Yes, you read that correctly. I, Hina, went to see a non-horror, non-action, non-animated movie. Look, mom wanted to see it and her hot date (Dad) was not all that excited, so I buckled up, sans popcorns, and went with mom. This movie is based off of a book (surprise! Hollywood stole a book and turned it into a movie). I haven’t read the book, but mom was giving me asides throughout the movie.
The story is about what you might expect. Dame Judi Dench plays Queen Victoria and Abdul is played by some guy I don’t know. Queen Victoria is getting on in years and is very lonely, the vultures of her family circling for her death so they can take over. There is a ceremony to be held in England and they are looking for two tall Hindus (to the British, I suppose there’s no difference between Hindus and Muslims). At the police station that Abdul works at, he is the tallest. The two are told not to make eye contact with the Queen, but of course Abdul can’t help it and when she sees him, she comments to someone else that he is quite handsome. The story pretty much spins from there. I would hate to SPOIL this movie, but it is rather predictable.
This is not a movie I would normally see, but I do so rarely get to spend time with my mom. It’s easier to talk sports with my father, and with the DC teams always collapsing, we have a lot to talk about. Mom wanted to see the movie so I went. It was enjoyable. There were a lot of good things about it and a few heavy handed things as well. In this political climate it isn’t easy to hit a nice balance, but this movie veered far to the side of racism and whites hating anyone who wasn’t white. Given the time period the movie was set in (late 1800s), it was sad how similar our current circumstances are to these.
As per my Hina test (strong female characters, diversity) this movie is an easy pass. Dame Judie Dench is wonderful. The fact that there are a variety of ‘brown’ people in the movie meets the pretty low bar of diversity. What is more, the movie had a lot of diversity of thought. If we are to believe the journals that the book is based off of, Queen Victoria was learning Urdu (an Indian language), learning about India, from Abdul. It is rare to see a movie where a person is open-minded and wants to learn about another culture. If you have time, this is a movie you can see with anyone (family-friendly) and worth seeing.
In the long saga of Hollywood believing that if it worked once, we should repackage it and sell it again, this is a remake of a 1990 movie, one I did not see at the time. Having not seen the original, I can only assess the current movie. The story made sense about halfway through, then got quite tame and sort of boring as it moved on. There may be SPOILERS ahead, but please, don’t waste too much money seeing this.
The movie opens with some sort of flashback of Ellen Page’s getting into a car accident. The next thing we see is her working at a hospital with other young doctors. For whatever plot jumping reason, she decides to get two of her friends to help her with a so-called experiment, letting her body die and come back to life. This already seems like a poorly thought out plan, but whatever, they do it, and suddenly she like unlocks all this stuff and can do all these things. The other kids go and it doesn’t really get better. Each of them begins to be haunted by misdeeds they did in the past. This is just as stupid as it sounds. I really stopped paying attention, but basically Ellen Page’s ghost of her dead sister pushes her off of a fire escape, but everyone else escapes just fine.
With respect to me diversity and strong female representation test (the Hina test), this one gets a very small pass. The main character was a gay woman. Even though this wasn’t explicit, the way Page’s character dressed left little misinterpretation. There were two other women, one white (Nina Dobrev of Vampire Diaries) and some African American girl that seemed familiar. There were no other minorities really present, but it had a good mix. It wasn’t like last week’s Friend Request where the entire cast was white.
Overall, this was not a very good movie and I’m glad I paid under $7 to see it. Plus I stole ice from the theatre to ice my knees, so that was fun.
