***WARNING: SPOILERS***
Last night, I went to see the Fifty Shades Darker movie with two of my best friends. I must start off by saying that this movie was significantly better than the first one. The movie opened up with Anastasia Steele working at her new job in Seattle, receiving flowers from the ever-so enticing Christian Grey. She contemplates throwing them away, but doesn’t. Fresh off the bat, Ana’s boss seems like a total creeper, and there’s some insane foreshadowing he would be (if you hadn’t read the books, you would have noticed it). Then, we get our taste of Mr. Grey and the plot moves on.
And that is what this movie did. It moved the plot along in a way that felt so forced – no issue was dragged out in the movie like it was in the book. Every situation – like the “Ana’s boss nearly attacking Ana” – was dragged out for what felt like 8-15 pages in the book, but in the movie, the situation was over in 3 minutes.
In the book, Ana’s stalker/attacker was definitely drawn out, and in the book she didn’t fire her gun, but in the movie she definitely did (you would even know this from the trailers). Again, though, the situation was over in five minutes. They seemed to prolong and even dedicated a song to Ana walking around Seattle obviously contemplating and gathering her thoughts, although my thoughts were more along the lines of “Is this 3 minutes of watching her walk really worth it? What is actually the point of this?”. Other thoughts I had in this scene were “Why is he so demanding? Why did he send out a search party for her when he clearly saw she was distressed after having a gun shot near her and needed to calm down?”. I think any reasonable human would go calm tf down!
Another example of rushing the plot was when his HELICOPTER WENT DOWN and within four minutes the situation was resolved and he shows up seemingly without a scratch after everyone talks about him like he’s dead. I’d hate to be comforted when my ~almost~ fiancé’s chopper goes down by other people saying “Well, he was a good guy and he loved you a lot”.
But, the true downfall of this movie was the fact that it felt as though they kept too much of the book’s cheesy and cliché dialogue and didn’t replace it with MATURE words. I think we all know how cliché the book was, and they kept it in the movie! There was some of the sly humor, but it was too fake.
However, the soundtrack isn’t bad. Sia, Nick Jonas and Nicki Minaj have some appearances on it, and they are pretty decent songs.
For another review, check out Vox.com’s hilarious one!