Film Review - Beautiful Creatures (2013)

Based off the young adult novel, Beautiful Creatures stars Aidan Ehrenreich as Ethan, a young boy who moves to a small southern town in the US and who finds himself attracted to Lena (Alice Englert, daughter of veteran director Jane Campion) but Lena has a very dark secret within her, one that could find her tempted by the dark side of the Force.

Beautiful Creatures was for me, a very nice surprise, not taking too long to pull me into its interesting world and the dilemma of its main characters, Englert has clearly learnt a thing or two from her famous mum and is actually pretty good, in fact her struggle reminded me an awful lot of Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars Trilogy and especially his training to be a Jedi in The Empire Strikes Back in that he feels the Force but cannot control it, not too similar to Lena's power here, the Force is strong with her but she isn't a Jedi yet.

As for Ehrenreich well he's fine but is easily the weaker of the two, at times he comes across as too buff for the role and I wish that it was a skinnier person as you might have gotten the more sensitive side of him a lot more than what you see here and as for their love story well another favorite of mine came to me and that was Highlander in that it is foolish for someone like Lena as it was told to Connor MacLeod in that film to love a mortal as all that will happen is pain and tragedy and during some of those moments I was reminded of "Who wants to Live Forever" from that film.

But apart from that, the film also has some other good performers, notable Viola Davis, Emmy Rossum and Jeremy Irons, Irons is immensely charming in this movie and could easily have been the scene stealer had it not been for Rossum who takes the cake in that department, she is simply downright sexy in this film and the moment she struts on screen she leaves an impact and although she goes a little too over the top, she definitely becomes the show stealer.

Irons meanwhile to come back to him also reminded me a little bit of Sir Alec Guiness from the Star Wars Trilogy in terms of some of his character moments, in fact I was reciting in my mind some of Alec's lines from Empire during some scenes.

As for Davis and Emma Thompson well they're okay and Davis is pretty good but Thompson I felt wasn't in the film long enough to really have much of an impact in terms of events as she has too few scenes in the film.

So all in all, I was surprisingly taken by Beautiful Creatures in terms of its story and characters and elements of it reminding me so much of Star Wars and Highlander, the Force is strong with this one so I very highly recommend it, 4 out of 5.