The giants' unwieldy names and unpleasant habits are taken straight from Dahl's book, and they represent Spielberg's one concession to the original version's creepiness: Giants like Fleshlumpeater (Flight Of The Conchords' Jemaine Clement), Bloodbottler (Bill Hader), and Childchewer (Jonathan Holmes) at least sound pretty ghastly. But The BFG plays them more like schoolyard bullies than monsters. They're malicious, but slow and predictable, and the film veers away from their kid-eating activities except by implication. Spielberg and late screenwriter Melissa Mathison (who also scripted his E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial more than 30 years ago) spend much more of the film's run time focusing on the digital wonderland of Giant Country, where The BFG runs around netting brightly colored, firefly-like dreams and popping them into bottles, so he can later blow them up sleepers' noses. A surprising percentage of the movie is just devoted to The BFG explaining himself and his life to Sophie, revealing how his immense ears let him listen to the voices of the trees and the music of the stars, or how much he enjoys a fizzy concoction called frobscottle that causes explosive green flatulence.

Not a lot happens, and even when there's action, it's erratic

All those explanations build an elaborate world via colorful malapropisms. The BFG has no formal education, and tends to "say things a little squiggly," complete with his own elaborate Dahlian vocabulary: Those frobscottle-induced farts are whizpoppers; a good, satisfying dream is a phizzwizard; a particularly bad nightmare is a trogglehumper, and so forth. But an awful lot of the film just consists of Honey, I Shrunk The Kids antics. Like Sophie interacting with giant-sized furnishings and colorful digital backdrops, or climbing into a disgusting, drippy vegetable to hide, or falling into a mixing bowl and rolling around. None of this disguises the fact that not a lot happens in The BFG, and even the action is excruciatingly padded and erratically paced. The film's best scene — The BFG's quick-moving, silent flight across London as he whisks Sophie away from her home — is visually clever and tightly paced, and it just emphasizes how sleepy and plodding the rest of the story is. Even when Sophie comes up with a plan, it proceeds glacially, with the characters explaining what they plan to do, then leaving long, slack gaps in the story while they do it.

Spielberg's weakness has always been wonder and whimsy at the expense of forward movement, and here, he's working with Walden Media, the Christian entertainment company that's built an ethos out of producing effects-heavy, pointedly wholesome kids' movies like Bridge To Terabithia, The Water Horse, City Of Ember, and the recent live-action Narnia movies. Walden's films have a particular glossy, unreal digital look, and The BFG is no exception. Spielberg is an old hand with special effects, but here, the world looks artificial and shiny to a fault, and Sophie's interactions with it are reminiscent of the stiff integration of animation and live action in Disney's Bedknobs And Broomsticks. There's nothing seamless or casual about the way The BFG picks her up, or the way she clambers around his den; it's all garish, showy artifice, and she never entirely feels like part of his world.