By Katie Garner
Rating: 0.5/5 Paws
On general principle, I normally don’t tell people what they should do with their lives. That would be presumptuous of me.
No one really likes being told what to do or what to like, anyway. But I will say this: in the two hours I spent watching Fifty Shades of Grey, I could have been repeatedly beating my head against a wall while listening to Nickelback and it still would have been time better spent than watching this awful movie.
This movie sparked a fair amount of controversy, and from what I saw, I understand why. The major subject of the movie is Christian Grey, who for the remainder of this review I will call “Abusive Batman.” Anastasia Steele, a young college student and the lens through which we watch this cinematic masterpiece, finds Abusive Batman to be an alluring and mysterious figure after she interviews him for an article. From there, she signs a scary sex contract, Abusive Batman leads her to his sex dungeon, and they have sex in various positions. Abusive Batman rejects Anastasia’s affection, as he was apparently emotionally stunted as a child when his parents were murdered in front of him in an alley of Gotham city.
In Fifty Shades, a sequence of events was strung together with a glue stick and someone in the editing room called it a “plot.” I could talk for hours on the fact that this movie portrays a relationship based on domestic violence, or that it horribly misrepresents the BDSM community. But that isn’t why I didn’t like it. No; it is because this movie managed to somehow be both terrible and boring. Even bad movies can at least be fun to watch. I have an archive filled with horror movies for that very reason.
The dialogue is one of the more absurd aspects of the movie, and the depth of the characters is so shallow that they could have replaced Anastasia with a lamp and next to nothing would have changed. Several details are extremely vague, such as what it is exactly Abusive Batman’s company does (which I personally hope is selling doilies). It also glosses over the fact that Abusive Batman was sexually assaulted as a teenager by his mother’s friend, but the audience is somehow expected to feel like this was a positive experience rather than completely horrified.
Alas, a movie adaptation can only be as good as its book. A book, I’d like to point out, which was originally posted as Twilight fanfiction on fanfiction.net. The title was originally “Master of the Universe”, and the author’s pen name on the website was Snowqueens Icedragon. So here we have a movie, based on a book, which was based on a fanfiction, which was based on another movie, which in turn was based on a series of books. Fanfiction should remain in the dark corners of the internet where it belongs, but for reasons beyond my understanding, it was adapted into a major motion picture. Go figure.
It strikes me that there are people out there who enjoyed this film, and I’ll admit that there were aspects to it that weren’t grueling. The soundtrack was alright, for one thing. I’m having some difficulty thinking of the second thing. All in all, I give it a half star out of five.