Pointlessly depressing and tragic. The characters kind of grow on you, but not really because their lives are so depressing and sad. Building up to the (spoilers).... the death of anne hathaway's character, I was crossing my fingers and saying please don't suddenly have a truck or some *beep* kill anne hathaway or jim sturgess, that's just totally unnecessary. Then the truck hit her. I was like ok, i'm done.
I dunno, but does anybody feel the same way?
Yes! Yes! I felt exactly the same way. I was shouting at the screen as she lay dying in the street. I was done with the movie at that exact moment. I finished it, of course, but I scowled the whole way. How dare you have me cheering for these two and be so happy for them just to end it all so abruptly with a sanitation truck?!
shareIt did feel like a bit of a cop out. I thought that in the book as well - it was like a classic 'chick lit' story but the writer wanted it to be a bit more sophisticated so he thought 'I know, I'll kill one of them off!' The story wasn't really going anywhere after that and it was an easy direction to take it. It would have been nice if instead, for example, we saw them get together and then their relationship break down, for them to end up as friends again - or something like that. But modern audiences don't like the idea of couples breaking up unless there's a truck in the way.
However I did like the whole one-year-on structure when it came to that. Often in films and TV shows you see a person die and you see their loved ones' instant grief, when anyone who's lost someone will know it can be drastically different a year on, or two years on, and so on, particularly when it's a sudden death. Some people can be relatively calm for weeks or even months and then spiral down years later. So it was interesting to see a glimpse of that in the story, with an optimistic ending.