Photo Credit: After the Movie

With the opening statement, “certain moments in life define who you are as a person,” the movie After seemed like a promising young love story of two college kids.  With the mysteriousness of the trailer, I anticipated drama, struggle, and lots of passion.  But as I sat inside the AMC movie theater, I was very, very disappointed.

Unlike the opening lines of the movie, there are no defining moments in the main character Tessa Young’s life.  Instead, there are four parts to this “love story:” before meeting Hardin Scott, trying not to fall in love with Hardin Scott, falling in love with Hardin Scott, and breaking up with Hardin Scott.

With the whole plot dedicated to the most cliche storyline of all time, girl meets boy then falls in love with said boy, I was quite distraught that this is the kind of content that society is producing and feeding young children.  To be in the 21st century, with all the feminist movements that have occured, and still show that the “most defining moment” in a young girls life is losing her virginity to a boy is highly ridiculous to me. What about when Tessa graduates college, or gets a job? No, instead this movie focuses on the partying side of college and only reinforces in young girls minds that education doesn’t matter when you can have a man provide for you.

Even if I were to look past the fact that this movie is basically cementing the idea of the patriarchy inside young girls minds, the whole movie was still just bland. There should have been more of pretty much everything. More drama, more backstory, and definitely more character development. In an attempt to become the teen version of 50 Shades of Grey, this movie fell short; it missed all the marks to be truly great.