Review: Beautiful Disaster, the movie

Jamie McGuire's novel, Beautiful Disaster, was made into an Amazon Prime movie earlier this year.

Whenever a book gets turned into a movie, I'm always a bit apprehensive. I like to read the book first to get the full experience, and then watch the movie because the two are never quite the same.

With Beautiful Disaster, I've read the book a couple of times; the second being only a month or two ago. The first time around, I loved the book. But when I reread it, when I was older and wiser, it didn't have quite the same appeal.

However, I was still very excited about the prospect of a film version. I'd seen the film adaptation of Perfect Addiction by Claudia Tan and I enjoyed the movie.

So the other night, my sister, who's also read the books, and I sat down and watched Beautiful Disaster, the movie version.

Now we both gave the film two different ratings. We categorised them as:

• A rating of the film based on the book

• A rating of the film, separate from the book

I'll tell you why we did this.

Novels can be however long an author desires. Some are only 50,000 words whilst others can be over 100,000 words.

But for movies, the typical length of a feature film is around two hours long - unless it's Avatar, Lord of the Rings or Avengers: Endgame.

Therefore, when it comes to converting a book into a movie, it's difficult to include everything. In Harry Potter, there are a lot of things missing from the movies that are included in the books - that's just how Hollywood works.

However, if you watch Beautiful Disaster because you've read the book, and want it to be like the book, then in my opinion, you are probably going to be disappointed.

The movie is around 90 minutes long and it does have a lot of aspects of the book missing. For example, the characters of Finch and Brazil aren't in the movie at all; the love-triangle aspect with Parker isn't really a love triangle, so you don't get that intense jealousy from Travis all the way throughout. The finale with the fire is also very underwhelming in the movie and not what I expected.

So comparing the two and rating the movie as a film adaptation of the book, I've given it a 2/10.

But on the other hand, if you watch Beautiful Disaster as its own film, forgetting about the book, it's better.

Watching it as a typical, modern-day, cheesy romcom, makes it more tolerable to watch because of the differences. It centres more around Abby and Travis, excluding other characters' storylines, and is very fast-paced.

I still only rated it a 5.5/10 because it was very cringy and there were scenes that didn't need to be quite how they were, in my opinion. However, the acting of Ginny Gardener and Dylan Sprouse, who's come a long way from Suite Life of Zack and Cody, was very good.

It's not my favourite film and I probably won't rewatch it, but I'm glad I've seen Beautiful Disaster at least once because it did make me laugh!

Have you seen the movie?

Until next time...