You probably know the story by now: Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) is a college student who ends up interviewing the billionaire Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) as a favor to her friend who has the flu. For some reason, Mr. Grey likes the girl and goes after her. She gets excited about the prospect of having a romance, and then she hears from him that he doesn’t “do romance” and that his “tastes are very singular”. And that’s what the fuss is all about. For them to be together, she’ll have to accept to be his “submissive” by signing a contract detailing all her obligations (I wonder what kind of lawyer would actually draft a contract like that).
The plot is simple, yet “Fifty shades of Grey” literally dominated the box-office this weekend, with over US$ 90 million in the U.S. alone mainly because the book-readers were curious to see how it would be adapted to the screen. And, as most adaptions, the movie doesn’t show everything the book describes, which is completely expected. If they wanted to show everything that’s in the book, they would either have to rate it as NC-17 (no one 17 and under admitted) or have it produced by HBO and turned into a mini-series. Since neither happened due to the studio’s legitimate desire to profit, the final product is a romance with just a few more explicit scenes.
The main problem of the movie, in my opinion, is the cast. Dakota Johnson gets better throughout the film, but Jamie Dornan still hasn’t convinced me as Christian Grey. The dialogues are weak, but, again, this is nothing that the book readers didn’t already know.
The most interesting part of watching the movie was the reaction of the audience. There was a woman behind me who would react to almost anything happening on screen. She would say “whaaaaat?” or “this is crazy” or laugh extremely loudly. At some point she said really loud “sorry, guys. I didn’t read the book, so this is all new to me”. I watched with 3 friends and the guy in our group laughed from beginning to end, mostly because of the dialogues.
In the end, it’s a classic romance of girl-falls-for-troubled-boy-and-tries-to-change-him, like so many other movies/books before it and certainly many more to come, with just a little different kind of spice.
