I was one of the few who watched this movie without reading any of the After books. Since I did not read the books, my opinion of the movie is simply based on its credibility as, well, a movie. This movie is your typical good girl meets bad boy romance without much depth in its content or narration. As for the plot twists, there were many. The acting was pretty good, although it wasn’t like the characters were exactly the most complex, so that doesn’t mean much. That brings up another issue. The characters either fit complete stereotypes or simply did not have any personalities at all. The biggest culprits of this were the two main characters, Tessa and Hardin. The movie focused much more on the romance between them rather than them as individual people with separate stories and personalities. This made them very un-relatable and boring characters. In addition, the editing was a bit odd, including a lot of shots of characters just staring at each other and extreme close-ups of body parts and objects. In terms of plot, some of the character motives were lost in the fast-paced nature of the film. This is something that happens a lot in the book to film adaptations since it is very difficult to cram what would be very long hours reading sessions into a 2-hour movie, but still, they could have tried a bit harder. The only thing I really liked about the film was that it was very visually pleasing in terms of scenery and lighting. 

 

Overall, this movie was very forgettable. It just blended in with most of the teen romance genre which is becoming very helpless. Unless you are a big After book fan, I simply do not recommend seeing this film. And quite honestly, I think the book lovers might hate it as well.

 

 

STW: 5/30, D: 5/25, C: 6/8, E: 3/5, A: 6/10, PVD: 7/12, S: 8/10