Beautiful Creatures - Blu-ray Review

'If this is unoriginal though - and it is - at least it picks interesting touchstones. There's more than a nod towards Interview With A Vampire, for a start, a work serious of intent and idea'

If the definition of twilight can be considered to be something 'moving towards dimness' then a film somewhat 'lighter than twilight' could, in fact, be considered a good thing. A move towards not being dim.

Perhaps that does a disservice to Twilight, the final entry of which had a least several interesting things about it. Regardless, not mentioning the eponymous vampires is near-impossible when talking about Beautiful Creatures, a film about love between super-powered and none super-powered entities who must deal with enemies, prejudice and problems around the idea of becoming an adult. No Twilight success: no Beautiful Creatures, I suspect it is possible to argue.

Where Twilight felt annoyingly anonymous though, this has a location and a voice it feels proud to call its own. Richard LaGravenese's film has a Southern Belle narrative that links in to local history, the cotton-flowered fields of home, the accents and the swamps. There's some craft in this, a care around location, mood and tone. Through accident or, more likely, design, Beautiful Creatures does not rely on pouts and forlorn attempts at love.

Which isn't to say that Beautiful Creatures is anything significantly above 'just higher than average'. Once again, this is familiar lore in not-too-new wrapping, fresh faces masking ancient stories and nearly-as-old storytelling. The beats towards the conclusion and 'reveal' are so recycled it would be more of a surprise to find that audiences did not see it coming. The relationship between leads Ethan and Lena (Alden Ehrenreich and Alice Englert, both good) is every three act Rom-Com dressed up to go to the occult ball.

If this is unoriginal though - and it is - at least it picks interesting touchstones. There's more than a nod towards Interview With A Vampire, for a start, a work serious of intent and idea, not reliant on flippant romance. There's also an underlying tone which rails against puritanical America, a really interesting notion in a US production.

Even if the ideas aren't all new then, at least there is conviction here and plenty of decent execution. It is inevitably ironic that a franchise with potential intellectual legs may well be cut down in its potential prime because it appears not to have potential fiscal ones to the tune of the right amount of dollars. Ho hum, as ever it were.

By Sam Turner. Sam is editor of Film Intel, and can usually be found behind a keyboard with a cup of tea. He likes entertaining films and dislikes the other kind. He's on Google+, Twitter and several places even he doesn't yet know about.