Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Movie Review: Five Feet Apart

Michael's Movie Grade: F

Review: It doesn't get much worse than this folks.

This movie may be a tearjerker, but the only emotions it got out of me were boredom and impatience. It is hard to think of how a story like this could have possibly been told in a worse way. We gain no emotional connection with anything because every character and every line of dialogue feels forced and unreal. With the dialogue here I have to think somebody working on the movie simply watched a bunch of romantic movies and copied down the cheesiest dialogue there. There is little of the romantic dialogue that feels like it ever flows naturally from the two lovers and all of it will sound familiar to anyone who has ever watched a romantic movie before. Sometimes I could have said an upcoming line before the character, because I just saw it coming. The characters themselves are just as clichéd as the dialogue. They feel like characters we have seen in a hundred different movies, only less interesting here. There is never a point where any of these characters feels completely real. The major plot points and the tearjerker moments feel no less than emotionally manipulative. They are so forced and only carry the weight that as people we don't like to see other people go through these things. Even if those people are as bland and boring as they are here.

One of the worst scenes happens near the climax (if you can call it that) of the story. The problem with this scene is it is much too obvious what is going to happen. It has been set up in an earlier conversation and again in the dialogue at the beginning of this scene. We all know what is going to happen. This however is not the problem. The problem is it takes forever to happen. I kept waiting and waiting for it to happen and it felt like an eternity before it did. During this scene, I simply began to feel an unbearable amount of impatience for this scene to be finished. When it happened what should have been a tearjerker moment instead became one of relief. Without giving much away, there are things I should not every want to happen to a character I am meant to like. However because this scene was so poorly done, I kept wanting it to finally happen so I could be done with this scene.

Hollywood will never stop making movies like this one. However this movie makes you want them to, and quickly.

-Michael J. Ruhland    

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