50 Shades Adaptation is Less than Stimulating

Rating: 2/10 (29 April 2015)

50 Shades of Grey has become a household name in the recent years as the fastest selling paperback book ever. It's steamy premise and erotic content make it a favorite amongst the female community; its even been coined as "mommy porn." The book follows the story of Anastasia Steele, a 21 year old college student who is asked to intern for a Mr. Christian Grey, a wealthy, young entrepreneur who built a successful empire from the ground up. Anastasia and Christian develop a sexual relationship in which Anastasia is introduced into bondage, submission, and sadomasochism, or BDSM. While the book seems as if it was written by a high school teenager whose hormones have been running rampant, the movie borrows heavily from this horrible writing style and does an exact copy and paste. The 50 Shades movie adaptation spares no expense from the amateurish writing and Director Sam Taylor-Johnson converts the remedial writing into an amateur spectacle of less-than- appealing sex scenes, poor plot development, and an unrealistic and unappealing portrayal of the supposed mysterious and soft spoken Christian Grey. Taylor-Johnson spares no expense in developing the relationship of Grey and Steele, but cuts out a lot of the steaminess and important details that were explained in the book. While I did not happen to read the book in its entirety (what I did read was a complete mess), from others whom have read the book and seen the movie, the consensus has been generally negative. But, from someone that has seen the movie without reading the book, it leaves little to the imagination what could be left to see in the story from the book that the movie has left out. To be fair, the movie industry has a strict set of rules on sexual content in rated R movies, so the movie was pushing the limit to some degree but some people considered the sex scenes to be a "sexual ad for Pottery Barn." While the directing style was very amateurish, the writing seemed just as amateurish and the characters were not believable. Dakota Johnson, who plays Steele, was probably the only positive part of this God-awful film; her portrayal of naïve Anastasia Steele was well done. However, James Dornan's portrayal of Christian Grey seemed too weak and not as mysterious and ominous as Grey was portrayed in the book. All in all, the best parts of the film were the opening and ending credits. With that, I give 50 shades of Grey only one half star out of five stars.