REVIEW | “To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before”

Howdy!

I have successfully done this twice now. The first time this happened was when I published the reviews of The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina, and Fuller House back to back without even trying two months ago! In my defense, I had basically kept myself away from watching the trailer and seeing the spoilers on Twitter for about seven months, so the fact that I didn’t make it past two days before watching the film adaption of To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han really doesn’t surprise me.

I have to say if you haven’t read the series or watched the film, you may not want to read this post, because I will be including spoilers in here.

First Impressions:

When I first watched the trailer for the movie, I was both excited and nervous at the same time! It was like the visual summary of the book. However, it became weird how nervous I was when I saw who played what character and I think the only two that I didn’t have a real problem with, were Lana Condor, who plays Lara Jean and Madeleine Arthur as she plays her best friend Chris! Other than that, I was semi-panicking in my head because I didn’t know how much would be different compared to the book, so I knew I had to buckle up and get ready for the ride!

Once I Started Watching The Film:

So, I was having some trouble on how to talk about it on here, I think the best way to begin is to tell you what kind of score I gave it on Netflix. I gave it four stars, but now a part of me has been a bit conflicted as I don’t know why I chose to rate it like that. A day later, I was discussing it with my mom and she said I probably did that because the movie itself wasn’t that bad, but since I read the book beforehand, it didn’t quite match up in the way I wanted it to, so that’s why I think maybe it deserves three stars instead.

For a romantic-comedy, it was really good! I liked the story between the characters, and how young the actors looked on screen considering they’re all mostly in their early twenties. There were a lot of scenes that brought out some of the same joy I experienced in the book, but there were parts were I was really sad too. If it was just a movie and not based off of a book, this would be okay, almost great to me, but it wasn’t! I think since I read and watched the film adaptions of both The Fault In Our Stars and Me Before You and enjoyed both of them, I was kind of expecting it to be as close to the book as possible, and when it wasn’t, I felt really let down. I know you can’t have everything in the movie, but I feel like there was like a 40% of the story included and that’s my personal opinion!

I think they held out quite a bit of key things, like the notes that Peter writes Lara Jean. At the beginning of their “relationship” they agree to write each other notes in class, but it’s not a focal part of the story in the film as I felt it should have, it’s literally only said by Peter when they’re writing up their contract and the large amount he had written to her is revealed at the end, but that’s it! You never get to see him actually write Lara Jean a single note in the whole movie, and yes, I am the most irritated about this little detail, mostly because I think you get to see Pete’s caring personality through the letters. Just because we can actually see the actor’s facial reactions and actions, doesn’t mean that key moments like this should be written out of the film!

Have you watched “To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before” movie on Netflix? What were your thoughts about it? Did you think anything important was missing from it?