So I´ve read the books. I found them very good despite being "teenage romance", because of the complexity of the characters (especially Hardin), the roller-coaster storyline and how you get so sucked into it and feel everything the characters feel. You can actually truly feel how Tessa and Hardin are soulmates.
The movie though...
I totally get that they had to cram everything together and leave stuff out which most of the time when I have read a book and then watched the movie annoys me but still leaved me satisfied. But with this I was too dissapointed. They left out so much that the whole development of the story and their love just felt extremely unrealistic and strange so that it made all of the romantic scenes laughable and weird. I mostly rolled my eyes and cringed as well as most of the theatre did. As soon as Hardin started speaking, everyone in the room burst out laughing because of how monotone he sounded and how weird his lines were.
They left out so much of the character Hardin, his darkness and pain, the anger and the mood swings. On screen, all that tried to portray it was just him being a bit passive aggressive and cry sometimes. Be a bit moody but it was nowhere near what it could have been. This also made everything lose that deep passion that I think is the reason many people are captured by the books. Not many romantic books capture passion in that way and that´s what made it unique to me. When they left all of that out though, this just became a bland and boring cliché film.
Usually when I watch rom-coms or whatever, I am at least a tiny bit captivated by them or can at least feel some compassion with the characters but this movie didn´t move me or make me feel anything at all even for a second. Which is sad because when I read the books I cried several times.
The other thing that I think draws people in by the books is the sexual content. I heard this movie was gonna be the new "fifty shades of grey" but the attempt at this being sexual was the lamest I´ve ever seen. The sexual scenes were so not sexual it was weird that they were even there. And it´s a shame becasue I feel like the seuxality and the passion and darkness of Hardin was the whole core of this story and they left it all out and made it into just any other love story.
And don´t get me started on the soundtrack.... it was pathetic.
The one thing I liked was the visuals, they found great fitting characters, I loved the settings and I loved the modern but still retro feeling to it. It was pretty much perfect.
But perhaps such a complex story as After can´t be made into a 1,5 hour film without failure. It´s too bad though, it could´ve been great.
