We Were Liars

I read the young-adult novel by E. Lockhart years ago and I was captured by its storytelling, characters and plot twists.

Watching the characters Cadence, Gat, Johnny and Mirren come to life and follow their summer in the series was really moving.

They did a great job portraying each character. The visuals were so overwhelming at times that I had to remind myself its just a series.

The last two episodes made me tear up and my heart race even though I knew what actually happened, but seeing it on screen was more brutal than reading it and imagining the scenes in my head.

I can really recommend watching the series and also to read the book!

This 8-part miniseries hit Prime streaming yesterday. My wife and I settled in and watched the first two episodes.

The biggest issue is nothing much happens in the first two episodes. The main character has an incident she doesn't remember at the end of episode one. Then most of episode two is flashing back and forward to understand why her family and friends reacted the way they did. And juveniles trying to sort out boy-girl issues. Sort of a teenage soap opera.

One reviewer wrote "flat, nonengaging", another wrote "lazy writing, lazy cast saying lazy lines." That pretty well captures this limited series. A story that might have been told well in a 90-minute movie is stretched to roughly 8 hours and the filmmakers expect us to devote all that time with just the HOPE that it will turn out entertaining and worthwhile.

Well, not for us. After giving it almost 24 hours to set in my wife and I both decided we had no interest in sticking with it.

However a week later I did watch the last episode just to see how they tried to tie things up. In fact I found it to be very interesting and I was surprised at what all had happened. I will go so far as to state, if a viewer doesn't want to spend 8 hours on the whole series then watching episodes 1, 2, and 8 can be pretty entertaining.

But one can tell, from the episode synopses provided by Prime for each episode, most of the filler time involves teenage soap-opera types of topics. That wasn't of much interest to us grandparents.

When I started watching this show, I had literally no expectations since the little I had heard about the book wasn't that good. But it was an excellent surprise! The mystery of what happened to the protagonist, her pain and confusion trying to remember the year before and her sweet romance was incredibly hooking. It took me basically one sitting to watch it all. Emily Alyn Lynd does an excellent job as a trauma survivor and is able to made me sympathize with her pain despite of my reality being as far as possible from a white rich girl. I liked most of the other actors, too, and my only reason to not giving 10 stars is the unnecessary length of the show giving the fact that there were not so much plot beside of what happened to the protagonist. But, in sum, I was completely hooked from the start and entirely devastated at the ending of it.

The four major roles - Cady, Gat, Mirrin and Johnny are cast with actors that are too old to play 16-year-old teenagers. Shubham Maheshwari, who plays Gat, is 29. The actresses who play Cady and Mirrin are 23 and the actor who plays Johnny is 20. The carriage and maturity between a 16-year- old and a 23-year-old is very different. It shows.

The mothers are only 10 years older than their actor children. Again, it shows.

The other thing that is unrealistic is how money grubbing the three sister's characters are. If they hate each other so much, they wouldn't spend the summer's together. And not every person with money just wants money. The patriarch is also a horrible person, also all about money. I think the author or screenwriters are writing about a world they don't know or understand. Very shallow writing.

The scenery is pretty, the premise bizarre. Issues that could have been explored were ignored. Other issues - like grief, privilege and race were dealt with badly.

This show is not convincing on so many levels, so I say - it is a miss.

I just have no words. I assume this movie is targeting the audience of 10 years old. The writing is really bad. It's like everyone involved was almost catatonic ...Very lazy writing, a cast that looks half-asleep, and dialogue that sounds like it was scribbled during lunch. It was worse than a filler time involving teenage soap-opera types of topics but act like they're not even teenagers. As if some kid in primary school wrote an essay and was made into this series.

I wasted time, I'll never get back hoping that it would at least end ok but it ends pathetically if you are a teenager. These kind of stories are what one would read to an 8 year old. I can't even believe that some actors in the series even signed up to play the characters and how bad the acting became because of the writing and cheesy predictable dialogues.

This whole season could just be 1hr movie. First time ever that I'm writing a review here because I just had to, since I've never seen anything this bad when it came to deciding to watch something.