**WARNING: There are spoilers for the film in this review. You are good for two paragraphs but after that it is a spoiler mine!**
On the 23rd August 2013 the highly anticipated movie based on Cassandra Clares YA novel series was released. Like thousands of others around the world I went to the opening night showing. It was an interesting 130 minutes.
First of all I am going to say that this movie will have been very hard to make. The book got confusing when we had huge paragraphs explaining this demon world and its customs so two hours of plain dialouge just wasnt going to do it. There were scenes from the book that I felt were nessasary to put in to help explain. None were. For example, where was the scensor? Where was the explanation of runes?
The movie began with a strong, if not cheesy, start. Clary Fray (Lily Collins) is introduced after way too many shots of New York City and a randomly place title talking with her mother, Jocelyn (Lena Headey), who acts suspicious and protective. Soon enough though the book is brought to life when Clary is seen going to the club we all know from the books: 'Pandemonium'. There she basically does what she does in the books. She fails at flirting with a blue haired man before seeing him get murdered by 3 invisible people.
Skip a couple scenes and Clary is out with Simon at their friend Eric's poem recital. This scene was amazing. They had the perfect amount of humour and really succeeded in showing Simons feelings for Clary without it being ridiculous how she couldn't see it. This scene lead onto one that wasn't featured in the book but I would have liked it to have been. Jocelyn is kidnapped. The tension in this scene was amazing and Lena Headey's acting was (as usual) great. It was a prefect way of showing the audience a glimpse into the world about to be introduced and really enagaged the audience by peaking their curiosity.
When Clary attempts to go after her mother (don't know what she planned to do but that's Clary for you) we are show the first real CGI effect in a dog that becomes a demon. This was creepy as hell. The CGI was really intricate and realistic making me flinch along with the other audience members. This superior CGI continued throughout with scenes such as the Institute and portal.
The portal was moved (understandable) to the Institute for this film and it looked cool. What was weird was when Jace (Jamie Campbell Bower) when all teen cliche and used a bubble to stroke Clary's hair from across the room. That trick could have ended badly with his stroking a random persons hair. There were alot of these teen cliches in the movie and I think that ruined some of the scenes. The director of this movie failed to realise that the first generation of fans for this were in their late teens by film production so it was clear the intended audience was maybe between 13 and 14 years old when in reality the fans were about 16 or 17. One thing that made the cliches unbearable though was the score/ soundtrack. It was too loud and too corny with moments being ruined by random horns going off.
This music did ruin a monumental scene though: the greenhouse scene. This was what people were probably most excited about but when it happened it just looked like they had wondered into a disney movie and Demi Lovatos song was added at the wrong moment. I did like the song but not for that moment (Link down below)
This leads me to the romances. Jace and Clary had a decent amount of chemistry on screen with plenty of lovey dovey scenes. What bugged me was how they revealed the plotline to the next two books (and films) by revealing the not-so-Morgenstern heritage of Jace. That is possible the biggest plotline in the series and they just let it slip in the 1st movie! Who does that?! Also where was Malec?
I have heard alot of negative reviews about Godfrey Gao as Magnus. People say his acting was not the best but personally I didn't think he was too bad. It is clear that he is better at the more serious acting than comical timing. It was also hard to fully decide with the amount of screen time he had. I have seen interviews with Gao where he is asked what his favourite scene to film was to which he replies the party scene. After going to see the fim I realised it was his favourite due to the fact it was one of two scenes he had in the final cut of the film. Would I have killed for the scene from Cassandra Clares short story about them to be added? Yes. From the look of things the Malec romance will be better portrayed and maybe a bit more present in the next film...hopefully.
One thing that was done really well was the fight scenes. They were really cool and well choreographed...there were just too many. After the vampire fight scene I was on the edge of my seat. It had been tense and scary but soon enough they were fighting with someone every 2 minutes and I just wanted more dialogue. I feel like they cut out alot of good scenes to fit in the fight scenes so I regret them doing that. Especially considering some of these fight scenes were not needed. In the books Valentine (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) does not seem to hate his children. In the movie he seems to want to kill them straight away so that could have gone and been replaced with a scene that helped explain this demon/shadow hunter world.
Speaking of Valentine...Something I cannot get over in this movie is Valentines hair. Anyone who has seen this movie will hopefully understand when I say this: braids. For some reason the costume department on this movie decided that to make Valentine as badass as possible they had to give him short hair with a single tiny ponytail which holds about a thousand braids in it... it looks stupid. If that was not bad enough they gave Luke (Aiden Turner) the most random grey patch of hair I have ever seen on a supposedly 38 year old male. The shadowhunter uniforms made up for it though as they were the exact amount of badass though so really the only flunks in the movie were hair.
So because it was only really accurate for the first half, went a bit teeny bop by aiming at the wrong audience and gave Valentine that stupid hair braid I can only really give this film a rating of 3.5/5...
Demi Lovato - Heart by Heart (Mortal Instruments)
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