It's Valentine's Day weekend of 2013, and your cravings for onscreen young adult romance are operating on high. In circumstances like these, you'd ordinarily turn to a DVD rewatch of the most recent chapter of The Twilight Saga. It sates the hunger and revs the engines for the next installment of the series. But those days are over. The Twilight movies have come to an end, with Breaking Dawn - Part 2 having come to theaters three months prior. Rewatches are too painful — they just remind you that you'll never see Bella, Edward, and Jacob take to the big screen again. You need to move on. You need to find something different.
Beautiful Creatures, based on the novel by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, looks like a prime candidate to full the gaping hole of Twilightlessness in the post-Dawn era. Alice Englert plays the superpowered Lena Duchanes, who will be claimed by the forces of Light or Dark come her impending sixteenth birthday (kind of a love triangle in its own right — anyone on Team Dark?). To gauge the severity of the situation, we have Lena's older sister (Emmy Rossum), who is an example of what happens to those chosen by the evil side: she is abandoned, embittered, and wears sunglasses indoors.
Aware of her "ungodly" powers (think small-scale Carrie), the didactic townsfolk have all sided against Lena, organizing speeches, protests, and other venues comprised largely of yelling. But there is at least one young man who takes a liking to her: Ethan (Alden Ehrenreich), himself an oddball of sorts who has fallen for the new and different Lena. There comes the life force of the story. While you're rooting for Lena to earn her way into the forces of Light, and to escape the wrath of her ignorant community (although, wouldn't you be a little freaked out by a girl busting windows with her mind? Fear is kind of a natural reaction there), you're rooting tenfold for her and Ethan to solidify their affections. Beyond the thrill of supernatural abilities and demonic forces is the core pull of a love story — similar to Twilight.
The film is written and directed by Richard LaGravenese (P.S. I Love You, Freedom Writers). Check out the trailer and see how well you think Beautiful Creatures will hold up to the journeys of Bella, Edward, and Jacob. And if it looks all right to you, good news: there are three more books in the series yet to be adapted.
[Photo Credit: Warner Bros.]
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