Mia Tiffany

Beautiful Creatures is a stunningly beautiful picture. But, unfortunately, despite its fantastic set design, it delivers a lackluster product on an otherwise intriguing and promising story. The problem with this film lies in its foundation or, rather, lack there of. Many plot points in the movie (Lena collecting poetry, Amma’s connection to the Ravenwood/Duchannes family, Amma’s powers, Seraphine’s “accident” and how she isn’t dead, and so many more) are not fully explained or subtlety explained through mediocre dialogue. It almost feels like the LaGravenese is subconsciously telling you to go and read the book to find the necessary information to understand the backstories. Either that, or he simply skimmed through the book, found the main plot points, and thought that was sufficient enough to make the whole movie out of. However, the blame cannot completely be put on LaGravanese because the movie itself was released a year after the YA world moved on from fantasy romance to the Dystopian genre (The Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Divergent, etc.) This story really had the potential to be a fantastic four-parter, but it was handed to a filmmaker that didn’t see the full picture of what this series could have been and released to an audience who had already moved on to the next big thing. A solid 3/5 for me.