time feeling here. That’s certainly something we see in later del Toro, too.
My hang up first time around was that I kept wanting to see what the story was getting at beyond what I was watching. This time around, I watched Cronos as a fantasy that had no real significance beyond being an engaging story with fantastic elements. For a good movie, that’s plenty.
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