My grandmother and I prepared ourselves for a full day of bumming around by checking into a movie. However, we made the mistake of wandering into the movie “Red Riding Hood”, a disappointment filled with an excess of special effects and an embarrassment to the U.S. film industry.

My first specific complaint is the acting was not real to the audience. The romance left the person watching hungry for passion while the actors and actresses recite their lines without feeling. This movie will fail in comparison to other dramatic romances such as “Titanic”, “The Notebook” and “Robin Hood”. Another example of this fake acting is the scene where the character Valerie’s, played by Amanda Seyfried, sister dies at a young age, yet the parents stand by without saying a word or doing anything one would think an emotional parent would do. The sister is vaguely mentioned afterward as Valerie goes on to find the wolf. This might be a problem in script, but a tear or two from the parents wouldn’t have hurt. These examples of emotionless acting made this movies generally boring.


This leads me to questioning this movie’s message. The film is “dead as a doornail” serious and lacked any from of comic relief. That being said, there is nothing funnier than laughing at actors attempting solemnity in a silly plot. The party scene was abundant with seductive dance moves, most likely not present in medieval times, and a near sex scene. This sends the age old message to the young female audience that sex equals love. This misleads adolescents and will impact their later relationships with this theme.

Finally, this movie’s mistakes are hard to look past. First of all, Valerie’s sister was killed by the wolf but was left without any sign of injury. The plot seemed very much like a soap opera that one could have watched at home for free, especially the matter of Valerie’s mom’s arranged marriage, sexual affair, and accidental pregnancy. Who has not heard that story more than once? This critic would have to say though that the biggest blunder was the fact that this movie did not equal the time period. This movie was set in the medieval era, yet their dialogue paralleled the way that I, a high school teenager in modern times, would speak to my friends. Also, there were two African men in the film, but this is historically incorrect because Africans were not introduced to the West until the seventeenth century and would be strictly slaves as the men in the movie were not. This leads the audience confused causing them to diminish their attention.

America’s films today lack the difference. The plots portrayed in movies have most likely been played over and over again and have brought nothing new. Directors and producers have forgotten that a movie has not accomplished its goal by simply getting people into the theater but by creating a positive response, leaving the audience with a new constructive outlook on life.