A poor sexual movie from a mediocre novel

Rating: 3/10 (7 April 2016)

Earlier this week it was finally time to watch the much talked about film, Fifty Shades of Grey, based on the book by the same name. For those of you who are not familiar with the story, it is about young Anastasia Steele who gets the opportunity to interview the billionaire Christian Grey. Their meeting creates heavy sparks between them and they later meet again and start to develop feelings for each other. But, Christian Grey is not like ordinary people. He has a very special taste when it comes to sexual activities, which Anastasia will soon discover.
This film has been such a big topic for the last year and it has practically been impossible to avoid hearing about it. For instance, the director Sam Taylor-Johnson will not return to direct the sequels because apparently she constantly fought on set with writer E. L James about the dialogue and details from the script. In the leading roles we see Dakota Johnson as Anastasia Steele and Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey.
Before I start to talk about the film I will say that I actually started reading the book, but I did not finish it. My first reaction now after I've seen Fifty Shades of Grey, is that it could have been made better. I feel that the film didn't go in the direction I think it was intended to. To my understanding, Fifty Shades of Grey is supposed to be about feminism and encouragement for women to also be able to explore their sexuality. I am uncertain if this message really did go through to the audience. In the film Anastasia seems to be eager to please others but rarely appears to do anything for herself. Perhaps this is the point of the film, but I feel that it could have been made differently to create a greater impact.
This leads me directly to the second big problem of the film, the characters. There is no doubt that Christian Grey has a permanent scar from his teenage years, which makes him unable to love anyone else. Jamie Dornan actually makes him pretty insecure and we clearly feel that there's something else behind his hard shell. Perhaps this is the reason why some people have criticized his performance, because they feel that Christian should be more self-confident and macho. I however liked it and thought it made him more human. Dakota Johnson's take on the character Anastasia is harder for me to get. I feel like I never really understand why she falls for Christian in the first place, or whatever motivates her at all.
There was of course a few things I did like about Fifty Shades of Grey. The music was almost always very fitting, except for Danny Elfman's film score, which at times felt a bit repetitive. Beside the music, I did like Seattle as a background and a lot of the production design was very well made, especially Christian's apartment. To summarize, I really don't know how I feel about the film. It does feel like it is too faithful to the book, despite the fact that the script excludes some plot lines. Perhaps it was E. L James constant interfering at the set that prevented director Sam Taylor-Johnson from having more creative freedom. I guess in the end I would have rather seen more character development than helicopter and glider flights, even if they did look good.
David Lindahl - www.filmografen.se