Review of The Age of Adaline (2015) by Pam E — 04 May 2015

AGE OF ADALINE is a movie as quiet and reserved as the main character herself, yet is still packs a strong, if subtle emotional punch. Its biggest flaw is the storyteller-like narration which gives you a pseudo-scientific play-by-play of the process that leads to her agelessness, which is so patently ridiculous as to illicit eye-rolling even from the most unscientifically-minded audience members (such as myself). What's worse is that, in my opinion, it works against the story by taking the mystery out of Adaline's agelessness. As SHE is utterly clueless as to why she has stopped aging, so should WE be. By giving it a "scientific" explanation from the beginning, that only we know about, the writers created a gap between the character and the audience that is difficult to fill, making her a little bit hard to relate to. It also makes her a little less sympathetic as she goes to great lengths to hide her condition from the world, a condition that we are told is understood by the 2030's anyway, presumably (by the nostalgic nature of the narration itself), with an extremely positive impact to humanity.

Other than the sci-fi aspect of the story, the movie is very much a romance, as Adaline, who has slipped into a guarded life of emotional distance, learns the value to love and the acceptance of the inevitability of change. It's pretty typical stuff, especially in the genre of immortality stories (if such can be called a "genre"), but it's delivered with a quiet, but powerful serenity that makes you very much like Adaline as a person and helps you to root for her happy ending.

AGE OF ADALINE gets a "Worth Seeing Once" on Talon's Movie Scale. Actually, it would make a decent date movie for geeks, as it's a pretty touching romance that rides squarely on the shoulders of a sci-fi premise... Assuming you can except the technobabble.