The BFG, film review: Gorgeous and technically excellent – but not Spielberg at his best

It'll likely enrapture kids, but the lack of plot lets this Roald Dahl adaptation down

Winning and understated: Mark Rylance plays the eponymous giant alongside Ruby Barnhill as Sophie (Rex)

There is a lot of windy popping going on in Spielberg’s live action adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG. Mark Rylance plays the Big Friendly Giant as big-eared, rustic everyman who garbles his words in a way that makes him sound strangely like one of the Droogs in A Clockwork Orange. He has a slightly mournful air and only really cheers up when he is drinking his favourite potion, frobscottle, which makes him fart in a very spectacular fashion, or when he is blowing dreams into the bedrooms of kids.

For all its technical excellence and surrealistic flights of fancy, this isn’t Spielberg at full throttle. The film looks gorgeous and boasts all sorts of ingenious legerdemain and special effects. It is aimed at a young audience and is likely to enrapture plenty of kids at half-term. The problem is that this is really a very skimpy story – a two-hander at heart.

Early in the movie, bespectacled orphan Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) is plucked away to Giant Land by the BFG. At first, she is terrified to be in the giant’s lair but she quickly realises that he’s a very benign soul at heart. Rylance plays him as if he’’s a supersize version of Bernard Miles’ Joe Gargery in Great Expectations. It’s a very winning performance because it is such an understated one. We are in a very outlandish world but Rylance is a self-consciously humble figure. Just as he terrorises Sophie (inadvertently), he in turn is terrorised by the other giants, child-eating, uncouth types who tease him relentlessly and call him “microbe”.

The BFG has some of the visual magic that you find in old Powell and Pressburger movies or in films like The Thief Of Bagdad. Spielberg uses another rousing John Williams score to drive the action along. At times, the film has the feel of a horror movie. When Sophie gets stuck in a snozzcumber, a disgusting vegetable in which she is trying to hide from a predatory giant, she ends up covered in utterly revolting goo and we seem to be straying into the world of Cronenberg-style body horror. The BFG also has some splendid comic set-pieces. Among the best of these is the scene when the giant crawls into the palace to meet the Queen (Penelope Wilton) and the corgis and has coffee with her.

This is another of Spielberg’s fables about lost and lonely kids. Sophie isn’t so far removed from the robot boy in search of his mother in A.I or little Jim adrift in wartime Shanghai in Empire Of The Sun. Inevitably, she turns out to be far tougher and more resourceful than she first appears. It’s an enjoyable affair but a very slight one with a plot that could have been sketched on the back of an envelope.