Midnight Sun Movie Review

Story: 17-year-old Katie (Bella Thorne) has a rare genetic illness that makes her hyper sensitive to sunlight. Forbidden from stepping out at daytime, fate makes her run into her childhood crush Charlie (Patrick Schwarzenegger) at night. The two fall in love in the moonlight, swim in the ocean and kiss under the stars, knowing there won’t be an ever after.

Review: Be it ‘A walk to Remember’, ‘Me Before You’, ‘The Fault in our stars’ and the most recent ‘Everything, Everything’. Several romantic dramas in the past with similar themes, better performances and superior execution, have managed to tug at our heartstrings. These movies ably captured the beauty and thrill of an unlikely romance, and it becoming the ray of hope in the lives of the protagonists who had given up on their dreams. The writing and screen adaptations in most cases, made you anticipate miracles, hoping eternal happiness for the couples struggling to survive. They worked effortlessly because of its unique treatment to an otherwise done to death plot.

Sadly, the sun never really shines on Midnight Sun. It is an unimaginative copy of all the popular films in the genre with not one unique quality to it. The only takeaway from this film is a disease — Xeroderma pigmentosum (XP) and that’s not what you expect from it.

Despite a likeable lead pair, the writing is so jaded, cliched and shallow that you don’t feel for the couple, their love or their loss. In its under two hours runtime, the mushy story and character development are so hastily handled that nothing looks convincing. Especially the ‘love at first sight’, feels orchestrated, convenient and downright predictable.

Bella Thorne is a pleasant actor and singer. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son Patrick, who is a chocolate boy version of his famous dad, relatively has more facial expressions than his father but fails to engage you emotionally with his performance.

If cliched romantic tearjerkers interest you, you can give this half-hearted exercise a shot. But if you wish to watch a timeless romance, turn to ‘Call me by your name’. As they say, there are too many mediocre things in life and love (or love stories) shouldn’t be one of them.