Beautiful Creatures
- Jayde Walker
- Feb 13, 2013
- 2 min read
Hollywood's latest supernatural tweeny adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, Beautiful Creatures, is a down-south mish-mash of Carrie -meets- The Craft -meets- Twilight -meets- Star Wars.
What’s the deal?
Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich) is a jocky-hipster-wannabe-writer living in the small South Carolina town of Gatlin (Children of the Corn shout-out!). Along comes Lena Duchannes (Alice Englert), the niece of the wealthy yet reclusive Macon Ravenswood. Ethan and Lena totes hook up – turns out they’re destined to be togevs forevs because their ancestors were lovers in the Civil War. Big probs in that Lena’s a witch and on her 16th birthday (can anyone say jail bait?) she will either go to the Light or Dark side. Money’s on the Dark, because she has a curse on her thanks to her Civil War ancestor - who was responsible for the death of Ethan’s Civil War ancestor. Awks.
It’s good!
Newcomer Alice Englert is not only Australian (high five!) but holds her own quite well against the likes of Oscar winner/noms Jeremy Irons, Viola Davis and Emma Thompson, who are all clearly slumming it in the hopes it’ll be the Next Big Franchise. Alden Ehrenreich is cute and thankfully not too much of a drip as the Love Interest. He does, however, have a penchant for chewing the scenery and potentially subscribes to the Christian Slater School of Jack Nicholson Homage Acting.
What’s wrong with you?
Look overall, I actually enjoyed it more than Twilight. Yeah, the writing is corny as and it’s a bit of a rip-off, but the magic scenes are pretty good and the two young lovers are adorbs together. Production values can be a bit squif, you can tell most of the budget went on CGI. The showdown at the end looked like a bit of a handycam effort with some minor lighting work in comparison to some of the more jazzed-up scenes.
Neo-Maxi Zoom Dweeb-ery
Also weird – because this is clearly geared at teen girls – is that the movie is narratively told from the point of view of the male, rather than the female, protagonist. Who are the girlies going to voraciously live through here??
Truth?
Much better than Twilight, but nowhere near as good as The Hunger Games.
Bender Fist Pumps
3/5
