Review of If I Stay (2014) by Brandon W — 23 Nov 2014

I'm not that much of a fan of YA romance book movie adaptations even though there's films that I like like The Fault In Our Stars and The Notebook. So with If I Stay being out, I didn't care that much about it when I saw the trailers for it even though it has Chloe Grace Moretz in it.

But what got me a little curious about it, was that my sister and my friend liked it. My friend is really into films and she was basically telling me to go see it, ok not really but still. So I wait until it's on DVD and watched it.

Even though I know why they like it as it does have good things in it, I'm not sure if I like it or not. I like the acting, it's really good, and Chloe Grace Moretz did her best in this. The chemistry between the main girl and the boyfriend is really good and didn't seem to be sappy.

The cello scenes are really good, and the supernatural scenes are interesting and does give into question of making a choice between family and love. The problems that I had is that with the supernatural part, it leads to her back story which is not a problem, the problem is that it didn't had a good balance of showing the main girl with her parent, and her relationship with her boyfriend.

It shows the side more than the other side, making it predictable that the main girl is going to be with that side. The writing is bad at times, and I didn't felt moved by the movie and more like it's trying to be manipulative at times which makes it even worse.

It's so frustrating and disappointing that it could've been a good movie, maybe with a rewrite it could've been. This movie was really hard for me to lead up to the score as there's good things, and bad things in it.

But when I kept typing up the review, I now came up with the solution that If I Stay was an all right movie, but I do understand why my friend and sister liked it.