Beautiful Creatures

'Beautiful Creatures' could be easily cast aside as the new 'Twilight'/'The Hunger Games'/'Vampire Diaries' etc. But, don't dismiss it just yet. Supernatural and fantasy based, it is, but cringy, complicated and gloomy it is not.

The story is told from alternating viewpoints. The first is high school senior, Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich) who can't wait to escape the small town he's grown up in. The second is the mysterious new girl, Lena Duchannes (Alice Englert) who has just moved in with her uncle, the feared, Macon Ravenwood (Jeremy Irons). Setting the story in a small town in South Carolina allowed the writers to create a bitchy group of girls, driven by their parents strong religious views, to bring out Lena's darker side.

Of course, with any supernatural tale, a mortal human will fall in love with a supernatural being. Ethan falls for Lena, despite the fact that she's waiting for her sixteenth birthday to see if she will be claimed for the light or the dark. Lena is a 'castor' (nicer term for a witch, as they say in the film) and her powers will either be for good or for bad. Uncle Macon is trying to steer her towards the light, despite a family curse that runs extremely close to home.

I found 'Beautiful Creatures' to be a far superior story to predecessors within this genre. Lena is angsty, dark in physical appearance and rarely smiles throughout the film. She could be compared to Kristen Stewart in the 'Twilight' series or Nina Dobrev in 'The Vampire Diaries', but I found her character to be much more intriguing. She tries her best to believe she is good and not give into her darker side. She has a past, history with her mother and cousin (both claimed for the dark themselves) and is torn between resisting or allowing herself to go the same way. Her relationship with Ethan is sweet rather than sickly, and isn't so intense that viewers will find themselves rolling their eyes or groaning in dismay.

Overall, the film is a very likable watch. I hadn't read the book prior to seeing it, so I had no mental images of how characters/settings should look like. I do however have the book on my Kindle and do plan to read it and the rest of the series. The characters were much more entertaining, with a slight injection of comedy in places, which sets it apart from other series in this genre. Of course, the story does dip in the middle as Ethan and Lena's relationship takes form, but it is soon picked back up by the introduction of Lena's cousin Ridley (Emmy Rossum), who was claimed for the dark on her sixteenth birthday.

I did enjoy it. The younger actors are relatively unknown, which I prefer in these kinds of films. It stops viewers like myself comparing them to other roles they may have been in. A personal highlight was the introduction of Ridley, that is definitely when things are really shaken up. I would like it if the series was continued, but the ending was satisfying enough so that if another film wasn't made, viewers would still be content with the ending.