Alice Englert, Viola Davis, Emma Thompson

The thing I love most about this movie? The poster. I love that artwork, and I loved the story location. The way they filmed it made it feel rich and gothic. The first thing I said was “I want to go there and take pictures!”

That’s probably not a great thing to say about the story itself. I’d never heard of Beautiful Creatures other than the movie trailer, which did a great job of peaking my interest. A girl, with magic powers? Count me in! I deliberately didn’t go look up anything about it, so that the movie could stand on its own without any expectations or baggage on my part. So did it stand?

Eh, it leaned. It didn’t fall down but it did stumble over the steps on the way up the porch.

I liked the eye candy. This is a beautiful film, in a lush, swampy location just ripe for story. I liked the romance (the core of the story) for the most part. I loved that the girl is the strong one, and the boy just the average boy next door type. She has the power, he doesn’t. That’s refreshing, given the recent vampire invasions. In no way is this girl a victim, even of her own circumstance or fate. She makes her own fate, and I respect that. The boy stands beside her no matter what gets in the way, which made her love of him make sense. Plus, he loves to read. That’s so sexy in a man.

The accents were unbelievably bad at the beginning. I have relatives from the deep South, and I’ve lived in Texas for years. Whoever the voice coach was for Alden Ehrenreich taught him some strange hybrid of Texan/Southern that didn’t quite match anything believable. It’s so bad you’ll probably cringe the first time you hear it. Go ahead, laugh, get it out of the way. After awhile I stopped noticing it so it’s not the worst part.

The worst part was her family.

The family felt like a caricature. The loner uncle, the odd grandmother type (never figured out if she was actually blood related), the evil sister/cousin, evil mother hiding in the shadows, and some guy who’s relationship I never figured out but who figures prominently in the end climax. He felt like an after thought, but he shouldn’t have been. I wonder if he originally had more screen time and it fell victim to the cutting room.

The town people…well, I come from a small (very small. VERY VERY small. So small you can’t find it on Google earth. Yes THAT small) town, and I’m here to tell you those people are pretty accurate for a small, southern town. Bad accents not withstanding, the character types are there. Yes, okay they’re a bit exaggerated but in my head that’s how it was. Small things were blown way out of proportion, and the churchy do-gooders weren’t so good behind closed doors.

I just got the feeling that something was missing. Something important. The story was incomplete. When I got home, I looked up the book on which this movie is based and realized that yes, indeed, there is a lot more to the story than they managed to impart in an hour and a half. They cut the movie too short, and too many things were left out. I’m going to read the book now so I can see exactly what I missed.

If you like paranormal romance, you’ll probably like this well enough. It’s not horrible. It’s not great. It’s…eh.