I could tell from the trailers that this film had no conflict. One trailer was just shots of locations. I knew then that nothing would be happening in this film and just as predicted that became apparent while watching it. It relies on drone shots, scenery, and bad lines. Also relying on the same old romance novel conflict "oh you use sex to compensate/cope/deal with (insert personal trauma) or 'let's inject external meaningless contrived conflict of some rando man for a pointless love triangle that lasts 5secs but creates the desired effect of getting the hero angry enough to act sexily possessive.' The lead character repeatedly whines about being unable to please him and keeps banging on about wanting to do so while acting like a chaste teen who constantly looks up from under her lashes, and is the most unrealistically perfectly pristine flawless uncompelling character ever. In fact, so is Gabriel. They are two of the most uninteresting people to tell a story about. And the lines, oh the lines! If there are corny lines in a book the cool thing about adaptations is you can ADAPT it. As long as you're telling the same story, you carve out better dialogue. It's clear the makers are more interested in ripping each and every single page to lay exactly as-is onto the screen for readers of those books, but what works in a book doesn't always translate the same way on screen and compromises the quality of a film if you don't know how to cut away the things that bog a story down and make it unnecessarily long, boring and do nothing for the plot or narrative. An utterly pointless and forgettable film.
Review of Gabriel's Rapture
