Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

Genre: Musical/Drama                 Time: 2h 17mins            Director: Stephen Chbosky

Quick Summary: Evan, a student suffering from social anxiety, writes letters to himself to help him cope. But when his classmate finds one of them and eventually dies by suicide, Evan finds himself in a soup.

This really wasn't as emotional and impactful as I was led to believe.

I felt very uncomfortable watching this film, especially since a 27-year-old man is cast as a supposedly naive young teenager. I had a really big problem with this as it makes it really hard to sympathise with what he actually does and his actions. As a teenager you can be like, they wouldn't know any better as they don't know much about life and consequences, but him being portrayed as an adult you lose that and I found it very hard to really enjoy his character and be immersed into the film that way. There are smaller nuances to his performance that just: don’t work, are annoying, or overall hurt it.

The writing is also a mix of very good ideas and equally, terrible ones – it can only be described as providing conflicting viewing. The screenplay creates a heart-breaking backstory for Evan that ensures an empathetic character, something that is nearly completely ruined by the character’s actions throughout the film. Every other character is shallow and weakly written

I'm glad I decided to listen to the original cast recordings of the songs because they are so much better. The cast of the movie is never able to live up to the standard of the original and they make all the songs rather dull sounding. As well as this, a big problem I had with the songs is that there was so much time in between them, it becomes really jarring when they break into songs, I actually forgot it was a musical at points.

Though the songs may not be particularly fantastic there are a number of tracks that genuinely have great messages in regard to mental health, even if they are surrounded by an entire film that may not deal with the topic as well as it could. But really I owe that credit to the Broadway version. I thought the editing cuts were very strange too, it would jump way too often to different characters as they were speaking, which can be done in a good way, but this would do it sporadically almost giving me a slight whiplash.

Long story short, you should just really watch the broadway production.

3/10