New Beautiful Creatures featurette wants to fill the Twilight void in your heart

January 23rd 2013, 10:37am

Look, it’s easy to compare BEAUTIFUL CREATURES to Twilight, seeing as how both are based on teen fiction fantasy series that involve supernatural happenings getting all up in the grill of Young Love, and especially with writer/director Richard LaGravenese saying in the below featurette that it’s “an adventure, but, most of all, a love story”. That said, let’s look at a few things the film has in its favor…

First, there’s the guy that provided the unfortunate quote above: Richard LaGravenese. His past directorial work may not jump out at you, but his screenplay efforts include THE FISHER KING, THE REF, and the “too gay” for Hollywood Steven Soderbergh flick BEHIND THE CANDELABRA. Yes, those first two flicks are from quite far back, but if Soderbergh liked one of his recent works enough to decide to direct it, I think that’s a pretty good endorsement of the guy’s potential writing quality on this project.

Second, there’s the impressive cast, with Emmy Rossum, Jeremy Irons, and Emma Thompson all throwing their acting chops into the mix. Personally, I’d have watched the entire Twilight series if they’d all had Jeremy Irons in them, and Emma Thompson is so damn classy that she makes me feel classy while watching her act, and I’m a person that typically has clearly visible food stains on his shirt.

Third, Alcon Entertainment bought the rights to this series in 2009, and has been sitting on them/quietly developing the project ever since then, which is a big deal when you consider that the original Twilight came out of that crack in the bottom of the ocean’s floor (as seen in the Pacific Rim trailer) and hit theaters in 2009. If the producers were only interested in cashing in on the Twilight trend, I assume they’d have fast tracked this thing long ago and gotten it into theaters no later than 2011. The fact that they’ve been developing it for four years, now, is a sign that maybe, hopefully, it isn’t horrible.

So, before you preemptively judge this movie (like I did in this article’s title), it’s worth considering that it might turn out to be a fun, or at least not thematically offensive, trip to the movies. Either way, we’ll all find out if Warner’s got the Next Big Tween Thing on their hands when it hits theaters on February 14th, which some folks also refer to as “Valentine’s Day”.