Review of Love, Simon (2018) by Dennis C — 09 Apr 2018

Love, Simon represents the de-evolution of story telling. The fact this movie has such a high rating is very telling of how easily the targeted audience is able to fall for blatant propaganda. I would like to make note that I came into this movie with an open mind, expecting to enjoy it and I have no issues with homosexuality.

One of the most glaring issues right off the bat are the characters and their relationships. The movie is inundated with unnecessary 2-dimensional characters. Even Simon, the protagonist, is absolutely bland. He's your typical movie teenager who is an unapologetic smart ass with underdeveopled relationships with all the people around him. Apparently his relationship with his sister is very strong even though the only evidence the audience has of this are the few times he compliments her cooking. His friends are absolutely worthless in terms of story progression. There is literally no development of his "best friend." The movie would have benefitted greatly by removing the best friend character and replacing the development of that relationship with his sister. The overall backstory of supporting characters and their relationships were unnecessary. When you have less than 2 hours to tell a story, the focus should be on the development of the protagonist and his journey. Love, Simon decides to sloppily jam in the backstory of some of the side characters in a failed attempt to make them more human and relatable. Anyone who fell for this should honestly get a brain scan.

And then we have the main relationship between Simon and Blue. Blue puts up an anonymous post confessing to the world that he's gay. Apparently this is enough for Simon to become smitten and immediately he reaches out over email. Eventually the digital back and forth becomes "love." The only thing these two have in common, that they know of, is that they are gay. This is essentially equivalent to me falling in love with someone because she made an anonymous post on reddit stating that she's asian. It is an absolutely ridiculous premise to which the movie anchors itself. At some point in the movie, everything starts crumbling for the protagonist, which is typical with these cliched romance flicks. All the lies that kept Simon afloat come back to bite him in the ass. Now take a wild guess on what resolves everything. If you guessed "a stupid public post on social media" you get a gold star.

Another issue with the movie is the overabundance of liberal propaganda scattered throughout which was entirely unnecessary. Here's a few: the mother's belief in the patriarchy, the attack on the freedom of speech (don't make a joke because you may offend someone), the shout out to refugees during the national anthem, the worshipping of Obama, and the list goes on. None of these things helped progress the story or develop any of these characters.

This movie comes out at a time where acceptance of homosexuality in the US is at an all time high. It has gotten to the point where no one is even shocked any more when an actor or athlete comes out of the closet, so to have a movie where a gay teenager is struggling to confess and be accepted by his peers makes very little sense. Most of the time spent should have been focused on the development of his relationship with Blue in person, but instead we get an undeveloped, half assed story with unlikable characters.