After seeing the a commercial for the movie “If I Stay,” I was intrigued. It has Mireille Enos in it and is a romance story, how could it not be decent? So a couple of girlfriends and I checked it out. It’s the story of Mia Hall, an aspiring Julliard cello player who has fallen in love with the lead singer of a rock and roll band named Adam. They’re head-over-heals until they realize that they want different things out of life and are caught between their love story and their futures as musicians. At the beginning of the movie, Mia and her family are involved in a car accident. She has an out-of-body experience, watching life go by but not actually living. She watches herself being taken to the hospital and watches her family and friends coming to visit her body in the hospital. The movie is comprised of flashbacks to her former life of growing up loving the cello and meeting Adam. At the end of the movie she is faced with the question, do I stay on this earth and live my life even though it’s shattered, or do I die now?
Although I really wanted to like this movie, I didn’t. The cast was great but it seemed as though the script was entirely made up of cliches strung together. It was just another one of those movies about a teenage love story and the difficulties that come with growing up and realizing what you truly want out of life. A good message, but not unique in any way. The car crash was completely expected and the ending was even more expected. I did, however, enjoy the story of Mia growing up in a family of rock and roll musicians, but finding comfort in classical music and going in a different direction. It was a bit hard to tolerate the amount of teenage angst at the end of the movie. All in all if you want to see this movie, get it on Redbox for about two dollars, it’s definitely not worth ten dollars at the theater unless you’re a die hard Chloe Grace Moretz fan, which, who really is anyway?
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