Beautiful Creatures Reviews

To be honest, I wasn't really sure what to expect from this flick but since there was a decent cast involved, I thought I might as well give it a try. Well, by now,  I have seen my share of Young Adult book adaptations but this one turned out to be the most boring I have seen so far. It wasn't necessarily the worst one but it was just so damned long and slow, as a result,  I really had a hard time to care about the damned thing. I mean, basically, it takes like forever to take off but even when it was finally revealed what was going on with this mysterious girl, everything happening afterwards was still rather tedious. At least,  Emma Thompson seemed to have some fun with her double-part and I was once again impressed by Alden Ehrenreich who managed to do a lot with this weak material turning this lead character into someone quite charismatic and almost interesting to follow. Concerning Emmy Rossum, she still look stunning, maybe even more nowadays,  but it's just rather sad that we only get to see her in such underwhelming productions. To conclude, the whole thing was pretty weak and I don't think it is really worth a look, except maybe if you are a die-hard fan of the genre. 

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Beautiful Creatures is basically Twilight with witches. Ethan falls for Lena, the mysterious new girl at his school, and soon discovers she's a witch – or rather a "caster". And her sixteenth birthday is approaching, when she'll definitively become either good or evil.
Now, perhaps equating it to Twilight was a bit harsh – this one does have more of a story and actual stakes to it – but, as it's a supernatural love story that came out in the wake of Twilight, the comparisons are inevitable.
At first, I really thought I was going to hate Ethan, because he does nothing but quote pretentious poetry. But I did kind of buy into his relationship with Lena: he's the only one who's nice to her, and they do bond over their shared interest in poetry; that at least gives them more of a foundation for a relationship than Edward and Bella!
Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson's southern accents are really distracting, though, Irons in particular.
One thing I really hated was the Emily character. She does nothing but chastise Lena for religious reasons. She's that clichéd one-dimensional asshole that I hate for all the wrong reasons!
But my real issue is that the movie has no regard whatsoever for pacing. Spoilers here, but the plot just meanders to the point where I honestly thought the mind-wipe scene was the end.
Overall, this movie is terribly flawed, with bad visual effects and inconsistent pacing… but it's still better than Twilight! :)

My rating: 45%