Beautiful Creatures - "Keep your distance, if anything happens to my boy I won't hesitate to send you back to the very hell that spat you out"
Beautiful Creatures based on the novel of the same name is set in the religious extremist town of Gatlin South Carolina where classic works of literature like "To Kill A Mocking Bird" & "Slaughterhouse Five" are banned to preserve the innocence of the children, these very naive & religious children, a never ending cycle of prejudice and sheep worship plagues this town. It's a POV story told from the perspective of 16 year old Ethan Carter Wate played by the very charismatic and charming Alden Ehrenreich, a newcomer but showing early potential. One day the niece of the town shut in Lena Duchannes played by Alice Englert moves to town and enrolls in the local high school and with that comes very stereotypical high school consequences for the new kid. Pushed around and bullied until one day Lena Duchanes snaps and accidentally unleashes her powers on the students.
Turns out Lena is a caster and her powers are growing stronger every day leading up to her 16th birthday where she will be claimed for either the light or the dark. Whilst the deadline places a sense of urgency on our protagonists they never make the Twilightian mistake of taking themselves too seriously or hiring terrible actors for that matter. The jokes are flowing and they actually act like teenagers without irritating you, not an abundance of tears or brooding personalities or a depressing colour gradient filtered into every shot LIKE TWILIGHT. Ethan is a very relatable character who falls for Lena, sticks up for her and is willingly pulled into her dangerous extended family half of which are dark and half of which are light. Emmy Rossum plays Ridley Duchannes, Lena's evil cousin who is a vixen & a siren, can get men to do anything she wants and she exploits it which was good to see, she's not a half-assed villain.
We learn that as Lena's claiming day approaches conflicts arise as her thought to be dead mother "Sarafine" played by the devilishly fantastic Emma Thompson is on the warpath set to corrupt Lena and turn her dark so she can have her daughter back. However Lena has a guardian Macon Ravenwood played by the always excellent Jeremy Irons the town shut in who is reminiscent of Boo Radley from To Kill A Mockingbird. His intentions are clear and his determination is unwavering a really good character for him to sink his teeth into. As Ethan starts taking more and more risks to be with Lena we learn that he also has a guardian, his housekeeper Amma played by the gorgeous Viola Davis. She's completely strange and superstitious & also a seer. She can speak to dead relatives and has frequent visions. It shows that Viola Davis took the character seriously but also had a lot of fun with her. All in all the casting is literally perfect they all hit their marks, true to the characters and the accents are fantastic.
There are a few bumps in the road which stops me from really loving this film even though I liked it a lot. Whilst there is some really clever dialogue, sometimes it's not delivered perfectly. Also the special effects are not a strong point of this film, sometimes coming across a little distracting particularly the spinning dinner table scene. The costumes are terrific but it seems only the adult cast got to don the truly wonderful and campy extravagant costumes, whilst Lena went a little too Gothic and it didn't seem to fit. The music I hate to say is more often than not distractingly bad, the cues were awfully timed and the actual score was bland. It didn't enhance any of the intense moments but the intensity never fell flat due to the consistent acting. Overall it's a great adaptation of the book and it throws away the stupidly ridiculous ending of the novel and replaces it with something a little more realistic. It's not perfect but it's a fun time and one of the better adaptations of young adult fiction, makes you think what went wrong with Twilight and The Hunger Games. 3.5/5
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