Water for Elephants, a brief review

My subtitle thingy on here says that I review stuff, but I haven't really reviewed anything so far, so I felt that it was time I started.

Warning, there may be spoilers below so please don't continue reading if you want to see the movie with out having it ruined!

As the title suggests I'll be reviewing Water for Elephant's which is based on a novel by Sara Gruen. I was actually surprised how good this movie was, despite having Robert Pattinson in it and looking a little cheesy/fairy-tale-esque, but I like my happy endings. Anyway this movie was surprisingly gritty, it showed guys getting pushed off trains, horses being shot and other animal and human abuse. I was expecting it to be a little more fairy tale, even though the trail does prepare you for some of those things, I was still fascinated. 


There were a few really bad, cliche lines which I hated, mostly spoken by Robert Pattinson's character. I kinda have a crush on him, wanna have his babies, etc, but the guy STILL can't act, which was disappointed. Every scene including him simply showed a close of his expressionless, or near expressionless face. Awesome. The character I did love was the evil husband (of Jacob's love interest) and circus owner(?) August played by Christoph Waltz. His character really capture what you'd expect an abusive person to be like. He managed to capture being scary, entertaining and human in one scene. Reese Witherspoon wasn't bad, but I've seen her do better, I still really liked her character, but again I felt like the movie had to many close ups of her face. It was definitely using the attractiveness of the two stars to draw people in.

I also found the movie a little slow in some places, but overall I felt that it worked because of the historical setting (the great depression). It also had an element of predicability, which I find boooorrrrowing. This a problem for me since I find most movies predicable. Usually you can guess how a movie will go down once you've seen one movie in the genre, this was no exception. I really did like the circus portrayal though, it captured the magic of going to the circus, and the dark reality of having a cold-hearted boss. Overall I'd give this movie a 7/10. I wouldn't see it again in theatres, but I might rent it. I also definitely need to get my hands on the book since I just found out the author wrote it during National Novel Writing Month, something I have participated in twice now and is super fun!