No matter the subject matter or quality of storytelling, the Tim Burton aesthetic permeates the filmmaker’s 30-plus year career. In his most successful features, that fanciful, gothic style can dramatize the horrific with an unparalleled sense of beauty and childlike wonder.

While the visuals impress across his entire filmography, Burton’s storytelling instincts have been inconsistent at best. Always prone to the occasional clunker (most famously that awful “Planet of the Apes” remake), Burton’s recent output includes a forgettable prestige drama (“Big Eyes”), the CGI-bloated “Alice in Wonderland” reboot, and a depressingly inept update of the “Dark Shadows” television show. In these movies, even Burton’s signature aesthetic seemed suffocated by story deficiencies and uncontrolled tone.

For much of its running length, “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” is the director’s best constructed film in years. The design elements exist to complement the story, and the first half especially nails the playful morbidity that defines his best work.

An even mix of Hogwarts and Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, “Miss Peregrine’s Home” is still a decidedly Burton universe, with the familiar “X-Men” and fantasy tropes remixed through the filmmaker’s prism. Even when the second half rushes through its convoluted world-building, the movie maintains a sense of fun — something sorely missing in his work of late.

Based on a young adult book series by Ransom Riggs, “Miss Peregrine” isn’t much about the title character played by Eva Green. Instead the movie focuses on Jake (Asa Butterfield, “Hugo”), a teen investigating the veracity of his grandfather’s bedtime stories after he witnesses the Old Man (Terrence Stamp) murdered by the hand (claw?) of a eye-sucking monster.

Jake’s grandfather told vivid stories of his adventures on a Welsh island where a home kept “peculiar” children hidden from the Nazis during World War II. All the children had special abilities (a floating girl requiring lead shoes to walk the earth, an invisible boy, etc.), and the headmistress, Miss Peregrine, could morph into a bird.

Long story short, Jake travels to the island and discovers everything his grandfather told him to be true. Jake unearths a time loop, where the inhabitants of the home repeat the same day in 1943 over-and-over again. While the kids and Miss Peregrine maintain their memories of each repeated day, they never age, and the world outside the time loop continues on as normal.

The time travel rules can be challenging at times, but Burton unspools exposition in small doses and uses the fantastical character detail to wash away the peskier leaps in logic. Jake doesn’t really understand how anything works either, so he makes for a good, befuddled audience surrogate.

There’s a reasonably entertaining budding romance between Jake and Lighter-than-Air Girl (Ella Purnell), and Green vamps enough to offset the title character’s curious lack of screen time.

Even at over two hours, “Miss Peregrine” feels like a movie fighting against its running time. This is most apparent with the hasty introduction of the villain, played by Samuel L. Jackson. Once the physical conflict appears, the movie abandons its steady pace and playfully gloomy tone and replaces it with battles with skeletons and CGI monsters.

Everything seems rushed, the climax opts for cartoonish antics, and Jackson’s intensity veers at times into comical insanity. The last act especially feels like either Burton or the studio stripped a good 15 minutes out of the final cut. The climax is action-heavy rather than character-focused, and the movie doesn’t really settle in the place suggested by its first half. Miss Peregrine barely appears in the last 30 minutes, undermining her purpose in the entire narrative and sidelining the movie’s best performance.

If the payoff is a mess, at least there’s enough of the good Burton tendencies to make “Miss Peregrine” a worthwhile experience. The ending veers into studio-mandated CGI-mayhem, but even a substance-focused Burton can’t stop the mechanizations of modern day, blockbuster filmmaking.

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Tyler Wilson can be reached at [email protected].