Our expectations hardly ever meet reality

Rating: 10/10 (17 March 2017)

At the very beginning of the film, the narrator states, "this is not a love story", and he is right. 500 Days of Summer, while it may have been marketed as a romantic comedy when it was first released back in '09, it is not, it is a coming of age story about naivety and expectations. In the film, we follow Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a very naive young man who has a crush on his co-worker Summer (Zooey Deschanel), a young woman who likes him, but doesn't really have the same feelings for him as he does for her, and when he figures that out, he goes into a serious depression. What I like most about this film is how realistic it is, and having been in a similar situation as Tom, I was easily able to relate. The film shows what can happen to our emotional health if we let our expectations get too high without thinking of what the reality of the situation could possibly turn out as when dealing with a crush. The film is very funny yet very depressing at the same time. The acting is fantastic, Joseph Gordon-Levitt delivers one of the, if not the most convincing performance of his acting career. 500 Days of Summer is a film I encourage all young people who have yet to start dating to watch because it teaches these lessons: don't get overly attached to someone you don't know very well, and when dealing with a crush, try to keep your expectations relatively low, or else you will end up feeling depressed, hurt, unworthy, hopeless, etc. because most of the time when we have a crush on someone, our crush most likely won't fall for us in the end. Depressing? Yes, but very true. It's very rare for me to give a movie a 10/10, but I feel that this film really deserves it, I think it's a masterpiece!