Remember Me

So, I went to see Remember Me last night. It was the only movie playing now I hadn't promised to see with someone else, and since I was going alone, I figured I'd see a guilty pleasure: a sexy romance. Sexy romance it was, but this movie wasn't exactly what I expected. In the first five minutes of the film, the audience is shocked to near tears by a traumatic experience that later helps to explain the lead female Ally's character and situation. In the scene that follows we watch Tyler, played by Twilight's Robert Pattinson, mope around in a typical brooding teenage-angst fashion. The film quickly evolves as something more significant. Each character has his or her own place in the film and they're played well by seasoned actors, Chris Cooper, Lena Olin and Pierce Brosnan. New to film, Ruby Jerins, plays Tyler's much younger sister Caroline. Bullied by her grade-school peers, Caroline relies on her brother for support, while their father, much too busy with work, has emotionally abandoned his family.

I really liked that the relationship between Ally and Tyler didn't take up too much screen time. The audience sees what it needed to in order to follow the story. There weren't too many fillers, as I call them: montages of the couple doing daily "couple life" things... save for one unnecessary scene of them playing at the beach. Their part was full of realistic problems and emotions most people could relate to and perhaps feel nostalgic about. The attractive young couple had great chemistry and preformed well. All of these things legitimated the film's classification as a drama rather than a teen romance.

The part of this film I had a hard time with is its ending. I felt they used a cheap trick to manipulate the audience into crying. I'm not sure this was necessary to the story. Perhaps the writer didn't know how to end it. Before these final scenes are a series of uplifting displays that tell you "things are too perfect, so I know something has to go wrong." However, this particular thing is not what I expected, so should I give credit to the filmmakers for that? I'm not really sure. Overall, I really did like this movie... I was just a little disappointed in the ending.