Everything, Everything Review

PG13: Thematic Elements and Brief Sensuality

Warner Bros. Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,  Alloy Entertainment

1 Hr and 37 Minutes

Cast: Amandla Stenberg, Nick Robinson, Anika Noni Rose, Ana de la Reguera

REVIEW: YA novel adaptations. You get either two types of them: the dystopian future SCI-Fi one and the teeny girl romance one. Just look at the poster and take a nice guess onto which type this one is. When marketing this film, the trailer boasted “From the studio that brought you If I Stay and Me Before You.” I never saw Me Before You, but I remember hating If I Stay. That movie was really your typical romance movie that was obnoxiously riding off the success of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. Now with Everything, Everything we have another love story about a sick girl. BUT you know what? I actually, kind of…..liked it. Well liked far better than If I Stay.

Maddy (Amandla Stenberg) is a smart, curious and imaginative 18-year-old who is unable to leave the protection of the hermetically-sealed environment within her house because of an illness. Olly (Nick Robinson) is the boy next door who won't let that stop them from being together. Gazing through windows and talking only through texts, Maddy and Olly form a deep bond that leads them to risk everything to be together, even if it means losing everything.

THE GOOD: With YA adaptations that follow sort of the similar premise featuring sick lovers whose love might die due to the inevitability of death, this movie attempts to contain elements to will make it stand out and in several aspects it does. It's pretty much Bubble Boy meets Tangled meets your typical YA novel. 

Due to the digital age that we live in now, a new trope you tend to see in movies is onscreen text messages. When a character receives a text you see the message pop out on screen so you can see what they are discussing. Instead of just showing text messages onscreen, the film does something creative by having the messages transition into little scenes of conversation as Maddy envision it into her little micro city she crafts on her downtime. Throughout the film, Maddy constantly goes into imagination when she's texting Olly. She’s almost like a mini Walter Mitty. 

Besides doing that, the film creatively expresses how they are feeling towards each other in the most comedic way possible. There’s a scene where Olly and Maddy are spending the Fourth of July together and instead of having them normally converse with each other, you see subtitles that show what's going on in their heads. It comically goes back and forth expressing Maddy and Olly’s inner thoughts. Little moments like that really makes the film stand out.

I’m happy to see Rue I mean Amandla Stenberg headlining a movie. Though I wouldn’t think it’ll be a YA novel adaptation, it's great to see her in the forefront alongside Nick Robinson portraying these young teenage lovers. I think to star in a YA novel adaptation is your Hollywood right of passage to stardom and this film proves that these leads are currently on their way. They have a lot of chemistry together. He’s good looking, she’s super cute, and together they make a good on-screen couple.

THE BAD: For a film that tries to be its own thing with its story, the movie fails short to making any logical sense at times. Never once throughout this entire movie is explained how Maddy's mom is able to afford this first-class house that she lives in. When you see how people get in and out of the house, the doors automatically slide wide open after they’re scanned. Apparently getting into the house functions the same way as to walking into a secret facility. Madeline only establishes that her mom is a doctor, but not even a doctor would have enough money to afford this house of the future and also hire a maid.

Though Nick Robinson’s performance is relatively good, his character is the corniest lover boy that probably jumped out the pages of a Nicholas Sparks novel. Maddy is lucky she never met anybody else besides him cause this boy is corny as hell. The guy says all the corniest lines and plays the corniest music. He’s just a hipster teenage millennial with a skateboard. Of course, Maddy just falls head over heels for him. There’s a moment he’s copying Love Actually and you’re completely rolling your eyes. 

Though this couple is cute, the problem with the movie is that it spends so much time of them being cute. There’s barely amount where Maddy doesn’t smile or laugh. There’s not much meat to their relationship other than she can’t leave her house and he has an abusive dad (which is an annoying trope I’m tired of seeing now). It's not until they go on their little getaway that it becomes that generic YA romance film that copies The Fault in Our Stars. With that movie you had the leads travel to Amsterdam for a mission, but this you have the leads travel to Hawaii because they wanted to. The setup of how Maddy even obtained tickets to go to Hawaii makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It doesn’t help that their dialogue is cheesy as well. It never seems to have a good balance. Their dialogue is either too cute that it's corny or too corny it's cute. Every five minutes they’re interacting, I’m just thinking of the great señor Chang.

The last thing I want to mention is how the movie deals with the relationship between Maddy and her mother played by Anika Noni Rose. Their relationship is supposed to ply a huge part of the story, but ultimately it never works due to the fact that Dr. Whittier’s mothering skills are terrible. As a mother, she does try to look out for her daughter, but at times she gets really irrational with her decisions. You can’t get a sense of her character because she’s barely in the movie and at the same time personality shifts at a flick of a switch.Because of this, their relationship, unfortunately, becomes the weakest element of the movie. What makes it worse is the film’s conclusion which doesn’t have much of a build up for all of a sudden, becomes a Tyler Perry movie. For the woman known as playing Princess Tiana, she’s pretty much the Mother Gothel of the movie.

LAST STATEMENT: Though it briefly expresses creative moments that attempts to give itself uniqueness and prospers from cute leads, Everything, Everything is ultimately more of the same ol’ terribly flawed YA novel adaptation. But at least it's not dreadfully dull.

Rating: 2/5 | 49%

Super Scene: Inner Thought Subtitles