Fifty Shades of Grey Review

Red lipstick, dark jeans, and black crop-top sweater and I’m ready to enter the realm of Fifty Shades of Grey. As I handed the middle-aged man my ticket, I felt sophisticated and immature at the same time. The mischievous side of me was exuberant and squeamish to finally come face to face with the Mr. Grey, but the reasonable side of me said not to get my hopes up about this unusual love catastrophe. I found a seat in the first row after the walkway, just far enough so that I didn’t have to strain my neck. As I looked around, I took note of what type of people had come to a 1 p.m. showing of Fifty Shades. Old men, girls who were obviously not 17, intertwined couples, and large groups of women coming in waves so as not to look like they came alone.

The previews came to an end and the movie started. Butterflies in my stomach made me stop munching on the large popcorn and sipping on the way-too-large-to-be-a-small soda.

The opening music to the movie was even a mix of intense sexual rhythm and heart wrenching bass. Main actress Dakota Johnson, playing Ana Steele and main actor Jamie Dornan, playing Christian Grey were supposed to be wrapped in a so-called “relationship” that requires Ana to be completely submissive to Mr. Grey’s requests.

In the book Fifty Shades, the “electrical connection” between the two characters is very prominent. However, the movie had a hard time portraying that feeling. The first meeting between the characters was cold, awkward and a bit comical on how uncomfortable they looked sitting across a desk from each other.

The book was quite raunchy and included a great deal of detail when it came to the “red room of pain” and the intimacy between the two characters, but the movie, to spare any more uncomfortable feelings in the audience, cut many scenes that would have been too inappropriate for even an R rated movie. The scenes kept in the movie were more than enough to get the idea of Ana and Christian’s “relationship.”

The scenes of intimacy were extremely revealing of Ana’s body, but not so much of Christian’s. Her breasts were exposed for at least half of the movie, but the only glimpse of Christian we got was a second-long shot of his rear in the dark. As a young lady sitting in the audience, I felt a bit ashamed and angry at how much of the woman’s body the producers were willing to show but of how little they were willing to show of the male’s.

Sitting there in my seat, I could now understand what people were talking about when they said that the movie was demeaning of women and depicts men as these sexual animals.

The movie overall had no secure plot and dragged the viewers along an antagonizing journey of chains, whips, and spankings. The ending was abrupt and was obviously left hanging by a thread to leave plenty of room for the next movies to come. The book did not have a great amount of emotional support to it and left the reader to conjure up feelings for themselves, but the movie was even worse at appealing to the emotions of the audience, other than of awkwardness of sharing this experience with a room full of strangers in a dirty theater.