Mariah

4/10 I will never watch this movie again. I felt like I spent the first 40 minutes trying to decipher what the plot is. So many side stories were being rolled into one and it was just not working. When Lydia’s father died in the beginning, it felt thrown in. Astrid’s character was entirely cliche. It feels like I’ve seen her type of character in other movies. Smart, likes science and what’s real, angry/unhappy, goes to a boarding school and hates her life…etc. I thought Jenna Ortega did well with her character, it’s just the character she played was rather boring. Beetlejuice was pretty tamed down, but I felt Michael Keaton did a good job jumping back into that character. The wedding seen was too long. I wanted to rip myself out of my chair and leave. We had three evil villains: Beetlejuice’s ex, that boy, and William Dafoe’s character. It was all simply too much. I wish they would’ve revealed to Astrid or dug a little deeper of the boys murderous past. He was there for a bit then he quickly left and burned in hell just like that, and he was never spoken of again. I was just very bored, especially towards the end. If I had watched it by myself and my significant other wasn’t someone enjoying it, I would’ve been out right after the boy sent Astrid away into the death world and betrayed her. After that everything really just went downhill. I didn’t really understand the whole relationship Lydia had with Astrid’s father. And when they saw him in the death world, I still couldn’t tell because they didn’t really interact. Only Astrid and the father had some sort of connection I could see. William Dafoe’s character left the movie awkwardly. In the wedding scene, he looked like he was just given a few lines cause the director forgot he was still in the scene and had to do something with him. They could’ve gotten away with just never showing his character’s ending or even better, just taken him out and all would be well. It was just too cliche, long in the parts, short in others, loose and empty characters, too many plots, and just a headache of a movie that could’ve been avoided if someone spoke up at the writing table and said, “Hey this script is terrible. Let’s just leave the original story alone and not butcher it.”