It’s happened! I read Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment (book 1) of James Patterson’s NYT Best-selling series back in 2005. 11 years ago! Even though I know that the prose isn’t amazing, it’s engaging (same as the Twilight saga, whether you like it or not), and Max was one of my first literary role models in addition to Hermione Granger (Harry Potter series) and Lyra Belaqua (The Golden Compass)
And when I first joined MoviePilot as a staff writer 4 years ago (before it became an open-source platform), Maximum Ride was listed as “in development.” And then, there was radio silence. And more silence. So much so, that I gave up hope it would ever happen
But then… a poster popped up
And I got SO excited. I was aware of the skepticism in these comments too, and I wasn’t naive enough to hope that it would be PERFECT. I mean, look at Percy Jackson and all the Allegiant drama of the Divergent Trilogy. But that didn’t stop me from hoping for the best.
I finally watched the movie yesterday (at night, even though people had been posting about it online for 14 hours before I got to see it for myself). And WOW. For a movie that was cast and started filming in the same week, and wrapped filming in 2 weeks, I was blown away.
In my opinion, the casting was perfect. I do wish Fang’s hair was darker, but other than that, everything about the actors playing their characters was amazing. Well… almost everything.
@AllieMarieEvans you were my perfect Max! @maximumridefilm @MaxRideBook thank you!
— Zara Hoffman??? (@AuthZH) August 31, 2016
The dialogue was stilted 90% of the time, which is a shame given how snappy the dialogue always was in the books, but they did their best with it. And there definitely were some awesome one-liners and short exchanges in that 10% that I think were comic gold.
And here’s my biggest complaint (of no fault of the actors) were the wings and flying (which… is kind of the point of this story). They looked super CGI, which was disappointing because the opening credits made the wings look AMAZING. And when they were flying, it was clear they were flying in front of a green (or blue, at this point?) screen because there was no interaction with the landscapes that would happen in real life (e.g. water rippling or trees shaking due to the wind from flapping wings).
Man… That flying sequence made me wish @maximumridefilm had had a bigger sfx budget. But everything else is cool imo
— Zara Hoffman??? (@AuthZH) August 31, 2016
But all in all? A good movie. Did you know that the storyboarder also worked on the Catching Fire movie (which is my favorite of the book AND movie trilogy)? And even though I did disparage Percy Jackson earlier, I did enjoy that movie. Definitely not as much as I love the Harry Potter movies (which I consider the gold standard—Hunger Games is silver), but I’m not a book-to-movie purist because I know it’s not realistic. And this movie hit all the points, did a good job (8/10 for me), and I hope that there will be a sequel. If I’m 100% honest, I want sequels (plural!).
Last night, I was stalking the cast on Instagram and then followed the #maximumride on the social network and saw what other people were saying. The response has definitely been mixed online. There are some people who loved it, some who hated it, and others who were expecting it to be bad, but were hoping for the best (which is what I was thinking when I found out about it, as you know).
And just for fun, here’s the moment I knew I loved this version of Max:
And here’s a moment from the end that had me laughing:
Fang: "I thought you were blind."
— Zara Hoffman??? (@AuthZH) August 31, 2016
Iggy: "Your breathing changed." Me: ? @maximumridefilm @PatrickJordanJ @zayneemory
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