Jack goes to market and trades his horse for the promise of gold, but he gets magic beans in the interim. Those beans - shock - grow into a beanstalk. That's not a normal beanstalk, though; it's a magic, CGI beanstalk. The top of the beanstalk is where the giants are, and Evan McGregor (in a strangely small role) helps our hero climb the stalk to save the princess who was conveniently taken up with the stalk started to grow.
Along with them is the evil dude who wants to take over the world, played by Stanley Tucci. Stanley does about the job you would expect - he plays pretty much the same bad guy most of the time. For some reason, even though giants were a story that passed into legend, and no one believed in them any more, Stanley's master plan has ALWAYS been to go to the land of the giants and use the magic item to take over and use them as his own personal army. They kind of gloss over how he knew that they actually existed, but let's just move along.
The giants were, again, entirely CGI. It gives them the unnatural feel that the director was probably going for, but I think it was a bit much. There's just too much CGI in this movie in general, and the result is that you don't really get too involved in much of the film. When you're waiting for CG giants to attack a CG city after it is damaged by a CG beanstalk and they use CG weapons to damage its CG walls with CG debris falling near our hero, it's just too much to deal with.
Maybe the kids will like it.
Camerawork was okay.
Story was decent.
Dialogue was fair.
Acting was generally good.
Directing was not great.
CGI was way overused.
1.75/5
